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Possible Breakthroughs in Cancer and AIDS Research
FortKnox writes "Two possible medical breakthroughs have come to light in recent days. In Australia, it was discovered that pineapple extract can stimulate the body to attack cancer cells. And in Japan, Kumamoto University researchers have developed a drug that will block cells from the AIDS virus, thus making something akin to an AIDS vaccine." From the Australian news: "One of the molecules, CCZ, stimulates the body's immune system to target and kill cancer cells, the other, CCS, blocks a protein called Ras, which is defective in 30 percent of all cancers. QIMR researcher Tracey Mynott said her team had set out to find why the enzyme-rich bromelaine crush had such strong effects on biological material."
Cures for a lot of diseases probably already exist but there is no money in curering people, just treating their symptoms. You really think drug companies care about your health?
"Go into the hall of mirrors and have a bloody hard look at yourself" - HG Nelson
I just hope these don't fade into the background as a lot of these types of things do. i think the world is ready for some cures...
Maybe I'm getting jaded these days, but it seems that every other week we have an announcement about a revolutionary breakthrough that's going to cure all these terminal conditions. And yet, we don't really seem to see masses of cancer patients getting cured outside these laboratory studies, in the way that antibiotics swept away most bacterial illnesses. Survival rates are up, sure, but most people are still dying and these conditions are still considered more or less terminal. Are the Powers That Be simply sitting on a bunch of cures, or do these things never turn out to be as promising as they were in experimental trials?
Nah, even if you eliminated the cancer, cigarettes still have a whole bunch of other bad side effects.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
>if it succeeds it will seek a commercial partner to develop a drug that could be used in human clinical trials.
What they are saying is, "Unless we find a patentable and highly profitable way to secure this discovery, We won't bother."
I welcome the return of more natural remedies. These drug companies aren't happy until they turn a natural remedy into something with side effects.
The government which is strong enough to protect you from everything is strong enough to take everything from you.
A cure for AIDs has existed for quite some time, it's called abstinence (probably not a difficult thing for most of the geeks here).
AIDs can spread through shared needles and blood transfusions, but predominately it is contracted from unsafe sex. Rather than worrying about a cure, stop the infection to start.
Let us know how your herbs and ritual dances work on your cancer tumors, okay, Sport?
Back in the day, when one wrote a NSF grant proposal to fund the isolation, identification and synthesis of natural product, one always included prominently the fact that in vitro - in a Petri dish, the desired compound killed cancer cells. Hey presto - now it's an NIH grant proposal as well. The keywords antitumor, anticancer, etc. in the title were magic.
Of course, these never became actual medicines. One realized over time that a sledgehammer will kill cancer cells in a Petri dish. As will a stick of dynamite or a teaspoonful of sodium cyanide or just driving over it with a Buick.
Once you take into account that human biological system is slightly more complex than the Petri dish system, you will be less excited by the breathless prose of headline writers.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
So, I guess the flu virus ain't a virus either, under the reasoning you exhibit above?
AIDS is not a virus, but "AIDS virus" simply means "the virus that causes AIDS", just as "flu virus" means "the virus that causes the flu". Of course, the actual _name_ of the "AIDS virus" is HIV.
The person writing the phrase "AIDS virus" knows what he means, as does everyone reading the phrase. There's not even anything misleading about it: AIDS referes to a syndrome which is caused by infection by HIV, and the phrase AIDS virus is just a reference to human immunodeficiency virus - nothing misleading about it. While I would prefer that someone refer to HIV as simply HIV, calling it the AIDS virus is not wrong.
"AIDS vaccine" is slightly misleading, for the reason you give, but it is also a case of everyone involved knowing precisely what is meant, and no actual confusion is likely to result.
+5 informative my arse. The above is not unlike complaining about the usage of who versus whom in some random sentence.
(This post brought to you by a lack of coffee and a distaste for grammar fascism and related disorders.)
And there's a cure for ebola, measles, smallpox ... abstinence from society. Total abstinence. That'll knock 'em dead.
There's a cure for auto accidents, too, called the M1 Abrams tank. Mileage sucks, maintenance sucks, cost sucks, but by god, if we only let those people drive who could afford Abrams, why, we'd cut deaths from auto accidents down to almost zero.
Or maybe you'd prefer banning automobiles altogether. Yeh, that'd stop auto accidents. Yeh.
Get real. Expecting humans to abstain from sex except with their spouse is about as real as expecting people to stop speeding on the honor system. Especially when the number of people with AIDS in the US is around one million; one in 300. And with the incubation period being on the order of ten years, it sure isn't on people's minds all the time, especially when they get drunk or just plain feel good. Are you going to ban alcohol and feeling good too?
It's real nice to spout platitudes about morality and abstinence being the only known cure, but it isn't a known cure because it doesn't stop transfusions or needle sharing spreading AIDs, and there are far more practical methods like using condoms. Are you part of the crowd that turns your nose up at recommending condoms to stop AIDs because it encourages amoral sex outside marriage? Must be nice to not have shit that stinks.
Better to have a solution, condoms, which is widely used, even if it is only 95% effective, than some psuedo cure, alleged to be 100% effective, which is unusable in practice.
Perfect is the enemy of good enough. Moral twerps have their heads up their asses.
Infuriate left and right
From dictionary.com:
Abstinence isn't a cure, abstinence is a form of prevention. If abstinence was a cure all you would have to do if you got AIDS is not have sex for a period of time.
The only thing abstinence cures is a marriage. If neither partner has ever had sex before, especially with each other, then it's a shot in the dark as to weather or not they will have a healthy sex life once they are married. What if one loves sex and the other doesn't? What if one person thinks the other is horrible in the sack? The quickest route to divorce is a bad sex life. There's no way in hell I'd ever consider getting married before having sex with the women unless she was either rich (in which case if it didn't work, I'd get half her dough) or she was otherwise the perfect women in every way. Drop dead gorgeous, funny, smart, healthy, in good spirits almost 100% of the time, employed, energetic, willing to cook and clean if I handle the yard work, willing to be the primary caretaker if she wants children, willing to put up with all of my bullshit, willing to not complain that I spend "too much time with the guys", willing not to complain if she feels that "I never take her with me when I go out with the guys", willing to leave me along when I'm watching the game ... aka ... a women that doesn't exist.
So in closing, you enjoy your abstinence and your either failed or unhappy marriange when you realize you don't click with your wife sexually, meanwhile I'll be chasing tail and really having a good time and when I finally do settle down and get married it'll either be a long and happy one or I'll come out of it rich.
Maybe if you studied how biological research is done, you'd realize how easy it would be to test it. There's things called randomized clinical trials and epidemiological studies that would easily determine in a few years time whether or these things worked. But since you can't think of it, it can't be done! Whooo-hooo!
Perhaps asking for volunteers in Africa (very high AIDS rate) might work though... if a noticable decrease occurred in the test area you've got a winner...
Wow, are you in high school? Get a clue and take class on statistics or clinical trials in particular. You'll find well agreed upon methods that work!
As a biomedical scientist working in the field of HIV and immunology research in the past 15 years (having published over 40 papers in journals like Nature, Science) I fully and completely agree with Yeasbeast's comment. Where are the peer reviewed papers on these "major breakthroughs"?? If there was really a true breakthrough in either HIV or cancer research it would make it headline in Nature, Science or Cell, sorry to say /. headline only enhances these pure BS hype, because most don't quite understand the nature of biological research and discovery.
Precisely. Ever notice how some sort of marriage ceremony seems to be engrained in many otherwise distinct cultures? It leads me to suspect that what people like to call "sexual morality" is really just a survival trait that evolved as a result of natural selection. Recent research on sexual networks (example) seems to point to the same conclusion.
Curent HIV vaccines rely on the fact that people seem to suffer no ill effects of not having this receptor and are currently a main focus of vaccine research.
..........FULL STOP.