Chimps, AIDS, And Immunity

Anonymous Coward writes "Researchers at the Biomedical Primate Research Center in The Netherlands have come up with a theory as to why modern chimps don't develop AIDS and its variants. The chimps in the study were found to share a usually uniform cluster of genes in the area that controls their immune systems' defenses against disease. This lack of genetic diversity suggests that a lethal sickness attacked chimps in the distant past. The theory postulates that approximately 2 million years ago an AIDS-like epidemic wiped out a large portion of the chimpanzee population. Those that survived developed an immunity to AIDS and its variants. If this theory holds true it may explain why some humans who are repeatedly exposed to HIV don't get sick."

Comments

Re:I worked at the NCI

[anzha]

Ethical questions aside, So how difficult would it be to purposefully change this one gene in an embryo?

What else does this gene impact? Obviously it has been changed naturally in some people, so it may not have that much of an impact...

Re:AIDS, mortality, and timing.

[Buck2]

Actually, you are probably speaking from a position that benefits from hindsight.

If the latency period of HIV is up to ten years (which is the last I've heard of it), and if my uncle died in 1992 (which he did), then if we also give a few years of wasting away (I don't know when he first developed symptoms), then he could have been infected way back in the 70's.

There was little to no information about HIV at the time. Think about all of the people who were infected by blood transfusions and whatnot. We only know that these things need to be checked out now. For my uncle, who probably got it from sex, and for blood transfusion victims, the disease basically "did just happen".

The only way it could have been prevented, because the vector was unknown, and, actually the disease was practically unknown, would have been to not engage in sex. Hah.