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Three-Dimensional Structure of HIV Revealed
Mutatis Mutandis writes "The BBC is reporting that a team of scientists from Oxford, Heidelberg and Munich has created the first accurate three-dimensional images of the HIV virus. The virus was found to have an average diameter of 125 nanometers, well below the wavelength of visible light. In the past the structure of viruses with a regular structure has been produced by 3D reconstruction techniques that work on a set of electron microscopy images of different viruses, but the irregular structure of HIV does not allow this. Scientists have now used a tomography technique that employs a series of images taken from a single virus, somewhat similar to the better known X-Ray CAT scan, but on a quite different scale." Structure also has a video of the 3-d rendering available for download. Relatedly an anonymous reader writes "A research team at Brown University has genetically modified bacteria found in yogurt so that the bugs produce a protein proven to block HIV infection in monkeys. The results offer hope for a microbicide that can prevent the spread of HIV, which now affects about 40 million people."
now every grad student taking a bioinformatics class gets a pop quiz tomorrow!
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
the bugs produce a protein proven to block HIV infection in monkeys
...but what about treatment for those that don't believe in evolution?
clearly, another example of the scientific elites pushing their liberal agenda
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
When can I buy the plushie?
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Does that mean we can start using it in Counterstrike mods?
Yes, HIV causes AIDS. To think otherwise puts millions in danger. The idea that it does not has been rejected for years by mainstream science and is perpetuated by a self-denying HIV infected population, not by science.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
I live in Belgium, a country that takes pride in its high quality of education. But just yesterday a survey showed that about 70% of the youth doesn't have a clue how you can contract HIV, and a very high percentage takes no protective measures at all. Staggering numbers for a developed country. One of the people that was involved in organising the survey said this was partly to blame to the false sense of security. Rumors about new cures, tales about how good the HIV treatments work. Youth these days seems to think it isn't that deadly after all, at least not deadly enough to be very wary... Sensibilisation campaigns seemed to be inadequate to change this view.
Frink: Take an ordinary double-helix ...
Wiggum: Woah! Slow down there egghead.
This isn't a new idea, that HIV isn't the cause of AIDS. You get these kind of weird ideas when laymen try to apply "common sense" in place of domain knowledge. HIV is a retrovirus that attacks the immune system, so it has unusual characteristics and effects compared to most other viruses.
A common argument goes that when a person is most sick with AIDS they have a low HIV load, which "doesn't make sense", since in all other viral infections the viral load is high when the infection is acute. However, since HIV destroys the immune cells in which it grows, you can actually see a low viral load as the infection progresses because it has no place left to grow. But by then the immune system is no longer effective at fighting off other infections and the infected person gets very sick.
As for the procedures that were followed, I think researchers have done a very good job at studying HIV and its transmission. However no ethical researcher would intentionally infect a human with a fatal disease, and HIV is specific to humans. SIV (a related virus that infects simians) has also been studied and it's pretty well accepted by now that SIV causes an AIDS-like condition in monkeys, and that HIV is actually the agent that causes AIDS in humans.
This image cannot be used for structural modelling of potential inhibitors because its resolution is too low. You need an x-ray crystal structure with Angstrom resolustions to be able to do this (these images have resolution of ~4 nm which is still very impressive for electron microscopy)
However, partial structures of HIV surface proteins (gp120 and gp41) are available but I am not sure if they have been used to model potential inhibitors.
On related note there is a newely FDA licensed inhibitor compound (T20 peptide) that blocks the function of fusion subunit of HIV surface protein (gp41) and it has been developed thanks to the structural information on this protein.
How many peer reviewed journals are cited above? ZERO!
Here's an easy to read summary of the real evidence: http://www.avert.org/evidence.htm
And a more detailed summary: http://www.niaid.nih.gov/factsheets/evidhiv.htm
Here are some of the proven, reviewed, science backed theories, quoted from the NIH site above:
"AIDS and HIV infection are invariably linked in time, place and population group."
"Many studies agree that only a single factor, HIV, predicts whether a person will develop AIDS."
"HIV can be detected in virtually everyone with AIDS."
"Newborn infants have no behavioral risk factors for AIDS, yet many children born to HIV-infected mothers have developed AIDS and died."
"The HIV-infected twin develops AIDS while the uninfected twin does not."
These are peer reviewed scientific theories. Anyone can cast doubt on them, but to do so with such little evidence is irresponsible, especially considering the gravity of the disease. No serious journal proposes that AIDS is not caused by HIV.
Since when has this country used intellectual elite as a pejorative term?
With the HIV virus, we know the mechanism by which infection originates, spreads, disables the immune system, etc. There isn't a vast amount we don't know. The HIV virus took a while to isolate and sequence, but when compared to other viruses, it was damn quick.
What we don't know is the history prior to the first recorded case, whether or not a guy in England really DID somehow eliminate the HIV virus from his body (he refuses to get re-tested after he got a negative), why some people do not produce HIV antibodies when exposed to the virus (are they immune, as some claim, or is their immune system just not capable of detecting it?) and how a virus so astronomically unstable can function (one problem with producing a vaccine is that de-activated HIV can re-activate itself, becoming extremely dangerous).
Now, there are indeed cases where medical science seems to have jumped to conclusions. BSE and CJDnv are supposedly caused by prions, but infected brain tissue retains its ability to transfer the deadly agent after being cooked at high temperatures. Also, it is unclear how proteins (a prion is just a protein) can get through the stomach wall AND the blood-brain barrier in order to cause damage.
Even in this case, although there are plenty of skeptics of the prion theory, I know of nobody who is seeking to ridicule the work. Rather, they are pursuing their own lines of enquiry with some measure of dignity. That's how you can tell the good from the great. The merely good will sometimes bolster their egos by proclaiming themselves the One True Word, denouncing everyone else. The great let the results speak for themselves.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The guy's name is professor Peter Duesberg. I did a speech based on his book "Infectious AIDS, Have We Been Misled" 7 years ago when I was in college.
To start out with, Deusberg was a good scientist, making important discoveries regarding oncogenic viruses, and was consequently recipient of the NIH's "Outstanding Investigator" grant. Whether his theory is correct or not, what is certain is that he has been the subject of career assassination for political rather than scientific reasons, for his views in the early days of the AIDS crisis. It was essentially argued that dissent from the HIV=AIDS model would cause confusion and interfere with efforts to prevent the spread of HIV\AIDS. Deusberg's university treated him as a paraiah and his NIH grant was rescinded. Science cannot operate properly if opposing views are silenced for political reasons.
The nobel laureate you refer to is Kerry Mullis. Despite inventing PCR the guy is a self described nut and LSD user. I wouldn't put too much weight in his testimony. Mullis argues that the Viral Load test, based on PCR, is far less precise than it is claimed to be. I don't know if this is true or not.
While I'm not agreeing with Deusberg's hypothesis, like any dissident his criticisms have focused on weaknesses in the HIV-AIDS theory over the years.
Deusberg has made a number of very good points regarding HIV, which are only now starting to be considered. Among them;
HIV is an opportunistic infection. People most often become HIV positive because they engaged in some other activity which damages the immune system such as the use of certain drugs (such as amyl nitrates or injected drugs) or hemopheliacs. Even before the AIDS crisis, hemopheliacs still had a dramatically shortened lifespan and increased suceptibility to disease. Deusberg claims (and I would tend to question, but don't have facts on hand to refute) that the death rate for hemopheliacs does not indicate their being hit by a lethal epidemic during the time of the early AIDS crisis and that their lifespan has steadily increased. The fact that HIV is an opportunistic infection suggested to Duesberg that it could be a marker for another condition or conditions which causes immune suppression. (Hemopheliacs, even without HIV, are immune suppressed.) While Deusberg gives a general notion of an immune system collapsing under excessive strain, it seems that Human Herpes Virus 8, common to AIDS victims, has been shown to also cause immune suppresion. HHV8 is transmissible via saliva and probably acts synergistically with HIV to dramatically speed up the progression of the disease. HHV8 is the virus responsible for Kaposi's Sarcoma, a symptom previously attributed to HIV.
Azidothymidine or AZT, which has been shown to reduce HIV viral load, has side effects that are essentially identical to AIDS including immune suppresion. AZT has never been proven to increase lifespan in a reliable, controlled study. The infamous Concord Study which attempted to prove the benefits of AZT, was hopelessly flawed. Subjects receiving the drug were aware of it and shared their medicine with the control group to help them. AZT was a chemotheraputic agent for cancer which was discontinued due to its severe side effects sometime before the late '60s. It's approval for use against HIV essentially circumvented the normal FDA approval process, due to the crisis of its introduction. It has been argued that AZT prevents seroconversion to HIV positivity and I think it's still used for this purpose.
Finally, unrelated to Deusberg, the CDC seems to be working off an outdated model for the evolution of infectious diseases (Burnette and White's model) which was based on analysis of airborne infection rather than fluid borne infection, which seems subject to different pressures. B&W's theory suggests (incorrectly) that all lethal diseases will, in time, evolve to benign co-existance with their host. This is generally true for airborne diseases. B&W's theory demands that HIV be a virus that was newly int
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Look, all these guys have at one time or another been respectable, but the truth is, HIV is a well-characterized virus with dumptrucks full of money poured into research into how and why it works.
The fact that I can pick out one name, Harvey Bialy, google him and find out he's currently on South Africa's payroll (who deny pregnant mothers with AIDS AZT or other basic anti-HIV drugs, btw) says volumes.
HIV's genome has been sequenced and studied, and scientists know in general how it works. Instead of copying and pasting one of my microbiology textbooks, I'd suggest looking up the "HIV" Wikipedia entry - it's got a good summary of the parts listed. You might try the "AIDS reappraisal" entry, where all the bullshit claims are addressed.
Have you taken a look at what all those "respected scientists" are actually saying? It sounds a lot like the utter crap being spewed by the "respectable scientists" employed by the Creationism... er, I mean the Intelligent Design idiots. "There's problems... there's questions..." Not a single decent counter-hypothesis as to the origin of AIDS or why the volumes of peer-reviewed AIDS research is WRONG.
If they were truly so adamant that HIV did not cause AIDS, there would be a simple way to prove it once and for all: they should all get together and perform a witnessed scientific study whereby they all inject a reasonably large dose of HIV virus into their bloodstreams and monitor the results. Dr. Barry Marshall, in fact, won a Nobel Prize for proving that H. pylori causes GI ulcers by doing just that.
Now to answer your original claims, that some people with HIV do not get AIDS and some people with AIDS do not have HIV, both of them have answers (the Wikipedia page, in fact, covers the 1st one). Some people have genetic mutations to coreceptors that HIV needs to infect CD4+ T-cells (CCR5 and CXCR4 being the 2 most common). Those mutations render the virus unable to infect the cells without further mutation of the virus. This is, in fact, a huge avenue of biomedical research - my medical school is participating in toxicology trials for a proposed drug using this.
The other claim, that some patients with AIDS do not have HIV is a very rare autoimmune condition. Through molecular mimicry or another similar means, a patient's CD4+ immune cells are targeted for destruction by the patient's own immune system, which leads to the loss of those cells and the development of AIDS. Nobody knows why yet (this is VERY rare), but it probably is caused by cross-reaction with similar antigens from a foreign source (bacteria, virus, fungal, etc.). The body has a bad propensity to attack itself - look up rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, Goodpasture's, Hashimoto's, or late-stage Lyme Disease among others.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I've got to admit obliterating AIDs from the world with only a submachine gun does sound appealing.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
No, the idea is a microbicidal cream that will form a barrier against HIV. I must admit to confusion over why this would be such a great breakthrough. It is unlikely to provide better protection than a condom. I guess women could use it where their partners refused to use a condom. Perhaps one idea will be to use it in conjunction with a condom in the way once recommended with nonoxynol-9. Note that creams and gels with similar objectives are already being evaluated (supported by the Gates Foundation and others).
Kary Mullis is saying more research needs to be done. And he has some good points that HIV isn't always the cause of AIDS-like symptoms, so additional testing must be carried out before giving all kinds of anti-HIV drugs to a patient with AIDS symptoms.
.. he has some validity but is well short of scientific proof that HIV does NOT cause AIDS. I have not read his opinions on the recent showing that those taking the newer AIDS treatments have shown marked improvement in their symptoms and immune cell levels.
.. a few thousand may be invisible to the anti-body while thousands more are susceptible to it. That's one of the reasons why AIDS cant kill off a person rapidly.
In my opinion, he does not have proof that HIV does NOT cause AIDS.
Are we supposed to risk the creation of millions of orphans in Africa because of the doubts of one Nobel laureate? What about all the other Nobel laureates? There are many of them, do we throw their opinions away because Kary Mullis is some kind of uber-Nobel prize winner? His expertise is not in the area of disease identification. That said, having read some of his points
I recall a claim made by a Duesberg follower that a virus would be stupid to kill its own host (apparently smallpox didn't get that memo).
It was probably not right of the scientific community to go after Duesberg the way he did, but on the same token Duesberg didnt have to become close minded to hold on to his theories.
To answer your question about "Western Blot", the virus HIV has a defect in it's error correction mechanism and is unable to ensure that it is not creating proteins to which the body has antibodies to. This means that if say there are a million copies of the virus