Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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).
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.
Best comment ever. Why can't there be like one comment that is allowed to be modded up to +6 every year or so?
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.
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...
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.
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
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
...but probably not true. This has been soundly refuted (in my judgement) by a 2003 paper published at Berkeley. See reference below. CCR5-delta32 (the allele) does protect against HIV, but it's unlikely it's the result of the genetic mutations of plague survivors. More likely can be traced back to smallpox survivors from 700 years ago. Check out the ref, it's online. HIV has many strains, not just two. HIV is rapidly mutating. If you're into this topic, check out the many papers at www.cdc.gov. Marianne reference: Proc Natl Acad Sci 2003 December 9; 100(25): 15276-15279 Published online 2003 November 25. doi: 10.1073/pnas.2435085100. c2003 National Academy of Sciences "Evaluating plague and smallpox as historical selective pressures for the CCR5-[Delta]32 HIV resistance allele", by Alison P. Galvani* and Montgomery Slatkin, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 *To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: agalvani@nature.berkeley.edu. Edited by Robert May, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom Received August 8, 2003; Accepted October 3, 2003. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcg i?artid=299980
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