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Anti-HIV Virus Developed
liam193 writes "Wired News is reporting that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may have developed a virus that fights the HIV virus. According to the article, 'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'"
This has got to be the best story posted yet... I cant wait for an official cure! :(
Progress!
-Imidazole
Hilarious Office Prank!
If this proves effective, I can anticipate people who'll get the treatment, then use that as another item on their list of "why you should have unsafe sex with me tonight". That may be a more entertaining way for more people to get "treated" than visiting their doctors, but HIV isn't the only nasty little bugger out there. We could end up with an epidemic of hepatitis and other STDs.
"I can't say now it won't make it worse," Arkin said.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
you people's primary linkers are making my day. Keep up the good work!
FP!
Congratulations
Where can I get signed up to be "infected" and singlehandedly propagate the cure to the world's population?
--Kevin
A virus which kicks the other ones ass and then take up patrol duty. "Arkin and his colleagues have designed a potential AIDS treatment that would remain with the patient as long as he or she has HIV, meaning it would prevent AIDS from arising even in patients who otherwise would have developed the disease after a decade of latency" And not only that but they made it out of the HIV virus, damn fine work.
vampirical
[tin foil hat]While this case may be (almost certainly is) good, I think the day is coming when it will get out of hand and we will see the accidental release of some real nasty man made viral stuff into the environment.[/tin foil hat]
Why should this scare anybody? Alot of discoveries are just happenstance, or maybe it took somebody to think outside of the box, or maybe they are super geniuses
My point is, if you can call it that, is that it doesn't always take a 50 Billion dollar military grant to come up with something to change the world. Ask the guy that invented the wheel.
Who's going to develop a virus to kill the virus that kills the HIV virus?
When things get complex, multiply by the complex conjugate.
This is scary stuff. Not the limiting of HIV, but the fact that it passes itself along just like the real thing. All sorts of interesting payloads possible here.....
God shes good looking
She probably gets around more than a rental car
God shes good looking
I'm going to knock on her door now.
-Grump
Is it true that more people vote for the winner of American Idol, than vote for the president? -Ali G.
I'll admit to not RTFA, but for people to say it is scary that a couple grad students with $200,000 were able to do this is unfortunate. I'm assuming they mean they are scared that the heavyweights couldn't do it with hundreds of millions of dollars, and yet a couple grad students do it with $200k. Ugh. To put profits so far above people's health truly is sad.
At my university they have been working hard on a similar sort of anti-virii for combating HIV and Influenza we have a research page located here for more details.
a virus that can be spread by having sex, just like HIV
Dont worry guys... it will be available in tablet form soon...
What is a Virus? How does it work?
A virus is a protein sheath (called a capsid) covering genetic information. The protein sheath varies in size and shape, the most famous being the T4 Bacteriophage (picture [sc.edu] on the bar on the left). Simply put, the genetic information can be in the form of RNA or DNA. The virus latches onto a host cell and injects its genetic material through the plasma membrane.
Viruses all have different strategies at this point, depending on their structure and target cells.
The most insidious, the retroviruses (of HIV fame), incorporate their genome into the host cell's. When the host cell copies its own DNA, in the process of normal cell division, it copies the code for the virus. Each daughter cell resulting from this mitotic division carries the virus latent in its own DNA. They now, in their normal life cycle, become factories for the retrovirus, pumping out more and more protein encased genetic sequences. Propagation is very thorough.
A simpler virus might only borrow the mechanisms of the cell to replicate itself. The virus would use DNA polymerases and associated enzymes to copy the genome for the viral offspring and RNA polymerase to transcribe mRNA molecules to translate to proteins for the viral capsid. The baby virii are then assembled (the DNA wrapped in the protective capsid) and they exit the cell. Sometimes this results in the death of the cell, other times it does not. The virus doesn't much care whether the cell survives once it has been copied.
This is the basic principle this virus works by.
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It would seem that they hijack HIV and turn it into an anti-HIV virus. Though that might make it easier to spead the cure around, one can only wonder if there is the possibility for things to go wrong to create a super virus thats difficult if not impossible to stop...
It's not time for fucking in the streets yet... /. geeks will have been "lost in the mail" and that 4% chlamydia rate will skyrocket!)
Hopefully they will release a relatively cheap form of the drug(since it cost them almost nothing to develop!), so that a lot of people in the world can have longer, more productive lives.
But it doesn't stop HIV. Even with this treatment I think it would be safer to err on the side of caution, even with 2 people that have the virus but would be taking the treatment. Mixing different strands of the virus can never be good. They say that it probably is safe from virus "evolution"(probably not the best term for it, but the HIV virus is notorious for making very poor "exact copies" and thus the genetic makeup does tend to change slightly over time)
But kudos to them, and who knows, maybe in time there will be fucking in the streets(only the invitations for
fp
next project.... virus to battle cancer!
Meh.
It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS.
Did they USE $200,000 and a grad student, or did they EXPEND $200,000 and a grad student? An important distinction, especially from the grad student's perspective.
A legparnasom tele van angolnaval.
This seems ineffective to me unless it's a permant cure. Rape is common in many third world countries simplely because they can get away with it. If you can "cure" someone HIVs it won't stop the men raping other people with HIV and then spreading it round again.
Unless it's to prevent it (and not just stop it), what's the point? It'll work in the richer countries but in the countrys where HIV and AIDs are the biggest killers it's like peeing on a forest fire.
--- [Insert intresting Sig here]
Some viruses are indeed enemies of each other. I always thought that the only way to fight aids was to find a virus which didn't harm the human body but was lethal to HIV. Now let's hope there is an easier way to get the new virus inserted in the body and that there isn't any colateral damage
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
This is, like, *exactly* out of Spinrad's book, "The Plabue Years".
I wonder just how big pharmaceutical companies are going to try to suppress this work.
Unless that virus can stay in your body indefinitely (meaning without your immune system eventually killing it) HIV will still win. It tends to hide in various places in your body like lymph nodes and can strike at almost any time. That's why some people go 10 or 20 years before getting sick as well as why you can reduce your virus count to undetectable with current meds but it will pop back up if you stop taking them.
cool idea. I actually thought about doing the same thing for my computer a few years ago. a virus that protects my files from other viruses. never got a chance to play with it.
I hope this starts something good. what scares me most is that it was comparatively inexpensive to develop. makes you think that maybe somebody doesn't want a cure to be found. or maybe nobody thought that a protective virus would be a good idea. oh well.
Arkin said this week at the International Biotech Summit at the University of California at Berkeley that it was almost too easy for him and his colleagues (Schaffer and then-grad student Leor Weinberger) to build the anti-HIV virus.
Microsoft warning comsumers to download the patch for the virus immediately.
Where's the beef?
The facts: A pair of researchers have managed to adapt HIV to a virus which fights HIV. It's not their idea (as far as I can see), and so far they've only tested it in computer simulations (which are basically not to be trusted as a good model of the human immune system, trust me, I do computational biochem), also they've killed HIV in a petri dish.
Killing HIV in a petri dish is not new, there's quite a few things that do that.
I'm not dismissing the idea, but y'all better keep those champange bottles on ice for a few years until the in vivo studies have been conducted.
Score: -1, Unbelievably Cynical
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'
Developing a potential treatment for AIDS is, after all, relatively easy. Doing all of the studies necessary before releasing an engineered virus into the wild, now that's both difficult and expensive. Very difficult, and very expensive, in terms of highly dangerous controlled tests, especially over large amounts of time.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The downside is that it eats the rest of your body also.
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
How long will this "cure" work? It seems that this designer virus will be very successful initially, but the HIV virus will become immune very quickly! Survival of the fittest
Doh!
'It's also possible that HIV and the therapeutic virus could mutate around each other and recombine to make an altogether new virus.
"I can't say now it won't make it worse," Arkin said.'
I really cant think of a more irresponsible statement, scientifically. There is no way he can know what would arise in the wild from potential mutations, and *definitely* no way he can make a blanket statement that it won't be more harmful than HIV. Those kind of generalities are just not beneficial to science, and mislead people to a great degree.
http://thechubbyferret.net - Ferret pictures and informative links.
Okay, so it's ambiguous, but quickly browsing lower paragraphs shows they're scared by how easy it was to develop a virus, with a specific purpose/target to boot. As opposed to being scared because of the inefficiency of multinational research corps or whatever [that's more or less what I assumed at first as well].
Stuff.
Time to try some gay sex!!
"It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them"
Maybe it's because I'm not medically inclined, but this doesn't scare me at all. (Assuming this reads like "It scares them that they were able to do it so cheaply with so few people")
a.) Lots of research has already been done, it's unlikely that he had to start on square one. I don't think it's fair to assume that the money and time spent by other researchers didn't give this guy an advantage.
b.) How do we know he didn't just have a great inspiration after watching other failures and take a gamble on it? I can't say I've kept up on this, but this is the first time I've heard of anybody trying to use a virus to kill a virus. (I've heard the theory, but I understood that there was concern over what happens to the new virus...)
I don't think it's so shocking, but maybe those feelings are muted by the idea that maybe a lot of people in Africa will be able to look forward to a long healthy life.
"Derp de derp."
While this is good news for people suffering AIDS. I would not put it in the cure department. The article did not say the anti-HIV virus irradicated HIV, just checked its mutation into AIDS. The results of calling such a treatment a cure would probably be an increased spread of AIDS.
$200K is not enough to test that mutations will be stopped. And if HIV didn't mutate so tenaciously, we would have had a cure years ago.
Remember the "vaccine" based on a "crippled" HIV virus unable to cause the disease. Test it on monkeys and give it some time, and it turns out it "uncripples" itself by mutation once in a while. Ooops! Good thing that never made it to human trials! HIV sucks.
Just because a virus is artificial doesn't mean it's going to be controllable.
That part has already scared me, but they have been able to Monkey (no pun intended) around with viruses for a while now, the part about it becoming cheaper was inevitable.
Since no animal testing was mentioned, I would like to extend my condolences to the grad student's family. It may seem like a great sacrifice, but just think of all the data gathered from the autopsy.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
Heroin that, by the time it was discovered, was considered as an 'heroic' non-additive substitute for morphine and medication.
The reson it scares them is based around issues of security. If they have some easy, cheap, and relatively low-tech way of engineering this virus, whats to stop someone from making a human-attacking virus? It could be used for terror, either threatened or just USED. Scary.
So they've made a perfect competitor virus to HIV. That's transmittable using the same vectors as HIV.
Evolutionarily speaking, this means the HIV virus goes extinct, or (as its proven to do) develop even stronger abilities. Say maybe to go... airborn.
Which means the human race may have just taken its first step into becoming irreversibly bound to our technology to continue our existence and evolution as a species.
(Not that we weren't already to a certain extent with food, energy, medicine, etc... But this is a far more intrinsic problem.)
Don't follow link.
At least the javascript on said page was buggy
enough to close the opening window right away.
Anyone remember the super lethal smallpox virus?
Transmissible gene therapy has some awesome potential, and the fact that such limited resources could pull it off is all the more inredible.
The flip side of this is of course the potential for insanely destructive devices in the hands of anyone with a decent budget and some technical bioengineering skill.
Technological advances are going to drive the price point for this technology down ever further. In 10 years, should we be concerned if $5,000 in supplies and computing equipment allows this same feat to be accomplished?
It's going to start getting very interesting as the decades roll by. The ever increasing and incredible capabilities that these technologies provide are a double edged sword. They will be used for great good, but you can be sure more malicious uses will also be employed...
There's been a new "virus treatment" almost every year, and each supposedly showing promise to cure cancer, or AIDS, etc. In fact, as far back as the 1930s, people have been attempting to use bacteriophage viruses as antibiotics.
All the experiments generally end up failing for one simple reason: your body has an immune system. And the immune system will attack the good virus and eliminiate it quickly.
This promising new HIV is special because it lacks the ability to kill white blood cells. Common sense says since it can't kill them, it'll be destroyed by them. Either that, or due to natural selection, the normal HIV that *can* kill will crowd out the "good" HIV.
Aids doesn't spread on horses.
My mare, and in result me too, are unaffected.
"...may have developed a virus that fights the HIV virus." Would that be the Human Immunodeficiency Virus? That HIV virus?
Now excuse me, I have to get to the ATM machine.
-- Apparently, some people are calling me 'Maurice' merely because I said something about the pompitus of love.
According to the article this is still not a cure for HIV since the virus will become less effective as the HIV infected cells begin to dwindle in numbers.
So don't throw out the rubbers just yet.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
If I read well, the treatment is based on a tweaked HIV. What if the 'good' virus evolves and become another very offensive one ?
Hey, I'm not kidding. One of the difficulties researchers encounter is the constantly-changing nature of HIV. I don't know if this a very trustable approach.
Ebola is spread as easily as the common cold. What sort of properties would an Ebola/rhinovirus combination have that you're afraid of?
The reason Ebola doesn't spread very far is because it has a short incubation period, and kills very quickly. The infected don't have much of a chance to transmit it outside of the local populace---an outbreak can be identified and contained.
Contrast this with HIV, which has a tremendous incubation period, meaning that even though it's very difficult to transmit, it's spread terribly.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
even the men?
I am a bio major and a new test run of an experimental vaccine is about %100 effective.
:-)
First off Hepatitis is an single strain RNA virus. This means a corresponding RNA with the right sequence can bind to it and nullify it and stop it from replicating.
The body can then destroy the rest of the virii.
HIV is a double stranded DNA virus. Very different and it uses the cells own DNA polimerase to replicate itself and create teh proteins for the new virus. Very different.
I wonder how this works? Does it create an enzyme that is a DNA cutter that attacks only the genome of the HIV virus?
Scientists are exploring virii as a method to inject DNA into new cells. THis counter virii could just amend itself to the cells own DNA and provide instructions on how to make specific HIV enzymes. Maybe its time I read the article.
http://saveie6.com/
There's also the problem that this modified virus can itself be propagated autonomously which is a problem, because once its "out there", its out of control in a way. And if its out there uncontroled in may mutate in unexpected ways (stated in the article).
I think the methodology of using virus and modifying the "payload" is a good research direction. But there should be safeguards. For example, it should be possible to add a deficiency or vulnerability in the modified virus so that it could be taken out using normal antibiotics. Therefore making the "runaway" scenario at most a benign one.
Now would seem a very good time to sell any shares you have in pharmaceutical companies. If HIV could potentially be defeated with just $200,000 of research, how many other cures and treatments won't need the billions that the big companies are pumping in to research.
I'll admit to not RTFA... +5, Interesting
*pulls hair out*
ok, if you had read the article you would find that they think it is scary that it is so simple to create a virus like that, not that 'heavyweights' didn't do it for more money.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur
So Arkin and Schaffer are instead calling the process "synthetic biology." Despite appearances, it's not an arbitrary term: The researchers are synthesizing biological elements into machines to do their bidding.
Wow, some computer scientists discover biology and think they thought of things nobody ever thought of before. "Synthetic biology" is as old as molecular biology--that's what all those wonderful tools Arkin is playing around with were developed for. That's why he can buy the enzymes, chemicals, cell lines, DNA, and other components from dozens of vendors. Furthermore, computer scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and other non-biologists, have been looking at biological problems for decades, so crossing disciplines is hardly new.
So, Arkin's general approach (as well as the general approach of the whole "synthetic biology" crowd) is nothing new. It is possible that he has come up with a specific new mechanism for interfering with HIV, but plenty of thought has gone into the careful design of similar schemes before and they have failed to work in humans.
Arkin may or may not have done some decent science in this work. But it foremost sounds like an attempt to grab attention. And that isn't nice: it not just detracts from other good research, in the case of proclaiming an HIV cure, it has the potential to hurt people.
Helper monkeys.
Hey, you asked.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS.
Two people and a grad student, eh? So the student doesn't get any credit.
Sad.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
So two lab junkies were able to manipulate a virus that basically stops a virus...seems pretty straight forward to me. Good Job. Wouldn't it be messed up if someone used this same technique to create a bad virus which shuts down peoples immune systems? Then spread it to people and places they didn't like, perhaps africa or areas with high gay populations? Man, that'd be terrible.
when i think of cutting edge marketing however...
Still "potential cure" is a long ways from cure. Last I checked, there were still some Nobel Prize Winners questioning the scientific validity of the theory that HIV is the only cause of AIDS.
if you were treated with this, you'd still be HIV positive. Sort of.
This appears to insert itself into the HIV sequence, and add a gene that supresses other functions of the same sequence. In my mind this is closer to the treatment available for leprosy than an actual cure.
In other words, if this became successful, people treated with it would most likely be safe from acquiring AIDS from their HIV infection, but would still be HIV positive. They should still not have sex with HIV negative people, to reduce the possiblity of re-infection and/or harm.
It's much better than taking drug coctails to stay alive, though. A hell of a lot cheaper, too.
hmmmm?
That page redirects to a shitfilled popupfest. which also posts your ip and your clipboard contents on a stats page.
The article points out that both the HIV virus and the engineered "cure" can be transmitted from person to person.
I think the point you are trying to make is that while this engineered virus may inhibit the effects of HIV, it does not destroy the HIV virus. People may become even more complacent about sex than they are now.
Moreover, what happens if either of the viruses mutate? You could potentially lose the protective effects of the engineered virus and find yourself infected with a new strain of HIV.
But let us not think that they have invented a wonder drug here. It is the testing and approval stages of new treatments that cost the real money. When the treatment is engineered from the virus itself that adds an extra level of risk, or at least of perceived risk. Who wants to be the first volunteer for an injection?
Let the orgies begin!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Most test actually look for byproducts of a condition, verus the condition itself. However, this makes me wonder if you catch the "good" aids virus if you will test positive for HIV.
We would then need another way to test to see if you have any of the real thing, or just caught the unreal thing from someone else.
I wonder if it gets passed from Mother to child...usually aids doesn't, but there is still a pretty good chance.
But this is fucking stupid.
Norton (Symantec) is already working on that.. but they find it hard to use an Antivirus program on an Anti-virus.
Oh.. we're talking about human viruses...
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
...but that's the guy from Chicago Hope (!)
-- If no truths are spoken then no lies can hide --
Is it like a poison antidote, possibly equally dangerous as the virus?
What works in a dish of cells is often an entirely different story in an entire organism. It will be exciting when their virus manages to, say, keep an SIV-infected monkey alive for five years post-infection.
Seven years ago, a custom rhabdovirus (rabies) for selectively killing HIV-infected cells had my biotechnolgy professor all excited, but nobody's heard from them for a while since it didn't work in whole organisms.
(Why yes, I _am_ a molecular biologist....)
"I never really used Joe either but a stupid editor is a stupid editor." -D. Reed.
.. grown in a lab to do my bidding.
.. low maintenance.
.. shaped and molded into something useful.
.. only around as long as they're needed.
.. more useful than CowboyNeal
- billn
"...a virus that can be spread by having sex, just like HIV..."
Sex?
Slashdotters don't have to worry about either one.
Apple aficionados rejoice
just a piece of unstructured thought
virus fights virus can de a very good solution
Biology - IT
Legal - Illegal
no legislation - patriot act
technolochically advanced - geek
$$$$ - jail
when goes wrong might be even more dangerous / damaging than the original virus
more infected people (hard to contain) - more infected computers (easier to contain, pull plug)
costs lives - costs money
Privacy is terrorism.
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student...
Let me guess: the grad student came up with the idea and did all the work, and the supervisors took the credit? Par for the course, I'd say.
... and people still won't accept the easiest (and in fact only certain) way to prevent the spread of AIDS:
Don't have promiscuious sex.
And that's it. Nothing more than that.
But you'd have a hard time getting a message like that past PC liberals who seem to have taken up key positions of authority, and those tribes in Africa who believe the best way to cure aids is to have sex with a virgin. I wonder who told them that.
The other entry vector is blood transfer, but it's not exactly every-day practice (ie if you get AIDS through a blood transfer you're very unlikely to transfer your blood to somebody else before you start having symptoms).
So if people would simply keep it in their pants we could stop AIDS dead in its tracks within 5 years.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Hello NURSE!
Its not guaranteed to work for everybody. Some people might have some gene(s) that prevent the virus from doing its thing, or even alter its behavior slightly. I dont have a sig. Help me.
These aren't the sigs you're looking for.
That AIDS is most easily spread through gay sex.
'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'
I suspect it took a lot more money and people than that -- let's not forget the billions of dollars and millions of man hours that went into the effort to effectively combat AIDS before this?
Often we hit upon success not by knowing to look, but by knowing where not to look based on the work of our predecessors.
- sm
I personally do not feel paying for sex is a huge crime (although I would never do it) and this could make that profession that much safer for those who practice it.
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But it can only pass itself along in the presence of HIV. You might almost say it's a virus's virus.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
"...if the treatment inhibits HIV too much, the good virus won't be able to propogate. "
is a problem? Seems to me that if the HIV has become that inhibited, the "good" virus has done its job and does not need to continue to spread. Why is the point of greatest return not the complete inhibition of the HIV virus?
Scared, of what? A cure to a plague?
Do these people also soil themselves at every sunrise?
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Regarding warning labels on miracle medicines:
"You may feel intense pain in your groin. This is because your penis is trapped between the toilet and the seat.
You may feel an impending sense of DOOM. This is because you are about to die." - Steve Martin
Mod parent up. The power of viruses is their ability to spread. We have found ways to counteract their effects, but we're in many ways powerless to the most innocent infections.
From the article: "The genie is out of the bottle"
As always, these kinds of worst-case scenarios has been discussed in the sci-fi litterature. In Frank Herbert's The White Plaque, a worst case scenario of a renegade scientist with the right education, a fair budget and the motivation to create a virus lethal for XX-chromosome carriers are pretty well discussed. Definately a book with a lot of thoughts to consider... at least if the secondary message of the article causes a few frowns.
Kristen Philipkoski is a dweeb. "The researchers are synthesizing biological elements into machines to do their bidding." Wired hype or does she really think that? At least she ends with, "'I can't say now it won't make it worse,' Arkin said." At least I can believe that. Oh yeah and is Kristen an xx or an xy?
i'll bite
ebola would be contained because by nature it kills within a few days. nasty visible skin lesions.
you dig?
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
Killing HIV in a petri dish is not new, there's quite a few things that do that.
Like air? or sunlight?
The HIV virus and the anti-virus duke it out and some of the HIV virus mutated to make it resiliant to the anti-virus would that make it more difficult to cure/treat......
Big fucking deal.
The major problem AIDs is NOT the parasite. It's the diseases that you get as a result. The other didlyo is human stupidity, mostly doctors. I know one idiotic quak what pricked me in the iner rectom and wanted to use the same neadle on my arm. yuck.
I think this technology will be supressed because it has the potential to offer a free cure.
"I can't say now it won't make it worse," Arkin said.
"'It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student to develop a potential treatment for AIDS. And that scares them.'" So the grad student did all the donkey work, and doesnt even get named? (jokes apart, thats good work by the researchers)
Now this is a divergence of the topic slightly, but I think its an important thing to look at. Several people have joked about how now we can have open, unprotected sex... but that's just it. If the counter virus was really successful then what would be the main motivation behind having protective sex... You can't die from it really, and the only other thing you risk are the other STD's out there... and hell if they got AIDS, maybe it's just a couple more years till they cure anything that you might catch. Now I don't have anybody that is in my circle of family or friends that has contracted HIV/AIDS so I am biased. However with this disease being the " now the world's deadliest infectious disease" Satistics and given the fact that it would be advantageous to sleep with people, unproductively with this counter-virus... hello millions of new unwanted pregnancies and also millions of more humans living longer. Hopefully a Grad student can invent a spaceship and a living environment to take us to other planets to populate there as well. Slashdot posting
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
Anybody read Xenocide by Orson Scott Card?
This sounds a lot like the Descolada virus, and the treatment for it. They just couldn't come up with an easy way to produce the anti-virus.
Soon the day will come when I can finally nail any girl I want and not have to wear a stupid rubber. Girls don't like sucking your dick after you had a rubber on, you gotta get all that done before you put it on.
And I, for one, welcome our new genetically modified overlords... Soon, genetically fused smallpox and flu virii will be as common as the Sasser virus, forcing humans to shut down in 60 seconds.
Worse than that, computer viruses don't evolve by themselves, but biological ones have that capability. A bad replication or mutation of that virus and we could have a new disease instead a new cure.
In the other hand, some vaccines already uses somewhat disabled diseases to cure them. And worked, and the worst not happened. If we have the opportunity to eliminate a for sure killer disease risking a not so likely future new disease, maybe the risk worths it.
I agree. The worst thing that can happen is for people to begin thinking "They've cured AIDS", and change their behavior - throwing away condoms, sharing needles, becoming more promicuous, etc, when there is actually no cure.
ok, prevention, whatever. Point is...so what. They shouldn't be scared unless it actually works. Not to be a cynic, but it won't.
I just looked at my biology book and the other comments are correct. I might have got the 2 kinds of virii criss crossed.
To my shame I would not want the average slashdot crowd to read my previous post.
Thanks
http://saveie6.com/
There are really two avenues of research: one to cure HIV, and one to supress it from turning into AIDS. They both have great upsides - curing HIV would be great for obvious reasons (but we haven't been able to do it yet). Supressing HIV reduces the amount of virus in the body - this helps to prevent the onset of AIDS, but it also greatly reduces the risk of transmission of the virus. On successful drug therapy, the number of copies in the bloodstream is very low (under 40 copies/mL blood by today's standards), while untreated it can be in the millions of copies per mL blood. If there isn't as much virus in the blood, the probablity of infection through all avenues (sexually and otherwise) is greatly reduced. Not enough that you'd want to take your chances, but enough to possibly have an impact on the spread of the disease.
Moreover, what happens if either of the viruses mutate? You could potentially lose the protective effects of the engineered virus and find yourself infected with a new strain of HIV.
HIV already constantly mutates - if it didn't, nobody would be dying from AIDS. There are all sorts of permutations of the virus out there - that is the one of the biggest challenges for HIV drugs, and the reason for the cocktail (rather than one drug at a time). HIV is pretty good at becoming resistant to drugs - even if a patient took a drug at precisely the right times all of the time, eventually the virus becomes resistant. Once a mutated copy of the virus is in the blood stream, the drug quickly loses it's effect.
The drug cocktail (usually three drugs) helps to prevent this - if a copy of the virus does manage to mutate around one drug, there are two other ones in the blood to destroy it. As long as the patient is complient with treatment (takes all of the drugs and doesn't miss doses), this line of treatment could theoretically last for years, especially with the number of new drugs in the pipeline. Still, triple-drug therapy isn't perfect, and overtime it seems that resistance will still develop (although it takes much longer than single-drug therapy).
Even if the virus were to mutate, it would do so under the same conditions as the anti-virus... drugs can't mutate, but the anti-virus could, and it could conceivably undergo the same permutations as the real virus - in effect, it could respond to these changes in the virus, which is where drugs will always fall short.
Another point is that it is relatively easy to get the genotype/phenotype of HIV in the blood stream, which allows doctors to determine the best drugs to treat the virus. If they are able to make this anti-virus work, it wouldn't be very difficult to simply create several different 'versions' of the anti-virus that could overcome the various common permutations of the virus.
It's also worth pointing out that while there are a lot of drugs that can treat the virus in the blood stream, not all of them can treat it in other areas (such as the lymph nodes or brain stem). If this anti-virus worked in the same way as HIV does, then it would be able to hit the virus everywhere it reproduces, even the hard-to-reach spots like the lymph nodes.
As for 'it will make people more complacent about sex', well, we'll just have to deal with that one. The same could be said for anti-retroviral drugs. It's not right to abandon this or any avenue of treatment because it may make some people less responsible about their sexual habits, especially with something as devistating as HIV/AIDS.
Of course, it's impossible to have any idea what would actually happen over a long period of time... I'm not a doctor, but even doctors find it difficult to estimate how well and for how long treatments will work - so far, most of what we know is through trial and error.
Which option would/should we prefer:
1) The HIV antivirus operates as specified. AIDS is inhibited from occurring, but the HIV virus is still present and may even spread freely now that the risk of AIDS is diminishing.
2) The HIV antivirus is exceptionally lethal. Those that are HIV positive quickly die, but the HIV virus is kept from spreading and may eventually die out.
You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
This is HIV we're talking about, it's pretty much a death sentence. That means that you'll have a percentage of the infected that just roll over and wait to die. It also means that a smaller percentage will do anything to beat it.
I think these bio-tech martyrs should be used for the greater good, but we can't waste them. first of all, it's not right to waste even walking dead-meat. It just isn't. Secondly, people that are willing to take the chance based on truly, in depth, informed consent can't be common.
I don't know where the balance is, but clinical trials for this could go a lot faster than the trials for the next Claritin. People will take hellish risks for this one if it's halfway reasonable.
Hey... yet another slashweenie mouthing off about something out of their area of expertise!
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
the first person that gets a dose will give it to his wife who'll give it to the mailman who'll give it to the neighbor's wife who'll give it to the neighbor who'll give it to the baby sitter who'll give it to the varsity football team...
Sounds to me like it could just as well be a case of introducing cane toads to eat the insects that eat the sugar cane. Problem is, the cane toads do more damage than the insects. I remember something from years ago where they were testing a vaccine that was effectively the AIDS virus cut up into small pieces. Apparently it worked well enough on monkeys. Whatever happened with that? Anyway, I think an important part of treatment of any contagious terminal disease is quarantine. Lock them all up.
Even if this works 100%, isin't one of the reasons HIV is so hard to treat BECAUSE it's extremely mutative and because of this quickly adapts to any form of treatment- Coulden't introducing another variation of HIV into the bloodstream end up 'double-gunning' the test subject, as the 'bad HIV' mutates to be immune to the 'good HIV' and the 'good HIV' mutates to become bad for the 'host'?
Now don't get me wrong- I see a lot of good in using more HIV to counter HIV- because of it's mutative abilities; if the 'good HIV' has been reconfigured to somehow prey on 'bad HIV' it will keep mutating in course to follow the 'bad HIV's mutations so that it will survive. However that said, I'm not sure it will allwase work that way, and only time will tell.
-Millions of Monkeys, Millions of typewriters, 6 hours of sorting through faeces encrusted pages to find: This post
... but the side-effect is that your balls fall-off.
It's GNU/HIV
Let's make a difference
shhh... the RIAA might sue it for copyright infringement
"Did they USE $200,000 and a grad student, or did they EXPEND $200,000 and a grad student? An important distinction, especially from the grad student's perspective."
Speaking as a grad student, after 5-7 years of 60+ hour work weeks and dealing with all the crap that grad school entails while making next to nothing you're both "used" and "expended."
Don't fix his broken link.
: //http://tinyurl.com/35rtt) was broken, leads to http://tinyurl.com/35rtt which forwards you to http://www.peoplesprimary.com/lm.php
His link (http://transfer.go.com/cgi/transfer.pl?goto=http
Take my word and don't copy paste. It's a picture of a girl with shit in her face.
Seriously. Don't.
I'm lost...
It's HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus), not HIV virus. Thank you very much.
<sarcasm>
Great! Now, the first thing these guys should do is apply for a patent. Something broad, say: "A cure for AIDS." That'll stop anybody from muscling in on their breakthrough.
</sarcasm>
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
that Newton quote you're refering to was an insult to one of his contemporary rivals who was small in stature. Short people didn't have any reason to live in the 17th century either.
Lets say this thing works and it cures AIDS and it also spreads from person to person just like AIDS.
1) Do you want something (even if it does nothing) spreading from one person to another, especially something man made.
2) I remember reading an article about GM food. This farmer in Canada is being sued because he used a GM crop that spread from his neighbors. The company says he has to pay for it. No he used it one year a few years back. Pretty much the suit is based that even though the company genetically altered the first generation of the crop, that they still should receive royalties for any future generations of crops that breed from the first, even if it wasn't purchased the 2nd or so on generation.
My question is would they pull that stuff with this. Because if one person pays for the treatment and it can spread whats stopping from him or her to "donate" the cure to another person for free?
NIGGERS!
Norman Spinrad's 1995 novella, Journal of the Plague Years, describes this very thing. I wonder if the researchers were inspired by it?
Since we're covering embryology. Breasts are really enlarged sweat glands. Guess what babies sucking on?
...a pair of Hollywood actors can synthesize a virus! I wonder what Adam Arkin and David Schaffer will do for an encore...
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
First off Hepatitis is an single strain RNA virus
:) In any case, DNA/RNA is not the main issue, virus types are more individual than that, and there are variants of DNA and RNA virus lifecycles that lead to complications of designing possible therapy and safety of therapy (sigh). One of the authors himself was quoted as saying he doesn't know if the new virus will do harm or not.
HIV is a double stranded DNA virus
Parent should be modded down for misinformation: this is plain wrong, HIV is a RNA virus with DNA in its reproduction pathway. Of the different hepatitis viruses, some are based on DNA (with RNA in their reproduction pathway -- hep.B) and some others are based on RNA. I hope the parent poster does a whole lot more revision before his exams
-wb-
Said the raven... KRONK !
Being in grad school myself, I couldn't but help and notice how they kept the cost down.
"$200,000 and a grad student"
As a sign in the math department around here says, grad students are really just indentured servants.
And don't visit that link. Lucky for me I only fell for that trick once before I changed my hosts file to block most web servers that host those images.
Karma: Meh (Mostly from meh.)
...HIV is a great operating system, all it needs is a good virus.
Bzzzt. Other than numerals, Latin does not have a declension that works out for any noun I know of to "ii" (the plural of cactus is cacti in Latin or cactuses in English). Read this: http://www.linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-viru s.html
- Matthew
I don't have a
I'm by no means an expert, but doesn't the metabolism of insects (such as mosquitos) destroy the HIV virus? Is there anyway we can use that to help develop a cure?
The article says that the new virus "won't likely eliminate all HIV cells in a patient." If that's the case, malicious HIV virus will remain in parents' body, while it won't be as active. If child of patients inherit both viruses s/he will also be HIV positive, just that the virus won't develop into AIDS and therefore safe. But if the new virus won't inherit to a new born, only the real HIV virus will likely be transmitted from mother to baby, which can be fatal.
It's premature to speculate such scenarios, but I couldn't stop wondering as this virus may change the meaning of "HIV positive." This new development may stop the epidemic, but I don't want to pass the remains of HIV virus to the future generations even if it's inactive.
I just hope that the various and sundry orginization which get money for HIV/AIDS research don't force this into an endless cycle of research so they can get more grants.
But don't listen to me I'm just made cynical by the constant demand for more research money for a disease that is more than 95% avoidable if you use common sense, and actually maintain some self control.
I can see it now, newborn babies being purposely
infected with this anti-HIV virus.
Already today, some places push parents to give
a hepititis vaccine to their newborns. That is,
we're giving an STD vaccine to children with
poorly-developed immune systems. Vaccines do tend
to wear off in time too; just when will these
babies be having sex?
Years later, maybe we discover that this increases
the risk of auto-immune diseases or causes cancer.
Oh well, too late!
Here's a link to the abstract of their actual paper on the topic. Technically, this is news from last Sept, though I suppose it's good to get mainstream press where possible so everyone knows where their taxpayer funded $200K is going. :)
Man... that student is going to have no trouble fulfilling his graduation requirements.
If this thing pans out, he could walk after turning in a grad thesis that says "I cured AIDS bitch, where's my degree?"
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
Add a dozen disabled copies of Ebola RNA/DNA to
the common cold. Now you have something that acts
like the common cold until it has a trivial
mutation. You'd get random pockets of Ebola
infections popping up all over the place.
I was wondering how they "spent" the grad student.
Like cupcakes!
I'm a minister!
Who's going to develop a virus to kill the virus that kills the HIV virus?
might need it more than you know:
"It's also possible that HIV and the therapeutic virus could mutate around each other and recombine to make an altogether new virus."
HIV Virus is redudant since the "V" in "HIV" is for virus.
They couldn't even put it into remission..it's just a countdown to death...and all the Doc's could do is slow it down abit.
It scares them because the pharmaceutical companies would want to kill them. Those guys have spent billions and haven't produced a cure. :)
Is that to say the drug companies have been withholding such information? It's common knowledge that a lot of side effects in drugs could be removed, but they aren't as then you have to buy chemicals to counteract those side effects! More money!
Isn't it about time people started funding moral/ethical pharmaceutacal companies?
Please note that the parent message contains a (botched) redirect link to a goatse.cx style web page.
I work in the Arkin group, and Leor is a friend of mine.
Here is the reference and the PDF of the actual article that the research featured in the Wired report is based off of:
PDF: http://tinyurl.com/yu5ur
Leor S. Weinberger, David V. Schaffer, Adam P. Arkin. "Theoretical Design of a Gene Therapy To Prevent AIDS but Not Human Immunodeficiency Virus Type 1 Infection". 2003. Journal of Virology. 77(18). 10028-10036.
---
~taltman
I think some people don't understand that AIDS is a syndrome, while HIV is the actual virus that causes it. AIDS means the immune system has reached a certain point of ineffectiveness due to HIV. That's why it can take years to be diagnosed with AIDS--HIV is destroying the immune system during that time. The period of time after HIV infection causes AIDS varies with each case.
See my sig...
Truth nowadays is based upon the general consensus of the many
This doesn't surprise me at all. The way things are going, we're going to "stumble" on to more amazing discoveries that seem to appear out of nowhere with a fraction of the resources conventional wisdom dictates is necessary.
This is, in my opinion, the result of our culture more than anything else. Great minds are choosing not to pursue areas where their talents could be most utilized. Our society celebrates material gain and good looks more than intellect and wisdom.
When's the last time you heard about a scientist being commended on a grand scale in the media (aside from Atkins, which has now become a shill for a multi-million dollar diet industry)?
Who are the heros now? Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Brittney Spears? You can't hear three sentences about any of these people before their net worth or some other materialistic qualifier is implemented.
If you're bright and brilliant, scentific research doesn't seem like an appealing vocation, so we have dramatically fewer people with fewer resources working on cures and solutions to problems. Every once in awhile a few people who buck the trend pop their heads above radar and make a contribution, and then what's the topic? Money & power and fame, casting a superhuman shadow over the real value of their contributions.
Did anyone else see this line and immediately think of the actor who played the mad hermit Adam (his wife was named Eve, of course) in Northern Exposure, or who played the doctor in Chicago Hope, the one who wasn't played by Mandy Patinkin, and didn't look like Vlad Lenin. What the heck is an actor doing involved with medicine at this level - he only *played* a doctor on TV.
Oops, different Adam Arkin
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
You neither mentioned Linux nor M$. Thus you are trolling.
Now if Windows was open sourced and managed by Linus, then by now we would have a cure for cancer and AIDS, no more wars and an end to world poverty.
Virii normally is used a little differnet to Virus and Vira. It is even spoken differently. Virii is not the plural of virus it is more like a group.
The term was started by some one when they got sick of Virus/Viruses/Vira. Ie When a machine is infected by Virii it will display these symtoms. With Virii meaning one or many Viruses basicly the unknown number of Viruses ie it could be 1 or it could be 1000. This came important with polymorthic viruses where the code is the same but the machine could be infected with 100 different forms or one but be displaying the same trouble.
Basicly why to we have color and colour it is because of the way both word are said.
Basicly it is a form of short hand. It is normally used to talk about Polymorthic Viruses.
1. RTFA. The scientists themselves say that as the HIV virus is inhibited, the !HIV (as you put it) can't propagate.
2. HIV is a retrovirus that incorporates into cellular DNA. All it has to do is lie dormant in a sanctuar site (e.g., lymph node, brain neuron) until the !HIV has cleared out, then it can replicate again.
I've seen that solution in use here and it works very well.
So what if some responses are out of date? Anyone can see that an edit happened, and can guess what happened.
Furthermore people who try to "edit history" in particularly egregious ways can't do it without being obvious. (Particularly when some aggrieved person points this out to the moderators.) So that pretty much self-regulates.
how long until spammers steal the data from your honorable study for marketing purposes?
Soon I'll find messages in my inbox with the subject:
Tap in2 half a million miles of surplus p.u.s.s.y with our product!
pi = 3.141592653589793helpimtrappedinauniversefactory7
But once the HIV is disabled all the way woulden the immune system distroy it along with the Anti-HIV virus?
Their supposed anti-HIV sounds a lot like a "defective interfering virus", however, given it is a wired article it is really impossible to tell anything about the details.
Defective interfering viruses occur in nature and have been studied for decades. The key points are that they are "defective", i.e. they cannot replicate on their own because they lack something required for replication. Second, they "interfere" with the replication of the fit virus.
Their idea is not novel within virology and it is not novel with respect to HIV. These guys sound like some pompous guys who don't realize they aren't as smart as they think they are.
Go to Pubmed and do a search for "defective interfering virus" to learn more about this. You can also search for '"defective interfering" AND HIV' (search for what's between the ' ') to see that people have thought of this with respect to HIV.
Finally, we can cure just about anything in a dish, most everything in mice, but not very much in humans.
My prediction. This will go absolutely nowhere. Just like the rhabdovirus study mentioned up-page that selectively kills HIV infected cells. Worked great in the dish, never to be heard of again. This study was presented in one of the most prestigious journals, yet it is now just a memory.
Genomes are like bytecodes, in base4 (nucleotides) or base20 (amino acids), depending on whether you're de/coding in the compiler (meiosis) or the interpreter (ribosome). The compiler really is just a dup; the "coding" process is mutational evolution. The really interesting information is a reverse-engineered interpreter. Who cracks the ribosome code will harness the lathe of heaven.
--
make install -not war
Using viruses to release a genetic payload is nothing new. K. Eric Drexler talked about uses of T4 phages and other things a long long time ago in one of his books.
;)
Ideally you get a bug that has most of what you need already. Like encephelitus or west nile virus to deliver a payload to cure schizophrenia. You have something that gets into the brain and nervous system as is, you just modify it here and there to be a little less agressive, make sure your modifications are not so radical that minor environmental stresses wildly mutate it, then work your way through the initial tests, approval processes, etc etc.
Not that they'd likely risk a bug that speads like encephelitus, and certainly not carrying a schizophrenia cure. If it got into the wild everyone but people with temporal lobe epilespy and some forms of OCD would stop going to church in a matter of months.
Good. Maybe when the vaccine is in wide use, and people are still dying of damaged immune systems, Gallo and his cronies at the CDC will be forced to admit that their HIV *hypothesis* is hysteria.
FYI: http://www.duesberg.com
http://www.cqs.com/aids.htm
1. not all women are in sexual relationships. Of course, there are also a lot of women who aren't 'of legal age' yet who are getting it on.
2. Just because the average penis is 6 inches doesn't mean that the average penis involved in sex is 6 inches. A small proportion of guys account for most of the sex in the population.
But I'd be happy to do somthing about this travesty if it's that important to you. Where does your wife live?
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
There was a short story from the 80's I believe it was called the good war. It was a story set in the future. A researcher makes a dreadnought virus that kills all viri. Of course naturally everyone wants him dead.
Adam Arkin is also the name of the actor that played Dr. Aaron Shutt on Chicago Hope. Weird.
Intentions aside, here is hoping this doesnt turn out like W32/Welchia. ;)
People may become even more complacent about sex than they are now
If you're concerned about that, you must not be getting laid.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
Back in the early 90's:
Q: What's the newest way to get AIDS?
A: Magic
It's funny because Magic Johnson (of "The Magic Hour" fame) has HIV.
Just two comments (and a closing statement, LOL!):
1. Just glancing at the article published under peer review (in Journal of Virology), one assumption that the authors made is that the model of virus dynamics in vivo is correct. Although it is the currently accepted model, it does not mean that it holds true -- I fear that a few more years of data will tell us truly if the mathematical model can be used, especially when pertaining to treatment via "anti-viral viruses."
2. For it to work in vivo, the "anti-virus" has to replicate near those cells/tissues that is actively replicating HIV. In fact, it probably works best if the "anti-virus" can superinfect the same cells infected by HIV -- that's the way anti-sense RNA works, in other words anti-sense RNA needs to anneal with the sense RNA of HIV. The problem is, HIV has mechanisms to reduce superinfection (downregulation of coreceptor comes to mind). The more you have to add to the anti-virus to evade such obstacles, the more difficult you make it -- i.e. the bulkier the virus, viral fitness plummets.
Only empirical studies in vivo will tell us if their treatment will work. As a grad student studying HIV, the news sounds exciting. But just like any "discoveries" made in this field, I have to take it with a grain of salt. Why? Well, think about the history of this epidemic and compare with other epidemics in modern history -- like polio and smallpox. What is taking so long for researchers to develop a vaccine with so much better technology than Jenner, Salk or Sabin ever had in their hands? The answer is in the virus itself, it has become so adept at evading the host immune system and usurping that system for its own end, that it is also destroying our body's chances of ever mounting a good enough response to keep it in check or eradicating it. I wonder if we ever will be able to develop a vaccine, and if we do, what will it take? More research into the biology of the virus? Or more research into our immune systems' biology? I personally think that studies in immunology is the key to answering this.
Linux at home
The idea is to create a retrovirus which will replicate in your cells wildly, creating numerous regulatory sites for HIV proteins that ultimately 'suck up' or titrate the HIV proteins out of solution. (This is from memory however, but I believe this is the only mechanism proposed.)
By lowering the number of HIV proteins in solution, you make it more difficult for the HIV to replicate itself wildly and turn into AIDS. The term is 'lowering the setpoint' of HIV becoming AIDS. HIV is still there. It can still turn into AIDS. But the chances of it doing so are less likely, BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE.
In fact, the most interesting part of the paper (to me), was that if the retrovirus vector is too efficient in killing HIV then the therapeutic vector loses its own mechanism of infection (ie. the HIV capsin proteins) because these capsin proteins are no longer being produced.
It's a fantastic idea, but it's not a viable therapy. Yet. Using the same principles, it'll be possible to more directly kill HIV (in the future).
Favorite
As a nation your are losing 50 million miles of pussy per year per women and not half a million, by your own calculations.
The best planning can be done after the project completes.
i see the two Ph.Ds get metioned alot in the article, but what about the grad student? c'mon, we all know he/she is doing all the work anyways ;)
this guy should get his own t-shirt:
i cured AIDS, and all i got was a student credit and this lousy t-shirt.
Ethics aside I think that a anti-virus virus would have to play
on the actions that allowed the original virus to spread;
blood transfusions, accidental exposure and wildly unprotected sex. I would also think that before releasing something like this in the wild they should find some method to make it possible to remove the anti-virus-virus from the host. The parallels between this kind of treatment/ethics/risk and releasing an self patching exploits worms/virus/trojans is interesting.
I fall back to a punchline from a comedian; you put your d!ck
in and the sh!t blows up..........
Unix, an obscure operating system developed by bored researchers in an attempt to get a better game playing experience.
I just don't get the fascination with large breasts. You can't blame it on lack of breast feeding as a child - I spent my first six months in a state run orphanage so I *know* I was a bottle baby. Its been ten years since I dated someone who could fill more than a B cup and I don't feel like I'm missing out a bit
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
industry, duh.
not to mention how many shady (china) nations there are out there working on some kind of opposite
lets not forget both gov't and medicine have more money than 2 college kids to develop these things, of course there is nothing you can do about it so just live with the threat of another horrible death over your head today like any other; thought i'd spread some midsummer cheer =)
I've heard many of the suicide bombers in Israel are HIV or Hepatitis positive
That is almost too horrible to be true
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
releasing new, potentialy mutagenic viruses that could wipe out much of mankind is always a good idea! Thank God we are giving grants for this!
Isn't that one of those viruses that makes people want to have afros, wear bellbottoms, and listen to disco? I sure hope I never get one of those!
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
The other possibility is that this means the current lucrative multi-billion dollar industry in anti-retroviral treatments may be going down the drain if this works...
The interesting thing here is that they have done something cheaply, not something new. The idea of curing a virus with a virus is not new, as someone already pointed out. The difference with what has been done, and what is being presented as something that should be done, is this.
Smallpox killed a _lot_ of people.
AIDs kills no one. It makes it possible for another disease to eliminate you, any other disease. The only interesting thought that I get out of this is simply, if we're going to attempt to cure AIDs by gene therapy, we should take a look at therapeutically altering the immune system to make it AIDs capable instead of its current state, in which it is incapable of dealing with it.
AIDs is not unique in its status of being a virus that our bodies cannot fight or loses the battle with, several disease are like that.
I think it would be awesome if we could derive a virus gene therapy that would make our immune systems disease proof. Not eternal life by any stretch of the imagination, but losing life to viruses is horrible, especially when this life stealing virus' means of propagation is our own...
Just some thoughts...
-LoneWolf-
It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.
Not a contradiction, but a question. Aren't most vaccines generally consisting of dead virus cells. Not a weak strain (which, BTW if a little blood on the end of a needle turns into HIV, what do you need to do to make the thing weak?), but inert?
Are some vaccines "weak," and others "dead?" And why in any situation could you not take dead cells of any virus to use as a vaccine? Not sure how microbiotics work, but I do know that AIDS doesn't have a huge lifetime outside of a living organism (2 weeks for HIV was it?), so shouldn't we be able to get dead cells?
LOL loud. AFAIK know the v in HIV stands for Virus.
I thought people knew that by now.
And since I saw it mentioned, and I'm being picky, AIDS syndrome is not a virus. It is a condition brought on by the HIV virus.
IMHO opinion, most people seem to need at least 10 more years of English classes after they're done with HS school.
ttyl later.
Not sure about HIV, but I believe that are several strains of AIDS. There have been cases where two infected people have had intercourse (hey, it's cool, we're already infected), and suddenly got a lot sicker a lot quicker. Reason being, they can take drugs and live a fair bit longer, but the drugs are targetted at a particular subtype of the virus. Getting subtype B from another person when you're being treated for subtype A and suddenly you're in double trouble.
I've been thinking about a commune of eunuchs. If you're serious about cutting away from the silly mainstream--go all the way.
-I am an elective eunuch.
And so, that being said, would you object to computer viruses being created to patch their own exploits (the same technique)?
1) Computer viruses can't mutate in the way that HIV can - even if somebody got the code and rewrote it with a 'bad' payload, then there would still be enough of the original to combat it. And the majority of systems should end up patched before that happens.
2) People ought to patch their boxes (especially Windows) simply to keep the rest of the net working. There is a strong utilitarian argument for keeping the rest of the net working.
3) Perhaps, for the tinfoilhat crowd, you could produce an equivalent of a robots.txt file.
Considering the monumental idiocy of the majority of Windows users, this might actually be a time where reducing freedom noticeably increases safety.
Exercise your right not to vote. thinkoutside.org
This work was published in the Journal of Virology, Sept 2003. Somewhat old news. Abstract follows. Full article in the following link http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/full/77/18/10028
Recent reports confirm that, due to the presence of long-lived, latently infected cell populations, eradication of human immunodeficiency virus type 1 (HIV-1) from infected patients by using antiretroviral drugs will be exceedingly difficult. An alternative to virus eradication may be to use gene therapy to induce a pseudo-latent state in virus-producing cells, thus transforming HIV-1 into a lifelong, but manageable, virus. Conditionally replicating HIV-1 (crHIV-1) gene therapy vectors provide an avenue for subduing HIV-1 expression in infected cells (by creating a parasite, crHIV-1, of the parasite HIV-1), potentially reducing the HIV-1 set point and delaying AIDS onset. Development of crHIV-1 vectors has proceeded in vitro, but the requirements for a crHIV-1 vector to proliferate and persist in vivo have not been explored. We expand a widely accepted mathematical model of HIV-1 in vivo dynamics to include a crHIV-1 gene therapy virus and derive a simple criterion for designing crHIV-1 viruses that will persist in vivo. The model introduces only two new parameters--HIV-1 inhibition and crHIV-1 production--and both can be experimentally engineered and controlled. Analysis demonstrates that crHIV-1 gene therapy can indefinitely reduce HIV-1 set point to levels comparable to those achieved with highly active antiretroviral therapy, provided crHIV-1 production is more efficient than HIV-1. Paradoxically, highly efficient therapeutic inhibition of HIV-1 was found to be disadvantageous. Thus, the field may benefit by shifting the search for more potent antiviral genes toward engineering optimized therapy viruses that package ultraefficiently while downregulating viral production moderately.
"Doctor's office, how can I help you?"
"Help! My nervous system keeps rebooti---"
Eek, I'm slightly suspicious about letting my body to become a living Windows installation.
On the other hand, it'll probably slip into that for the same reason it happens on those win32-boxen too: people going after pr0n/sex/whatever..
But why do they need the grad student? Oh, I get it, there were no monkeys available.
Can anyone see a 21st century cane toad disaster in this?
"It took Adam Arkin and David Schaffer just $200,000 and a grad student..."
That poor grad student, science is full of sacrifices...
Hmmm, I wonder what role the grad student played in this....
Um... Forgive me if I have some reservations about that. Check out Tracy Hickman's The Immortals; I really hope these guys do better testing than the people from this book (who practically wiped out humanity -in spirit, if not literally- with a virus what was to have been the cure for AIDS).
Actually I was just making fun of the parent poster, in case he wasn't gay. I am not bothered at all by other people's sexuality as long as it's not directed towards me, it's just probability, which I believe is at least 90%. As for scientific facts, infection rate probably somewhat depends on the "method" and strongly depends on the number of partners, which AFAIK (which is not much) is higher for gay males than for an average person.
I guess slashdot mods don't have a sense of humor. I guess I don't either if I take karma seriously. Except that it's kind of sad if political/scientific correctness is required even on slashdot. Well, I am not going to hide and be a coward just because some people can't take a joke. Ah, what the hell...
I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR NEW GAY OVERMODS!
a dad comes to his son:
"here my son. this is your shave-blade, you gonna use-it for the rest of your life."
you think gillete is trying to develop something to "help" society or suporting some lake that?
As a computational biologist, it dismays me how especially gullible computer people seem to be when it comes to biology. Maybe there is a bit of a 'tude here that anyone can do biology. Maybe it come from watching too much Star Trek - I don't know.
I do know that a story in WIRED about a team of biologists hacking a linear solution to the Travelling Salesman problem would generate far more skepticism here - unless, of course, they used the mystical "DNA" (or were MIT grads...)
That must be the before picture
The really interesting information is a reverse-engineered interpreter. Who cracks the ribosome code will harness the lathe of heaven.
I think you're talking about a DNA Microarray.
It allows you to get the expression profile of the cell. More info here.
Flash tutorial here.
Interestingly enough, it's the reverse transcriptases that are used by viruses like HIV to embed themselves in our genome that allowed cDNA technology and therefore Microarray technology to become a reality. We could have made the complimentary DNA strands that the messenger RNA binds to using other methods, but it would have been much harder.
Now I'm only waiting for Microsoft to develop anti Sasser/WhateverWorm virus that is using this same mechanism. Spread itself around internet and patches whatever machine it finds.
Didn't similar things happen in the 60's, when they found cures for a lot of diseases? I remember reading that the combination of the pill and antibiotic treatment for almost all of the fatal STD's combined to produce the "Free Love" movement, in some ways. Of course, Free Love was a collossal failure, but I'll bet it was an interesting thing to stumble across, judging by the few modern polyamory types I've met.
-1, "1337" speak
you would be suprised, but yes, HIV's genome accepts patches every time it leaves an infected cell. in fact, during the replication cycle its genome is altered, mutated due to inperfect copying by the HIV polymerase. the chnges can be advantageous for the virus, or the result can be a defect particle.
Ni.
It is kind of fortunate that HIV was discovered about the same time scientists were just learning about retroviruses. Scientists had been wondering if viruses could cause cancer in humans. They knew of such viruses in chickens and cats, but hadn't found human ones yet. Then they learned that these viruses operated differently than other kinds by turning themselves into RNA and inserting themselves into the host genome. Then AIDS came a long and fit this model. If AIDS became epidemic as son as ten years earlier, scientists would have been much more dumbfounded. However, this didn't tell you how to cure these kind of viruses.
but I would wait to see if this is actually a viable stable solution to the problem. The article mentions briefly that the real HIV and the manfucatured cure could mutate around each other and produce yet another deadly virus. This is only mentioned in passing in the article but IS a real possibility considering the fact that HIV has been known for its outrageous mutation rates. HIV contains POL which is a reverse-transcriptase and is responsible for translating the virus RNA. In the average HIV-infected person there are over 1 million (!) different mutant variants of POL.
What about these drug companies going to do that treat the symptoms? There is a lot of money to be lost here. Furthermore, will the insurance companies cover it?
So I looked into it, and the average pussy is eight inches deep, while the average penis is only six inches long. That means that two inches of pussy are wasted, on average, with every coital thrust. The average sex act lasts three minutes, with 30 thrusts per minute, adding up to 180 inches of wasted pussy per sex act, which happens on average three times per week. Multiply that by 52 weeks, and divide by the number of inches in a mile (63,360) and we find that there is nearly half a mile of wasted pussy per woman per year! Figuring approximately 100 million American women of legal age, that means, as a country, we are wasting around half a million miles of pussy every year, while some men here go without!
;)
There's a good reason for that gap. I'm not one to brag, but in some positions, I end up hitting the "wall" on my wife. Problem is, it hurts her a little when I do that, and it sometimes causes irregular periods if I do it too hard. So we either have to avoid those positions, or just be carefull when we use them.
BTW: 30 thrusts per minute? That's only 1 thrust per 2 seconds. Count to 2 (1-one thousand, 2-one thousand) and tell me you're that slow. 3 minutes? that poor, poor woman!
I would estimate 60 thrusts per minute for 15 minutes. (900 thrusts/sex) That's average over 15 minutes. Of course it'd vary greatly over that time.
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
In all seriousness though, this is very very cool. Anyone interested in the original HIV genome (it's like sourcecode) can find it here.
Does this mean I can get arrested for having the code for this virus on my computer?
Could I really convince a court that even though I have the source, I'm not the original author of the virus? I guess it depends on the intelligence of the courts. (oh great!)
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
A virus fighting another virus - doesn't that ring a bell?
Yep - there was this guy who thought that the best way to fight the Bagle virus was to write another virus called Netsky.
Imagine the same happening with a biological virus...
Send me and my wife a photo of yourself naked, with an erection, if you live in or around the SF Bay area. We'll look over the photos and decide who to invite over. Thanks!
P.S. If you have no experience with, or interest in double penetration scenarios or being a 'top' or 'Dom', don't bother. Also, you must be comfortable with big badonkadonk butts, light B&D, and know what a 'safe word' is.
P.P.S Or were you all just talk?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Why don't they invent an anti cooties virus too? That would make grade schoolers the world over a lot safer on the playground.
Unlike the rhinoviruses, the strains of Ebola dangerous to human beings have never been shown to be contagious via the aerosol route during any actual outbreak. It may have been demonstrated a couple of times in the lab, but those were isolated instances that have not been replicated.
If Ebola Zaire were in fact contagious via the air, neither of us would likely be breathing right now.
Also Ebola does not always have such a short incubation period nor does it necessarily kill all that quickly. Some people have it for weeks and then recover fully. Please check your facts before posting next time. That you were modded up to a 5 is pretty scary.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
SIV seems harmless to chimps, but HIV seems harmless to people until they come down with AIDS. And if SIV never proceeds to an AIDS like condition in chimpanzees we do not know whether it was the chimps that adapted to the SIV, or the SIV that became less virulent to be able to spread better in chimps. I for one wouldn't bet on a not very virulent disease like HIV having any incentive to provide many more than 10 or at most 20 symptom free years in the name of spreading better, and I wouldn't expect the evolution from a moderately good spreader ( 10 years symptom free ) to a very good spreader ( 20 years symptom free ) to happen quickly.
If it was not the virus that evolved, but the chimps, then I would not neccessarily expect humans to have the genetic diversity to field an effective defense. Then again, a very small number of humans are natually immune to it ( search for "Naturally immune to HIV" in quotes using google to find it mentioned but not featured in various articles ).
One might assume HIV is anologous to Syphilus ( SIV evolved in chimps to become less virulent instead of chimps evolving to tolerate it ) but that would be baseless. There are people who have been multiple strains of HIV, and reinfection with syphilis after cure with antibiotics is possible.
Infection with one strain does not confer immunity to all strains ( or even the original strain ). This means that for all intents and purposes, each strain is a seperate disease not in competition with the other strains any more than say, HIV and Syphilis are in competition with each other or the common cold.
More virulent strains of Siphilis died out on their own because visible sores disgusted potential sex partners and probably caused pain for the infected genitals that made sex too painful to engage in. They did not die out because of competitive pressure from less virulent syphilis strains.
There are probably a panoply of Siphilis strains that are adapted to produce more or less infectious sores with strains that produce more sores winning out by better spreading where antibiotics are not available and sores don't cause the host to obtain an immediate antibiotic cure. Where antibiotics are available, almost invisible cases that spread less easily win out, living under the radar of their infected hosts for long periods of time.
Therefore the existance of a less virulent strain of HIV that doesn't cause AIDS, therefore doesn't neccessarily mean the extinction of the more virulent strains.
But the presence of the less virulent phage-infected HIV will make it's hosts immune to non-phage infected strains of HIV, since the presence of the phage will mean any newly aquired strains are immediately infected so phage infected strains WILL be in competition with phage free strains, and so will act as a vaccine that may wipe out HIV sans phage like smallpox.
What evolutionary pressures will the new HIV+phage strain face? Will a person infected with HIV+phage be able to transmit the disease as easily as a person infected with only HIV was able to? Will there be pressure to develop other forms of virulency to increase transmission rate? Maybe the phage, which now requires HIV to survive will lose it's ability to prevent AIDS.
The HIV+phage strain will not face some of the barriers to spreading that HIV alone faced. A person infected with 'harmless' HIV+phage would not be as careful about spreading it as they would be about spreading HIV. People won't be as careful about not getting 'harmless' HIV+phage as they were about not getting HIV alone.
If
CDC Mortality numbers for 2003 break down the mortality rates due to HIV infection like this:
(That's leaving out the "other" category of blood transfusions and so on.)
Gays and IV drug users are easily at the most risk, but 135 thousand US citizens, give or take, died of AIDS due to heterosexual transmission last year. For comparison, in 2001 the CDC says 163,538 died of a stroke in this country. Note that the number of deaths from AIDS not due to male-to-male contact was 375,896, just 100,000 fewer than among gay men. That's including the drug users.
(I'm still wondering what the heck point you thought you were making about religious nut cases who want AIDS to wipe out all the gay people. The simple truth is that there are loads of fundie religious folks who want that -- and who else? What other large groups want all the gay people to die due to AIDS? You're right that people are nuts in so many different ways, but this one belongs to the fundamentalists, no question.)
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Egg on me. Clearly I've seen "Outbreak" far too many times. Thanks for the correction.
--grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca