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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...'"
....brainnnzzzz.....
The Black Death.
Oh yeah, we're cookin' now!
KFG
... will it stop zombies?
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.
. . . is another's saving trait.
This article is interesting on several levels. The fact that some people are completely immune to the disease isn't really remarkable. That's been known for quite some time. What's amazing is that this fairly basic gene (a way of bringing stuff into cells) is completely redundant. It makes me wonder how much of our cellular machinery is simply there in case another part fails.
Don't worry. I don't think there's intelligent design behind it. Just cases of plagues that have swept through populations from time to time, causing these interesting redundancies to appear.
As I understand it, Plauge is a bateria that can be treated these days. And a little bit of vaccine trivia for you:
Cow pox infection survivors didn't get Small pox, so that's how the innoculation for mankind's only "eliminated" disease began to be put under control.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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?
I saw it when it aired, too. It was fascinating. I was in PubMed and reading the article it cites before the show even finished airing.
It's also reminiscent of how (no one knows exactly why) the gene for sickle cell anemia provides resistance to malaria, thus has yet to be expunged from the human gene pool.
i am a soviet space shuttle
So what's stopping me from having science insert that gene into my offspring?
to the website. The website is about researching into the gene CCR5 related to its ability to prevent infection from the Black Death, based on the research in 1996 that showed it was able to block out HIV infection.
"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.
Plague doesn't cause the mutation, it SELECTS the mutation.
i.e. if you don't have the mutation, plague won't give it to you. It just won't kill you even if you don't get treated if you have the mutation.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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).
...
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?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
Nobody seems to have noticed that TFA is just a summary of a TV show. And one that doesn't seem to have that much to say about Delta 32 either. Anyway, judging from Google, Delta 32 is old news.
yes it's very old news, found this at http://www.lexiline.com/lexiline/lexi76.htm -
The August 7, 1998, German daily, Die Welt, contained an article by Susanne Horst
"Zehn Prozent der Europaeer sind vor Aids geschuetzt", summarizing the genetic findings of the national cancer center in Chicago as presented by molecular biologist Stephen J. O'Brien.
Human Gene Mutation CCR-5-delta-32
There is apparently a human gene mutation, "Mutation CCR-5-delta-32", which makes its holders nearly immune to AIDS, since this gene has no receptor for AIDS-similar viruses.
Whoever has inherited this gene from BOTH parents is fairly immune to AIDS. Whoever has inherited this gene from only ONE parent also has a good deal of immunity. (The immunity is not perfect in either case, since rare strains of AIDS can use the receptor CXCR 4).
We're pretty crude about modifying DNA. When we cured a bunch of kids that had some lung-related genetic disease, a good number of them got cancer. It seems that we scrambled the DNA while patching it.
Corporations would patent the genes. If you had kids, you or they would be violating the patent. Probably your "enhanced" DNA would also contain a copy protection mechanism that you couldn't bypass without violating the DMCA. For example, you might be born without the necessary organs.
This story is interesting, but as you mention, it isn't new.
This is the Zonk Effect in action. A mutation that Zonk has allows hime to think old news is news. So he forwards this. Another mutation causes Zonk to pass off press releases as news -- see today's "Microsoft as Vigilante" story.
Folks like you happen to have the "Google" mutation, which means that you are immune to mistaking old information for "new". When you see something interesting, you Google it, and immeditately discover that you've been "Zonked".
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
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.
..Think of it as a gift to future generations. There was a Secrets of the Dead episode about this on PBS which was pretty interesting. Mystery of the Black Death
"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."
There's also the mental benifits that go with having a single partner for life. Just ask all the married guys and gals here.
Best comment ever. Why can't there be like one comment that is allowed to be modded up to +6 every year or so?
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
UCSC Genome browser - has the whole gene, but you can zoom in on segments if you want.
NIH - this has links or links to links of everything you'd want to know.
...to point out that, in these days of mass panic over the current (relatively harmless to humans) H5N1 avian flu virus, there is but one cry we all think of.... "Bring out yer dead!" (For non-UK readers: a tabloid panic over bird flu has just swept the country - hundreds of tabloid hacks have cottoned onto the notion of an inevitable pandemic leading to mass graves, collapse of society as the economy grinds to a halt, etc, and totally failed to understand the connection between the current bird flu epidemic, and the potential future human pandemic. Retroviruses are such pesky buggers...
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
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
\
- 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.You mention a very, very interesting fact, which blew me away when I learned it about our genetics. What is it with (1) all this pointless intron DNA, and (2) all this God-damned splicing? Why don't the prokaryotes do that stuff? This is, as you say, weird.
So is it an accident? Given that there've been only about 10^5 generations of homo sapiens, whereas bacteria do that every 2-3 years, and they've been around billions of years -- is it just that we've not evolved as far as they? Will our DNA be a lot tighter in 30,000,000 AD (assuming we survive at all)?
Or is there some reason designed in by...(audience holds breath)...no, not God for, uh, Christ's sake...but by natural selection that gives us an advantage with all this DNA swapping?
Have I not heard the thought that it might be because a bacteria's big problem is a hostile environment and his lack of ability to manipulate it other than eating it, whereas one of our big problems (before modern medicine) was fighting off viral attackers? And, if that's the case, this screwball shuffling around of the DNA, plus "hiding" the real genes amongst acres of useless, identical-looking trash are clever techniques for making us much more elusive targets for viruses.
Joe Virus successfully invades the pathetic human cell, sneaking past the killer white cells, snipping the wire and snaking under the membrane while the guard dogs howl....he makes it! Cleverly picks the lock on the super-secure citadel of the nucleus, gets out his dynamite, blows the doors off the chromatid fiber, and, chortling, inserts his DNA sequence into the host DNA.
But alas for Joe, 90% of the DNA is never used, and so Joe has a 90% chance of having inserted himself into a string of rubbish that will never be transcribed. Poor bastard, waiting and waiting...
Now to get back on topic, I've also heard that one caution people have about gene therapy (such as slipping in a gene that protects against HIV) is that if there are these ancient unexpressed viruses lying about in our DNA, what might we do if we muck around with it by slipping in some new genes? Might we accidentally "turn on" a virus dormant since the next to last Ice Age? If it's just a Neanderthal version of a head cold, big deal -- but what if it's something far worse than AIDS itself? As fatal as AIDS, say, but with a 60 day mean survival time and the ability to be spread through the air? Brrr.
Then may your nights forever be filled with lonely HIV infected women.
When can I get tested!?
Another good example is Humanities closest relative , the good old chimp.
.. and that is just one example and a fairly tame one .It strengthens relationships and gives a great deal of pleasure . It can reduce stress and is a great form of exercise..
An animal which many Zoologists want to have reclassified from genus pan to hominid .
They have an incredibly complex societal structure which shares a great deal of similarity with us .
They as of yet have not discovered the joys of Shame (oh goody) , the chimps have mutual masturbation in the same way as we shake hands . They have sex for a great deal of reasons , of which procreation is but one.
To say humans only have sex for procreation's is ludicrous . Fat lot of good a blow job is for having a baby
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
is how this mutation got into the general population in the first place.
The current operating theory, as I understand it, is that it originated (uhhh ... mutated?) somewhere in southern Finland, made it's way across the Baltic Sea to Sweden, and from there fanned out across Europe and West Asia during the period of Viking expansion -- from about the 8th-10th centuries.
The mutation is found in native populations as far away as Cyprus and North Africa; but the closer you get to Scandinavia, the more prevalent it becomes. So, really, the Vikings were doing the rest of Europe a public service while they were casually burning it into the ground.
Plunder. The gift that keeps on giving
...But the gene only stops HIV type 1. The delta 32 gene mutation would not prevent infection from HIV type 2.
From this journal:
"Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) type 2, the second AIDS-associated human retrovirus, differs from HIV-1 in its natural history, infectivity, and pathogenicity, as well as in details of its genomic structure and molecular behavior."
Type 2 is the predominant strain of the virus in Africa, so knowledge of the delta 32 mutation will have little effect on the spread of the virus in this epidemic.
However, this discovery can still potentially lead to a vaccination/cure for HIV type 1 which is the predominant strain in Europe, and possibly other areas of the world (including the middle east and western Asia), which is still very necessary.
Steve
90% of the DNA is never used, and so Joe has a 90% chance of having inserted himself into a string of rubbish that will never be transcribed.
That's not quite true. Many retroviruses and retrotransposons carry their own promoter sequences with them, so they increase the chance of transcription by the cellular machinery. It gets trickier when you have something like SINES, however, which lack promoter elements. They basically cluster near LINES, which carry promoter activity, so that the SINES get transcribed along with the LINES.
Da Blog
PBS ran a documentary on this a few years ago. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/index. html
Information about the CCR5-\Delta-32 and possible links with selection events occuring with respect to the plague have been known for several years, but there is no concensus on the issue.
/not/ been seen (and if there is a paper reference that claims to do so, I would very much like to see it), is evidence that yersinia pestis and HIV actually use the same receptor, and thus the selection event even makes any sense. Given that yersinia pestis is a bacteria (albeit one with a large plasmid), and HIV a virus, this seems, at a perfunctory first thought, unlikely. However, it could be true.
/virus/), and has been with humanity for 1000s of years, could have selected for such a deletion. The catastrophic nature of the event was never has high as that of yersinia pestis, but it was recurrent throughtout generations.
What has
The article seems to imply that this deletion is only evident in the people of Eyam...as you can imagine, this is not the case. It is evident in different levels amongst ethnic groups worldwide. See Stephens et al, "Dating the Origin of the CCR5-Delta32 AIDS-resistance allele by the coalesence of haplotypes", American Journal of Human Genetics, 62: 1507-1515,1998.
Eyeballing the data, it looks like the further you get from Europe, the less likely to have high levels of the allele.
Which is odd, if the black plague is at fault. There are several theoreis as to the origin of yersinia pestis, the most common being a transfer from marmot populations in Mongolia/Inner Mongolia (they are still a resevoir of the disease...but then so are ground squirrels in California), and another hypothesis being of a sub-saharan African origin. The answer, I suspect, will never be perfectly resolved ( I blame the marmots..), but it is in precisely these orginating areas (potentially), that the humans have the lowest levels of he mutation.
There was an excellent article (whose reference I cannot currently find, I apologize), that used a population dynamics approach, and concluded that the current levels of the deletion are too high to have been caused entirely by the black death selection event - that event is too recent for such a high allelic frequency. However, a longer history of influenza (which is a
The history and biology of yersinia pestis, and HIV/AIDS are fascinating. I suggest that one does some reading on the history of governmental ineptitude and institutional discrimination surrounding both. Black Plague, San Fransisco, 1905. AIDS, San Fransisco, 1980.
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian
Chef: The Black Death? Are you sure?
Stan: What's the Black Death, Chef?
Chef: LaToya Jackson, children.
The Boys: Oh.
Chef: But I think back in those days it meant something else: the plague!
--South Park Episode 502 - "It Hits The Fan"
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
The CDC (Center for Disease Control) has presented this information for years (1998 is when I first heard it from them) at their seminars for charities that work with HIV positive persons. The mass media has apparently avoided this information even thought th CDC has presented it to them, just because it wasn't newsworthy or controversial as the deaths from HIV as they could be associated to homosexuality or to drug use (considered better shock topics). They have even known and offered to many of these HIV charity members the opportunity to have testing done to determine (and join in a group study) possible suceptability to HIV based on this. All this for years...
Virii isn't the plural of virus? Next you'll try to tell me that "boxen" isn't plural of "box".
Not really, that is too simplistic. You leave out some critical factors. Many mammalian societies make use of grand parents and older relatives in order to insure the continuity of the community. The societies start to fragment and go down hill once those influences are removed. Applies to humans as well, IMO. For instance, take elephants, it is hard for younger mothers to go off and feed all the time without having the older auntie elephants watch and guard the young ones. The species itself is in danger if there's too much stress on the still child bearing years members. Part of the genetic makeup, that gives the evolutionary advantage, is precisely this "caring for the young" DNA imprint pattern that actually *cares for the young* with the older members, and the older members *have to be there* for this evolutionary advantage to be effective. If you bork out one generation of the older ones the entire group starts to decline, which in the long term might wipe out the species, even if the genetic code stayed intact,with no adequate care for the young if the elders are absent, then the young have too many opportunities to not make it to childbearing age and the raw numbers slip into decline.
That was my first thought, for a change the AC was useful and I'd give him points if I could. I think it was an episode of Nova or something, they found an isolated community in Britain where half of the town had survived a plague outbreak, and had then not seen a lot of migration since, so they could test the descendants of the survivors.
They tested the people whose ancestors had lived, and it turned out that you could have three situations: If you did not have this mutated gene, you would die. If you had inherited it from one parent, you would get very sick, but survive. If you had inherited it from both parents you wouldn't get the black plague at all.
They talked about how the plague spread, and the areas where it had hit most often over the past couple thousand years (there's evidence of it sweeping through Europe in the dark ages) had the highest incidence of this delta-32 gene, and so would have a higher percentage of the population immune to it. They estimated that up to 14% of Europeans had this gene and if they were right, that same number would also be completely uninfectable by HIV. They didn't speculate as to what would happen to the people who were partially immune to the plague, but we hear of people who are infected with HIV and 10-15 years later haven't developed AIDS symptoms.
I brought the documentary to the attention of the HIV researchers at my office, and they said there wasn't an easy method of introducing that gene into people affected by this. I know people who work at Genzyme, they use genetic samples to grow new skin cells for burn victims and new cartilage for knee surgeries. It's not completely out of the realm of possibility that they could figure out a way to grow some white blood cells to match the patient, but with that delta 32 gene introduced. It's unlikely that they'll work it out sooner than 10-20 years from now, though, so it's science fiction until then.
-jpowers
Let's not forget:
If virus were directly transcribed from latin, the proper plural would be virii
t ml
No. There is no Latin plural. If there were, it would most likely be "virus" (4th declension) or "viri" (2nd declension). "virii" just isn't Latin, it's a joke.
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.h
From observational evidence, it isn't that people with the deletion are actually immune to HIV, it is that they are less likely to be infected at a given viral load. If a person has the deletion in both copies of the gene coding for CCR5, they still may be able to be infected with HIV - but the rate of spread is significantly decreased. It takes a critical level of the virus, and a critical proportion of infected cells, meaning that it takes time (often several years) for the syndrome to manifest.
It is rather helpful to find anything at all more about HIV - it is a confusing virus, and one that is certainly evolving along with our drug treatments for it. Research is stymied, sometimes, by the unwillingness of governements and funding bodies to confront the epidemic, based on, essentially, fear of talking about sex. More reasonably, it is also difficult to perform experiments with the virus, based on ethical and moral considerations with respect to possible test subjects....
(The moral of the story is, if you want a SARS flu vaccine, you get the Chinese government to make it....it have no qualms about injecting prisoners with `maybes.' In a Western country, one would never stand for such a violation of ones rights, and yet the West has no problem with using the results of such experiments. It is worthwile examining ones own moral view on these sorts of tests. )
You're right, there most certainly are those in the medical-historical community who argue that the precise disease may not have been yersinia pestis. The point is, there is no way to run a test on the DNA of a bacterium(or virus, if that's what it was) that was around 400 years ago. There have been inconclusive attempts to get samples from skeletal remains.
Note, from my previous post, I discussed influenza. Influenza mutates so rapidly, that even if an ancestor selected for CCR5-Delta32, modern influenza may do nothing of the sort.
Another intriguing genetic tidbit. It is widely believed that the black death selected for incidences of Downs' syndrome (which is an extra copy of chormosome 21) - witness relative population rates of Downs' syndrome vis a vis caucasian/European populations and other communities - there are significantly more individuals with the condition in caucasion/European populations.
Insanity is contagious. - Yossarian