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Gene Found In Black Death Survivors Stops HIV
WindozeSux writes "According to research done by Dr. Stephen O'Brien, a mutated gene known as delta 32 found in Black Death survivor descendants, stops HIV in its tracks. In order to be immune both parents have to have the delta 32 gene. From the Article: 'In 1996, research showed that delta 32 prevents HIV from entering human cells and infecting the body. O'Brien thought this principle could be applied to the plague bacteria, which affects the body in a similar manner. To determine whether the Eyam plague survivors may have carried delta 32, O'Brien tested the DNA of their modern-day descendents...'"
This kind of solution to "curing" HIV is probably as close as we'll ever get to solving the problem. It's not going to be a wonder drug, it will be simple natural selection. Black Death came and those with the mutation survived, they didn't find a cure. Hopefully with todays technologies not only those with the mutation can survive the global epidemic that is HIV, but science can bring the benefits of that mutation to all of us.
of such discoveries is medicine made. now, the difficult part is going to be getting the experiments to prove it into the public eye, infecting "32" blood with HIV in vitro, and then taking that research into the luddite chambers of policymakers.
we'll have fun galore when that happens. a true righteous moral civil war.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
So what's stopping me from having science insert that gene into my offspring?
"This kind of solution to "curing" HIV is probably as close as we'll ever get to solving the problem."
Wow! Guess that whole abstenance thing didn't work out. How about not sharing needles? Or screening blood donations. Maybe what we really mean is that we don't have a solution to AIDS that still allows us to engage in those destructive behaviours we all enjoy.
Things like this put an interesting spin on science in general. Trying not to be off topic here, but if we are to reach anything like a utopian state (think Star Trek here) then we, as a race, have to overcome quite a few thresholds. The number of people on the planet is one, the fact that modern medicine is allowing more mutations to survive, including weak mutations (read that as mutations that weaken the population over time rather than insert survival traits like immunity to AIDS).
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The things that we are doing through science for money is going to become a wall that will stop us in the future, or can. Right now, it is unknown if our vegetable and foodstuffs are actually as valuable to the human body as they are supposed to be. I'm not talking about hamburgers, but raw vegetables. Pesticides and genetic modifications of crops is changing how they are used by the body.
Its not improbable that scientists could insert the immunity genes via foodstuffs in the near future, rather like making us all part of a super race... or rather the benefactors of the genetic makeup of superhumans. This process, in the course of history, has always wiped much of the world clean of the weaker specimens, leaving those with the stronger mutations to live on. That in turn drags down the rest of the population as genetic weakness is passed on.
This is a reasonable idea, just give the good genes to everyone.... but morally, that is the wrong thing to do. It will turn out that only those with an extra $150k will get the therapy... no insurance will cover it, 3rd world citizens can't buy it, and its not so different than what some of Hitler's folks were attempting to do (at least in some respects)
So, will it be superhumans or ginormous global conglomerates that run the future earth?
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Religion goes back as far as human history has been documented. Being that the basic tenants of religion build on each other, I often wonder if promiscuity is shunned in almost all of oldest civilizations because it comes from an implicit form of survival. In other words, if you have just one faithfull partner, your chances of survival are much MUCH greater in times of a massive STD pandemic.
Take Africa and Asia for example where AIDs runs rampent. If this trend continues, only the religiously faithfull and monogamous will survive to carry on their genes and culture. In the mean time, I think we are seeing a deadly transition taking place.
Life is not for the lazy.
dude, if you're in a russian prison, pennicillin-causing-mutations probably don't make the top 100 list of your current problems.
is you blame people for what a virus does. i used to be an aids educator before antiretrovirals came out in the early 90s. i remember at one conference on the issue i went to there were basically 2 dominant subgroups: gay men and black women. the black women were saying things like "this horrible gay disease, if gay men weren't so promiscuous we wouldn't have to deal with aids." the gay men were saying things like "this horrible african disease, if some african hadn't had sex with a monkey (a surprisingly common idiocy about aids) we wouldn't have to deal with aids."
do you see the parallel between their attitude and their attitude yet? the point is very simple: people were blaming each other, for what a virus does. no one is to blame for aids, no matter what they do, seriously, that's the most moral and honest and intelligent and wise position you can take on aids and human behavior. i'm 100% serious!
the point is to fight the virus, not fight other people (and, yes, your atittude promotes blaming people rather than the disease). you're whole "every body stop having risky sex" line is very pat, simple, and convenient. and absolutely useless against fighting aids. people have risky sex: all races, all classes, all types of moral upbringing, all attitutes.
need i demonstrate some recent trips from memory of moral demagogues loudly spouting out about moral behavior and then breaking their own rules?:
1. william bennett, sage of american morality: degenerate gambler
2. rush limbaugh, voice of personal accountability: drug addict
3. jim bakker, great religous authority: adulterer
4. etc., etc.
closeted gays, sex addicts, adulterers... they would be the first to pat you on the back and go "here, here" and clap to your words and smile at what you say... and then what would they do in their bedroom? do you see your problem yet? your words have no value. it's just a big public mass exercise in "do as i say, not as i do" and no one takes it seriously, because everyone is a hypocrit when it comes to something as complex about human sexuality, including, and most prominently, about their own sexuality. so your attitude is great lip service, but it doesn't translate into reality.
please, wake up: human behavior is complex, it doesn't fit your simple prescriptions. you fight the VIRUS, you don't blame people at ALL. because you know who wins when we turn on each other and blame each other?
the virus wins
and do you know what you get when you blame people for their disease? ("you deserve it") a cold heartless existence. is this compassionate conservatism you are esousping here? (snicker)
yu are not the first to make blanket overriding statements about how humans SHOULD behave, without any wisdom about how people DO behave, and then just say "you get what you deserve". but this doesn't make you wise, nor moral. it makes you part of the problem.
please, when you say the words you say, do not for the slightest bit think you are a moral or intelligent person. to be so willfully or naively blind of real human behavior, THAT DOES NOT CHANGE, AND IS CONSTANT ACROSS ALL UPBRINGINGS, is ignorance at best, evil at worst.
yes: you and your atittude. ignorant, or evil. personal accountability is important in life. but when it comes to disease, the punishment you are saying is acceptable for something so natural as sex only makes you out to be heartless or blind.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Not much float around...if some mutation gave birth to proteins not doing anything...than that simply didn't do anything to organism and wasn't promoted/denounced in any way by natural selection.
And comparison with bacteria isn't fair...we reproduce at their level all the time, constantly. Your cells that is.
Sure, there's perhaps some "waste" given for example simply the amount of nuclear material...but it gives us so much.
There are things in which bacteria aren't very effective. Sense of sight, for example, is first out of many things I could mention here...
One that hath name thou can not otter
Calm down people!
There is quite a few methods currently being researched that could cure HIV. It's not a done deal til HIV is actually cured in infected people right now.
Another possible method is:
Crocodile's Immune System Kills HIV
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- siblings and their children
- children you may already have, and their children
- nephews, nieces, aunts, uncles, etc.
They share more of your DNA than some random person, so it counts. You could babysit your brother's grandkids so that both parents can support the family better. That counts.They've even started banning shows that birds are appearing in, for fear of infecting the general population.
Idiots.
I feel like beating the editors with repeatedly with a cluebat. All the birds have *bird* flu. Not human flu. Humans are not birds. We do not have feathers, and cannot fly. Neither are we parrots. Which are also birds. Even dead parrots.
If/When the virus:
(a) jumps the species gap (which there's evidence it has done already a few times),
and (here's the kicker...) (b) the mutation can not only survive, but transfer to other human hosts (this hasn't happened yet) then there will be an issue.
Then it won't be bird flu any more. It'll be human flu.
Caveat to (b) - it may lose virulence in the tranfer, and end up just like all the other flu outbreaks that the press don't like to talk about because they're not scary enough, like 1967.
Oh, and (c) we know *just* a little bit more more about disease prevention than we did in 1918...
This is the natural progression of evolution tho, those who have this gene are a step above the rest of us in the evolutionary scale. If it weren't for modern technology, those of us without this gene would have been wiped out long ago by a combination of HIV and the black death, leaving only those with this superior gene.
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There is no "above" in the evolutionary scale. There is only the dead and the living (-and reproducing).
This is the natural progression of evolution tho, those who have this gene are a step above the rest of us in the evolutionary scale.
I agree with the AC who also replied to this saying "There is no 'above' in the evolutionary scale. There is only the dead and the living (-and reproducing)."
It might be beneficial against HIV, but what if it has side-effects?
For example, the gene that helps defend against malaria (and is prevelant amongst many of African origin) is the same gene that causes sickle-cell anaemia. The benefit probably outweighs the problem, but it shouldn't be assumed that there is "better", "worse", "above" and so on.
People tend to view these things in a very short-term manner, when evolution is a long-term game.
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However since he is gay, he would have no offspring, therefore there is no evolutionary benefit.
Might I also add that in 1918, there was a major war taking place in which millions of men were all living in close proximity in the trenches. This closeness of this many people could have also been a contributing factor to the devistation of thie virus.