Posted by
samzenpus
on from the super-soldier dept.
Trokair writes "China Daily reports that researcher Tuofu Zhu has discovered two women in an HIV Research program that are immune to the disorder via a mutant gene."
Re:Spontaneous mutation?
by
allism
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
About ten years ago, I did volunteer work for an HIV-testing clinic. I met two men while I was there who were convinced that they were both HIV-immune. One had been very sexually active during the late 70s and early 80s and had had most of his friends and sexual partners die of AIDS-related causes, and the other had repeatedly had sex with multiple HIV-positive partners out of survivors guilt. Talk was just beginning around then of people who seemed to be immune to HIV.
It's not something I'd especially want to gamble on, though - HIV mutates nearly every time it infects, and at some point I think these people who are now immune won't be immune any longer.
Genetics at work?
by
enforcer999
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well, we are a very capable species. We will not die off easily. Aids/HIV are dangerous and deadly to us. It was just a matter of time before our own bodies figured out how to survive this virus. We have a good package to work with.
Just my first thoughts on the subject. I would like to know more about the study.
Re:Genetics at work?
by
jm92956n
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
It was just a matter of time before our own bodies figured out how to survive this virus.
I don't think that's exactly the case. HIV is only twenty-five years old, which certainly isn't enough time for genetic evolution to take place (especially considering the relatively slow reporductive rate of humans).
It's more likely they've an odd mutant gene that by coincadence makes them immune to the virus.
-- An effective signature identifies a particular user amongst a base of thousands.
Re:Genetics at work?
by
Proc6
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Just for fun...
0.0000000000000214/nucleotide/generation multiply that by 3 billion nucleotides in a human
------------------
0.0000642
70 year lifespan = 365 70-day cycles.
(so 0.0000642 x 365)
------------------
0.0243433
1 (person) divided by 0.0243433
------------------
4.1
So 1 mutation every 4 peoples entire lives, with a "most of the time it does nothing at all", sure doesnt look like a lot of evolution just whizzing past us to me...
Of course I'm just computing numbers without fact checking and maybe missing something.
--
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
Virtual Light
by
Mark_MF-WN
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Didn't they do this in William Gibson's "Virtual Light"? Yet another Gibson prophecy fulfilled.
1 More Reason to Find Swedish Women Hot
by
craXORjack
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I swear I saw a documentary on PBS about how a tiny percentage of mostly european descendants are immune and it was because of the Black Death (or Bubonic plague, I'm not sure that those are the same thing.) But googling for answers lead me to
this article which says that 10-15 percent of northern europeans have limited immunity due to inheriting 1 resistant gene and 1% inherited the gene from both parents giving them full immunity. And Swedes have the highest percentage. Also it says the Plague is debunked and suggests the everpresent Smallpox as the culprit.
-- Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
The main story and your post put me in mind of a particular episode of "Secrets of the Dead" that I saw, exploring the plague and its survivors.
I wonder if either of those fellows could have been carriers of the delta 32 gene, a mutated form of the gene CCR5:
"In 1996, research showed that delta 32 prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body"
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/
I didn't see in the article anywhere where it mentioned which gene was affected in the Chinese women, but it seems like to be a different one, based on the information presented in the "Secrets" show:
"O'Brien assembled an international team of scientists to test for the presence of delta 32 around the world. "Native Africans did not have delta 32 at all," O'Brien says, "and when we looked at East Asians and Indians, they were also flat zero." In fact, the levels of delta 32 found in Eyam were only matched in regions of Europe that had been affected by the plague and in America, which was, for the most part, settled by European plague survivors and their descendents."
It was a really good show and if you get the opportunity to watch it, I highly recommend that you do.
Yes there have been numerious cases of prostitutes in South Africa being imune to the disease.
Re:I hope this is true
by
TykeClone
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Not to be harsh, but you can get the same thing with heart problems. I mowed lawns in high school - one afternoon I mowed the lawn of a little old lady. That night, my dad came home and said that she had just died of a heart attack. She looked fine that afternoon, but that night she was dead.
Same goes for any kind of cancer - it can insidiously grow in you until there's nothing you can do about it but waste away and die.
Probably going to burn some karma with those comments, but it's a terrible disease that they're working on. I hope they find a cure and kick its ass - same for cancer - but it's just another way to die.
-- A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
otherwise completely normal
by
jeif1k
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
In other words, you must have a pathetically weak immune system (or none at all), and your body's cells must be so fragile that any abnormality of any kind will destroy them instantly.
A small fraction of people seems to be resistant to HIV infection because they carry idiosyncratic mutations that interfere with the way the HIV virus works. That doesn't mean they have a "pathetically weak immune system"; in fact, such mutations generally have no known effects at all other than conferring HIV resistance. Furthermore, resistance of some fraction of the population to specific viruses is a common occurrence.
But, hey, if that's what these two women want for their life, that's their problem.
WTF is that supposed to mean? One of the women in question was exposed to HIV from her husband, who was infected through a blood transfusion. It's bad enough that bigoted right wingers confuse stupidity and carelessness (unprotected sex) with immorality, but now people like you even consider accidentally getting a tainted blood transfusion a lifestyle choice and a moral failing?
I think you demonstrate just how absurd your kinds of views are, and the blithering nonsense that preceded it showed how uninformed you are.
I assume by this you're referring to the federal government's "ban" on certain types of research, such as stem cell reasearch... only there is no such ban. You can do all the research with any type of stem cells you want (including those from aborted fetuses) and not break a single law... you just can't do it using money from the federal government.
While whether or not such research should have access to federal funds is debatable (and I'd probably agree that the current regulations are too restrictive), it's a far cry from actually banning such research.
One useful statistic that I've never come across is the relative ammounts of research funding spent in the U.S. by private vs. public/government sources.
No such thing as race in science
by
Magickcat
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It's interesting that the mutation has been found in the Asian population, but I'm concerned that the article places an emphasis on ideas of race, which has been an obsolete scientific term since genetic research in the 1940s and 50s.
Race and the idea of race have are not medical ideas. The reason why so many Europeans (not merely Caucasians) have one or two copies of the mutant gene is because of the bottle neck of the black plague throughout Europe. It afforded them some or cmplete resistance to it. It is entirely possible that the Chinese people found to have the gene may have these ancestors themselves. As Chinese "asians" are just as much a mix of people from different places as "caucasians".
There is no scientific basis for ideas of race whatsoever - we are all homo sapiens.
Of all the genes in human being, about 75 per cent are identical in every person; only 25 per cent vary from person to person. And of that variable amount, 85 per cent of the difference would be present even if the two people were fairly closely related; that is, an ethnic subgroup, like Norwegians. Another 9 per cent of the genetic variation will result from individuals being members of separate nations or tribes within a "race"--a Spaniard and an Italian, for example. And only about 6 per cent is the result of the two people being from what we call separate races. Any person's race accounts for only about 0.24 per cent (or 6 per cent of 25 per cent) of his genetic make-up. Info taken from here.
--
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses.
If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
Patents are the real key
by
fsterman
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
The key is the fact the Gene patens have blocked research into it. Every time a lab does something with the caucasian mutation this lab send out a cease and desist. They guy who they found it on originally is opposed to it, but he has no say, even if it is his body. Another thing software and genes have in common, neither should have patents.
-- Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
But HPV is more prevalent than GW are
by
MarcQuadra
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
And virtually everyone has one form of HPV or another.
Last I heard, there were over 90 strains, and several are common on even non sexually-active folks.
HPV transmits through skin contact, so rubbers won't prevent it. But the VAST majority of the time it does NOTHING, no warts, no cancers, NOTHING. Certain combinations of strains seem to cause the warts, and that's far less common than having no symptoms at all.
Overall, I think there's a LOT of fear mongering about STDs. The problem is really much more prevalent amongst the poor and uneducated. If you pick your partners right, and 'look before you leap' you have pretty good chances of coming out OK. It's good to get your partner to prove no infection before you hit it raw though, and you should go 'get swabbed' every year or so.
Also remember, there are less than 100,000 women with HIV in the United States. Your chances of sleeping with an HIV-infected female pickup in the USA is about 1 in 1500. Your chances of CONTRACTING HIV from that would be under 1 in 30,000. For non-junkie heterosexual men seeking women in the USA, your chance of being infected with HIV is almost nothing. Worry about the nasty STDs instead.
-- "Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie."
-Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Re:Not as interesting as it sounds...
by
maxpublic
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Just curious, then, where does that put bisexuals?
No one knows, but it doesn't seem to be linked to morphological differences in the brain. And I doubt we'll find out any time soon, since bisexuals are generally treated as deviants by both hetero- and homosexuals (except when it's part of some straight guy's "bi-babe" fantasy).
Max
-- My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
It may not be relative
by
PCM2
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, I once saw a show on PBS where some scientists did a clever test. They took a whole bunch of photographs of people's faces and morphed them together, to create a picture of a composite human face. Most people who saw the face and were asked whether it was an attractive person agreed that it was.
The idea here is that what the scientists did was create a completely average face -- that is, mathematically average. Faces with big noses, or big chins, or buggy eyes, were cancelled out by the majority of faces that didn't share those features. In the end, what you got was a face every feature of which was the "norm" for the human race at large.
So the conclusion you could draw from this study is that the people we find the most attractive are the ones with the least apparent variation. A particularly exaggerated feature on a face might be viewed as a sign that some radical genetic divergence has taken place in that person's development -- and we don't care much for that, as a species. While diversity might be good for evolution, we like the norm (and this has nothing to do with skin color or the facial features of any particular ethnicity; so far as I know the scientists used a whole cross-section of people).
So if this theory is true, then no, human standards of beauty are not actually as relative as romantics might assume.
-- Breakfast served all day!
Re:Tell me it ain't so !
by
Anonymous+Writer
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Take the Bubonic Plague, for example. It had the potential to destroy humanity, due to the lack of technology, specifically the knowledge of how it was transmitted.
Coincidentally, there is a correlation between the distribution of this mutant gene in populations and the bubonic plague. It is speculated that its high concentration in Caucasians is a result of it's ability to resist the black death.
Re:Immune
by
Thomas+Miconi
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
Not being a racist troll here, but from my experience, culturally Asians seem to be a lot less promiscuous,
But you're talking about an exponential process. If everybody has unprotected sex with n persons while being infected, as soon as n > 1, the actual value of n matters very little: the disease will spread with catastrophic speed. It might take more time to infect the whole population, but not that much.
As an example, if in one case the process spreads with multiplicative factor n1 = 2, and in the other n2 = 8, then it will only take 3 times as long for the first process to infect as many people. If n1 = 2 and n2 = 16, it will be 4 times as long.
The ratio between total infection times is equal to the ratio of the logs of the two multiplicative factors. You can check by yourself, it's just basic logarithm / exponent manipulation.
Of course in this simplistic analysis we ignore repetitions (people already infected do not contribute to any further increase in infections). But these effects become significant only when a sizeable proportion of the population is infected, so essentially if one population is small and the other is large, the disease will spread faster, for a longer time, in the second one.
Oh, btw, remember that in the case of India and China put together, we are talking about one third of mankind.
But there is an even more depressing aspect of AIDS. With AIDS, abstinence is only a protection if it is absolute. There are some populations in which such a thing exists. Most of the time it is enforced by scaringly oppressive traditions / religions / customs. In other words, when AIDS becomes widespread enough to have a significant impact on the population, it turns obscurantism into a Darwinian advantage.
Slashdot Mirror
About ten years ago, I did volunteer work for an HIV-testing clinic. I met two men while I was there who were convinced that they were both HIV-immune. One had been very sexually active during the late 70s and early 80s and had had most of his friends and sexual partners die of AIDS-related causes, and the other had repeatedly had sex with multiple HIV-positive partners out of survivors guilt. Talk was just beginning around then of people who seemed to be immune to HIV.
It's not something I'd especially want to gamble on, though - HIV mutates nearly every time it infects, and at some point I think these people who are now immune won't be immune any longer.
Denver Isuzu Suzuki
Just my first thoughts on the subject. I would like to know more about the study.
Didn't they do this in William Gibson's "Virtual Light"? Yet another Gibson prophecy fulfilled.
I swear I saw a documentary on PBS about how a tiny percentage of mostly european descendants are immune and it was because of the Black Death (or Bubonic plague, I'm not sure that those are the same thing.) But googling for answers lead me to this article which says that 10-15 percent of northern europeans have limited immunity due to inheriting 1 resistant gene and 1% inherited the gene from both parents giving them full immunity. And Swedes have the highest percentage. Also it says the Plague is debunked and suggests the everpresent Smallpox as the culprit.
Liberals call everyone Nazis yet they are the closest thing to it.
The main story and your post put me in mind of a particular episode of "Secrets of the Dead" that I saw, exploring the plague and its survivors.
I wonder if either of those fellows could have been carriers of the delta 32 gene, a mutated form of the gene CCR5:
"In 1996, research showed that delta 32 prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body"
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/
I didn't see in the article anywhere where it mentioned which gene was affected in the Chinese women, but it seems like to be a different one, based on the information presented in the "Secrets" show:
"O'Brien assembled an international team of scientists to test for the presence of delta 32 around the world. "Native Africans did not have delta 32 at all," O'Brien says, "and when we looked at East Asians and Indians, they were also flat zero." In fact, the levels of delta 32 found in Eyam were only matched in regions of Europe that had been affected by the plague and in America, which was, for the most part, settled by European plague survivors and their descendents."
It was a really good show and if you get the opportunity to watch it, I highly recommend that you do.
soupy twist
Yes there have been numerious cases of prostitutes in South Africa being imune to the disease.
Same goes for any kind of cancer - it can insidiously grow in you until there's nothing you can do about it but waste away and die.
Probably going to burn some karma with those comments, but it's a terrible disease that they're working on. I hope they find a cure and kick its ass - same for cancer - but it's just another way to die.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
In other words, you must have a pathetically weak immune system (or none at all), and your body's cells must be so fragile that any abnormality of any kind will destroy them instantly.
A small fraction of people seems to be resistant to HIV infection because they carry idiosyncratic mutations that interfere with the way the HIV virus works. That doesn't mean they have a "pathetically weak immune system"; in fact, such mutations generally have no known effects at all other than conferring HIV resistance. Furthermore, resistance of some fraction of the population to specific viruses is a common occurrence.
But, hey, if that's what these two women want for their life, that's their problem.
WTF is that supposed to mean? One of the women in question was exposed to HIV from her husband, who was infected through a blood transfusion. It's bad enough that bigoted right wingers confuse stupidity and carelessness (unprotected sex) with immorality, but now people like you even consider accidentally getting a tainted blood transfusion a lifestyle choice and a moral failing?
I think you demonstrate just how absurd your kinds of views are, and the blithering nonsense that preceded it showed how uninformed you are.
I assume by this you're referring to the federal government's "ban" on certain types of research, such as stem cell reasearch... only there is no such ban. You can do all the research with any type of stem cells you want (including those from aborted fetuses) and not break a single law... you just can't do it using money from the federal government.
While whether or not such research should have access to federal funds is debatable (and I'd probably agree that the current regulations are too restrictive), it's a far cry from actually banning such research.
One useful statistic that I've never come across is the relative ammounts of research funding spent in the U.S. by private vs. public/government sources.
It's interesting that the mutation has been found in the Asian population, but I'm concerned that the article places an emphasis on ideas of race, which has been an obsolete scientific term since genetic research in the 1940s and 50s.
Race and the idea of race have are not medical ideas. The reason why so many Europeans (not merely Caucasians) have one or two copies of the mutant gene is because of the bottle neck of the black plague throughout Europe. It afforded them some or cmplete resistance to it. It is entirely possible that the Chinese people found to have the gene may have these ancestors themselves. As Chinese "asians" are just as much a mix of people from different places as "caucasians".
There is no scientific basis for ideas of race whatsoever - we are all homo sapiens.
Of all the genes in human being, about 75 per cent are identical in every person; only 25 per cent vary from person to person. And of that variable amount, 85 per cent of the difference would be present even if the two people were fairly closely related; that is, an ethnic subgroup, like Norwegians. Another 9 per cent of the genetic variation will result from individuals being members of separate nations or tribes within a "race"--a Spaniard and an Italian, for example. And only about 6 per cent is the result of the two people being from what we call separate races. Any person's race accounts for only about 0.24 per cent (or 6 per cent of 25 per cent) of his genetic make-up.
Info taken from here.
Si tacuisses philosophus mansisses. If you had kept quiet, you would have remained a philosopher.
The key is the fact the Gene patens have blocked research into it. Every time a lab does something with the caucasian mutation this lab send out a cease and desist. They guy who they found it on originally is opposed to it, but he has no say, even if it is his body. Another thing software and genes have in common, neither should have patents.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
And virtually everyone has one form of HPV or another.
Last I heard, there were over 90 strains, and several are common on even non sexually-active folks.
HPV transmits through skin contact, so rubbers won't prevent it. But the VAST majority of the time it does NOTHING, no warts, no cancers, NOTHING. Certain combinations of strains seem to cause the warts, and that's far less common than having no symptoms at all.
Overall, I think there's a LOT of fear mongering about STDs. The problem is really much more prevalent amongst the poor and uneducated. If you pick your partners right, and 'look before you leap' you have pretty good chances of coming out OK. It's good to get your partner to prove no infection before you hit it raw though, and you should go 'get swabbed' every year or so.
Also remember, there are less than 100,000 women with HIV in the United States. Your chances of sleeping with an HIV-infected female pickup in the USA is about 1 in 1500. Your chances of CONTRACTING HIV from that would be under 1 in 30,000. For non-junkie heterosexual men seeking women in the USA, your chance of being infected with HIV is almost nothing. Worry about the nasty STDs instead.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Just curious, then, where does that put bisexuals?
No one knows, but it doesn't seem to be linked to morphological differences in the brain. And I doubt we'll find out any time soon, since bisexuals are generally treated as deviants by both hetero- and homosexuals (except when it's part of some straight guy's "bi-babe" fantasy).
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
Actually, I once saw a show on PBS where some scientists did a clever test. They took a whole bunch of photographs of people's faces and morphed them together, to create a picture of a composite human face. Most people who saw the face and were asked whether it was an attractive person agreed that it was.
The idea here is that what the scientists did was create a completely average face -- that is, mathematically average. Faces with big noses, or big chins, or buggy eyes, were cancelled out by the majority of faces that didn't share those features. In the end, what you got was a face every feature of which was the "norm" for the human race at large.
So the conclusion you could draw from this study is that the people we find the most attractive are the ones with the least apparent variation. A particularly exaggerated feature on a face might be viewed as a sign that some radical genetic divergence has taken place in that person's development -- and we don't care much for that, as a species. While diversity might be good for evolution, we like the norm (and this has nothing to do with skin color or the facial features of any particular ethnicity; so far as I know the scientists used a whole cross-section of people).
So if this theory is true, then no, human standards of beauty are not actually as relative as romantics might assume.
Breakfast served all day!
Take the Bubonic Plague, for example. It had the potential to destroy humanity, due to the lack of technology, specifically the knowledge of how it was transmitted.
Coincidentally, there is a correlation between the distribution of this mutant gene in populations and the bubonic plague. It is speculated that its high concentration in Caucasians is a result of it's ability to resist the black death.
Not being a racist troll here, but from my experience, culturally Asians seem to be a lot less promiscuous,
But you're talking about an exponential process. If everybody has unprotected sex with n persons while being infected, as soon as n > 1, the actual value of n matters very little: the disease will spread with catastrophic speed. It might take more time to infect the whole population, but not that much.
As an example, if in one case the process spreads with multiplicative factor n1 = 2, and in the other n2 = 8, then it will only take 3 times as long for the first process to infect as many people. If n1 = 2 and n2 = 16, it will be 4 times as long.
The ratio between total infection times is equal to the ratio of the logs of the two multiplicative factors. You can check by yourself, it's just basic logarithm / exponent manipulation.
Of course in this simplistic analysis we ignore repetitions (people already infected do not contribute to any further increase in infections). But these effects become significant only when a sizeable proportion of the population is infected, so essentially if one population is small and the other is large, the disease will spread faster, for a longer time, in the second one.
Oh, btw, remember that in the case of India and China put together, we are talking about one third of mankind.
But there is an even more depressing aspect of AIDS. With AIDS, abstinence is only a protection if it is absolute. There are some populations in which such a thing exists. Most of the time it is enforced by scaringly oppressive traditions / religions / customs. In other words, when AIDS becomes widespread enough to have a significant impact on the population, it turns obscurantism into a Darwinian advantage.
Thomas-