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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.'"
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/
Where can I get signed up to be "infected" and singlehandedly propagate the cure to the world's population?
--Kevin
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.....
a virus that can be spread by having sex, just like HIV
Dont worry guys... it will be available in tablet form soon...
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 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.
They're afraid of what someone who doesn't have benevolent intentions might be able to do with this approach.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
[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]
It's not like some kid in Germany released AIDS to help his mom's computer shop and is trying to fix the damage.
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.
"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.
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."
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...
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
Since you did not bother reading the article, I'll tell you why they said that it's unfortunate that it could be done so cheaply.
It's not what's been done, it's that it could be done at all, with so much ease and so cheaply.
Now imagine what would happen if someone decides to come up with a virus that is made out of common cold, that does something that it's not supposed to.
How does contracting Hepatitis through common cold sound?
That's exactly the reason they are scared -- if this becomes commonplace, anyone can come up with cheap ways of messing around with genetics.
Now, the article also mentions how the effects are usually not known and sometimes ineffective, so we may not know for quite a while what ELSE this virus does, and what else such cures may do in the future.
It's like making a pact with the enemy's enemy -- sure, you are saved for the day. But what about down the road?
It's just a scary precedent -- I refrain from using the word bad, because we do not yet know what is going to happen. But it's always helpful to think of the worst possible scenarios, too. Especially in sensitive areas like bio-tech.
'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!)
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?
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.
I am a bio major....
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.
If you were a bio major, you would know that HIV is a retrovirus, which carries its genome in RNA, and uses reverse transcriptase to copy itself into DNA.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
WRONG! Actually, everyone should know that HIV is a retrovirus. It has a single stranded RNA genome which is replicated through a double stranded DNA intermediate. At this point, the viral DNA is integrated into the host cell's genome. Kiss my phd.
Actually, no.
HIV is a lentivirus, a subcategory of the retroviruses. HIV virions package two, negative strand RNA molecules. Within a cell, the HIV reverse transcriptase synthesizes cDNA that integrates into the host cell. The low replication fidelity of the reverse transcriptase is what accounts for HIV's incredible ability to rapidly escape from drug treatment and immune responses.
Unfortunately, the Wired article doesn't provide many scientific details. The idea is pretty creative, but there is a huge difference between simulating a cure (and even making one in a test tube) and finding a cure that works in animals. A few concerns off the top of my head:
1) Recombination between HIV and the treatment vector. Remember those two strands of RNA I talked about above? You can get mosaic viruses that resemble part of one virus and a second part of another. I'd be willing to bet that this is the 'it could make things worse' aspect mentioned at the botom of the article.
2) Any time you insert foreign DNA into the genomic DNA of cels (as would occur with this anti-HIV, if I understand it correctly), bad things can happen.
3) Attenuating (or weakening) HIV has been widely tested as a vaccine. And basically, it works, at least in monkeys. If you give monkeys an attenuated version of SIV (monkey AIDS virus), the monkeys are basically protected against full-blown SIV. So why isn't this a vaccine that is being used in people? Monkeys that have weakened immune systems, are young, are old, or just have plain bad luck eventually get sick and die...from the attenuated strain of the virus. In other words, the attenuated vaccine makes the monkeys sick. The 'anti-HIV' sounds like a different riff on the same theme, with the possible caveat that they are looking to use it on people who are already infected, unlike a vaccine which would be used on uninfected people to prevent infection.
Just my two cents. My cred: 8 years in HIV research, with a Ph.D. in it.
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.
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
It's GNU/HIV
Let's make a difference
"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."
1) They're not grad students. They're both assistant professors at UC Berkeley. (Odd though that they don't refer to them as Doctors.) Do you really think grad students have $200K to throw around on their own experiments?
2) They chose to publicly credit a grad student (Leor Weinberger) with contributing to this particular piece of work. But leave it to Wired's "professional" journalist to write ambiguously on the facts of a story.
3) It is *not* a cure to HIV/AIDS. Its merely a engineered component which would be a necessary step towards a potential cure for HIV using "synthetic" biology. (Apparently, "gene therapy" is an unpopular term nowadays.) Their theory is that a bioengineered HIV virus would be able displace the deadly strains of HIV and thus reduce AIDS deaths. Adam does a lot of computer modelling in his research to help demonstrate his theories (which to me is also a notable aspect of this story...)
So, to conclude this part, you did not RTFA, heavyweights with hundreds of millions of dollars are able to do this, grad students have not yet demonstrated an ability to do this (although much like an a-bomb or bio-weapons, its probably in their reach), all the conclusions you reached from your presumptions are probably incorrect, and most important, there isn't a cure for AIDS just over the horizon.
I really wish they had published papers available online specific to this research. ( Google let me down... :( ) I suspect the Wired writer was incorrect as describing the engineered HIV virus as "latching" onto the real ones. More likely, its engineering the "vaccinating" HIV virus to be non-deadly and outcompete deadly HIV strains to infect a host (but IANAB). Don't suppose any graduate biology/chemistry students could help dig up some links?
What I did find from Google was a useful blurb about Adam and his work
.There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
Just a minor correction to my own post. HIV packages two positive-strand RNA molecules (positive-strand diploid, as pointed out by someone else), not negative strand. That'll teach me to post quickly while heating up dinner.
Norman Spinrad's 1995 novella, Journal of the Plague Years, describes this very thing. I wonder if the researchers were inspired by it?
I'm curious, do you mean American English? Because according to the dictionary defining American English, you are wrong. You are also wrong according to Dictionary.com. You are also wrong according to Wikipedia. The correct plural of virus, in American English (I don't have a copy of the official Oxford English Dictionary, which defines British English), is viruses. The use of the term virii originated in the 90s on warez sites/forums.
I always thought Unbelievably Cynical would be a +1
Why not get the real ultimate power?
Except that there is no basis for virii being the plural of virus in Latin whatsoever. The plural of murus (wall) is muri. The plural of filius (son) is filii. Apparently someone thought virus should have a plural ending in -ii because they saw the plural of filius and other second declension nouns ending in -ius and thought that all nouns ending in -us ended in -ii.
The confusion doesn't end there though. There is no example of the word virus being pluralized in any classical works. This wouldn't be a problem except that virus is an irregular noun. It's a neuter noun that is declined like a masculine second declension noun (except the accusative case which is also virus). In Latin (and Greek as well) neuter nouns have plurals that end in -a. Do not pass go. Do not collect $200. This is one of the most reliable rules in Latin (and in Latin most rules have very few exceptions in the first place). As such viri can't be the plural of virus either.
Then there are some people who upon hearing that virus is neuter mistake it for a third declension neuter noun and say that the plural of virus should be virora just as the plural of corpus is corpora. However, this cannot be the case since virus is known to have the genitive singular form viri and if it were a third declension noun it would have the form viroris.
Then there are other people who say that virus is a fourth declension noun but this doesn't make much sense since the genitive form doesn't match what would be expected for a fourth declension noun and as for as I know all fourth declension neuter nouns end in -u and not -us.
My best guess is that the plural of virus would be virus since this follows the pattern of other second declension neuter nouns with gender confusion issues. However, it's probably best to avoid all of this confusion and just pluralize it as viruses.
And now you know. And knowing is half the battle.
My only political goal is to see to it that no political party achieves its goals.
It scares them because the pharmaceutical companies would want to kill them. Those guys have spent billions and haven't produced a cure. :)
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
Hence, a seropositive male almost always produces seronegative offspring, assuming the mother is not infected. It would be unusual for a fetus ever to acquire HIV infection directly from the father. The developing embryo simply does not have the CD4+ receptor that HIV latches on to, until much later in development.
HIV transmission is not like Mendelian genetics.Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
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.
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
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
You mean you do not consider this standard Highschool material?
Exactly.
For everyone looking at the latin virus explanation post and going "HOLY CRAP!!!1!", it's really not that bad. This is honestly 2nd year high school latin at best, and probably stuff that you'd hit in 1st semester latin at a university. I know when I took greek, first semester was all about declining nouns - the prof. wanted to get that down before we went to tenses, which are harder.
I hope this helps, if not to explain it, to at least show that what he's doing is not that bad.
In English, we conjugate verbs all the time - it's second nature. It allows us to understand that "are our children learning?" is correct, when "is our children learning?" is not, because in this case, "children" is plural, and "children" is also the subject (remember, to find the subject of a question, you have to turn it into a statement, i.e. "are our children learning? -> "our children are learning").
Well, in Latin and Greek, the same thing is done with nouns. You conjugate nouns. Except that it's called declining nouns. Verbs conjugate, nouns decline, and difficult students decline to conjugate.
So, in Latin, when you say,
"The boy built the tower" and
"The boy gave the tower a roof" and
"The tower fell down",
the word for tower is spelled differently, because of where it's used in the sentence.
In the first case, it's the direct object, receiving the action of the verb. In the second case, it's the indirect object, describing something about the direct object (which is roof). In both of these cases, you could say that the tower is in the objective case. Latin and Greek just call that accusative. In the third example, the tower is the subject of the sentence, which is just called the nominative case.
And there are other cases, which do get a little more in depth, like the genitive case. But, if you think about it, genitive is from the greek genesis, meaning a begining, and the genitive case is used with nouns "comming from" somewhere, whether it's actual travel, or an abstract idea like love comming from god (there's a lot of genitive in the greek new testament).
Keep in mind that this isn't as foreign as it sounds to English speakers. We do it on a limited basis with pronouns: He gave me the ball, vs. I gave the ball to him.
So that's really all there is to it. When the virus guy is posting about declinations, all he means is ways to decline nouns. We group them into first, second, thrid, etc, based on how they decline, much the way people group verbs when they study a foreign language. And the concept of gendered nouns is very much still in use - spanish and french still have masculine and feminine nouns, as do a host of other languages, and german has neuter nouns as well.
It's not that bad. Give those dead languages a fair chance.
~Will
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