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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
. . . 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.
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?
Well, until HIV becomes an airborne virus, not catching it in the first place is a pretty good way for 99% of the population to survive the epidemic...
AIDS so far is a social disease, which means certain behaviors minimize risk and certain behaviors maximize risk; unlike, say, the flu, which is both airborne, transmitted by contact, and through animals.
GPL Deconstructed
So what's stopping me from having science insert that gene into my offspring?
Initially few took up the practise. Interesting many clergymen dennounced the vaccine practise as sin. The clergy believed smallpox was god's design and all, even the children, who died of smallpox were decreed by god to so die. What finally turned the tide some years later was the adoption of the vaccine practise by a high ranking member of the British aristocracy. She (her name and title don't immediately come to mind) had her children vaccinated. The strong british caste system was momentum enough to swing favour toward vaccination.
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
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?
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).
It still doesn't invalidate the rest of my comment that AIDS is a predominantly social disease; even in areas with 30% infection, the changing of social norms would make the remaining 70% of the population effectively immune:
1) Curtail sexual promiscuity
2) Practice protected sex
3) Encourage long term monogamy
All three of those things will render AIDS a harmless disease for 99% of the uninfected population.
A cure is necessary, of course, for the survival of the remaining infected population.
GPL Deconstructed
As you say - certain behaviors minimize the HIV risk and writing Slashdot tripe on Friday night is by far the most secure approach.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
"3) Encourage long term monogamy"
Why is always the cure worse than the disease?
"It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities." -- Prof. Dumbledore
You should pick another boogeyman. Birth rates are declining worldwide. Over a third of all countries now have birth rates below replacement levels. Places like Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain are expected to have population levels 30% lower than they are now by 2050.
The big factor is cities. Over 50% of the world's population now lives in a city. On a farm, more kids meant more helping hands. In a city those helping hands aren't needed, and in fact pull down prosperity levels. As such, people choose not to have them.
As China and India become more prosperous, they too will join the club.
In short, the "Population Bomb" was a dud.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do 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.
What finally turned the tide some years later was the adoption of the vaccine practise by a high ranking member of the British aristocracy. She (her name and title don't immediately come to mind) had her children vaccinated.
It was the Princess of Wales (though she wasn't the first, she was the person who made it popular). See the Variolation section of this page for more information. This form of vaccination had been practiced in Asia for a couple thousand years before making it to the West.
If we are speaking of old civilizations...then it seems pertinent to discuss the Romans...who were permiscuous as all hell...and were pretty damn successful. The religious aspect is bunk!
So 1950's...
1. Sex is *not* primarily for producing children... you'll produce a sprog maybe a couple of times in your life. You'll normally have sex at least a few times more than that (well maybe your church won't let you, but most people will). Sex is *fun*. Enjoy it while you're young.
2. There are plenty of healthy well adjusted people who are the children of unmarried parents. There are plenty of screwed up dickheads that are the children of married parents. Get with the late 20th century please at least... marriage is just a contract - if you really can't stay with someone without that then maybe you've not really found the right person. Marriage does *not* guarantee a lifelong relationship - there's a 50% divorce rate... fuelled by people like you who think that a bit of paper is a free pass to lifelong bliss - two people working hard at a relationship can do, and you don't need a contract for that.
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.
> 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.
Given that some of the oldest known religions practiced temple prostitution, I think your otherwise interesting speculation may be based on a false premise.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Sex is absolutely not just about reproduction. It's perfectly possible to produce offspring without orgasm, and lots of species do. Pleasure in sex appears to function to promote closeness between partners, making that hypothetical long term marriage that much more likely. There's even a hypothesis that female orgasm is a by-product of the fact that men need orgasms to convince them to stick around and look after their mates, but I remain unconvinced. More research is required, and by God, I'm the woman to do it...
of course, biting monkeys is not to everyone's taste - Konrad Lorenz
*adds alicenextdoor to Friends list*
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Not when the Vatican and religious leaders have been telling them that not only do condoms not prevent HIV infection, but are laced with HIV themselves:
Still think religion in Africa helps fight HIV?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
PBS ran a documentary on this a few years ago. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/secrets/case_plague/index. html
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