Scientists Image an HIV Particle Being Born

FiReaNGeL alerts us to a huge development in virology and microscopy: by using a specialized microscope that only illuminates a cell's surface, scientists at Rockefeller University have watched, in real time, hundreds of thousands of molecules coming together in a living cell to form a single particle of HIV-1. A video is available on Rockefeller's front page. "By zeroing in at the cell's surface, the team became the first to document the time it takes for each HIV particle, or virion, to assemble: five to six minutes. 'At first, we had no idea whether it would take milliseconds or hours,' says Jouvenet. 'We just didn't know.' 'This is the first time anyone has seen a virus particle being born,' says Bieniasz, who is an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. 'Not just HIV,' he clarifies, 'any virus.'"

Comments

A viral video...

[Tarcastil]

A viral video that benefits science?

I remember

[mfh]

When they used to say that the time it took a Windows computer to go from the first boot time to an infected state was about five minutes.

Coincidence?

Re:I know next to nothing about this

[mikael]

Before, researchers didn't know how long it took for the AIDS virus (or any virus) to assemble itself from the different amino-acids required to make the genes, and the proteins required to make the outer casing. It could have been hours, minutes or milliseconds. Now, they know it takes several minutes.

A cure would involve kill cells that have the virus inside. Detecting and killing such cells is one step to finding a cure, but probably impossible. Finding drugs which inhibit the virus entering cells, reaching the DNA, or leaving the cells are all partial cures.

Development of antibodies which attach and kill cells with the virus particles partially formed on the surface of the cell is the next most likely achievement. To achieve this, they now know that they need something which can completely enclose the surface of a cell within 5-6 minutes.

Also, they now have a new technique to visualise the behavior of virus particles in a cell. They can watch to see how any potential treatments interact with the virus within the cell in real-time.

Ah, paranoia. How cute

[Moraelin]

Dude, let's put it like this:

Any company which discovers a cure gets a monopoly (patent) on it for 20 years. Which is a lot.

Now picture having this choice:

A. You get the existing anti-virals which tend to do a lot of damage. (There's a reason you don't get them for a cold or even a flu: they do more damage than the flu.) And they might or might not work. In fact, you'll probably just buy you some time. And everyone makes them, so while there's some money milking potential in the "but mine work better" factor, you're still just getting a slice of the pie.

B. You get the miracle cure from Company X, which actually works and presumably with a lot less side effects.

Choice B is a no-brainer. The company which would get a 20 year monopoly on B, is going to sit on a freaking huge fortune at the end of those 20 years. Not only they'd get the lion's share of the existing pie, they'd get a whole merry bunch of retards who'd rather buy the cure later than use a condom. Again.

So basically, you're telling me that a whole lot of CEOs, doctors, their investors, etc:

1. Would rather work for the general benefit of their competitors in preserving a status quo, instead of making a metric buttload of money for themselves.

2. A lot of rich and powerful people, and some of those same CEOs, doctors, etc, would rather die themselves or watch friends and family die a slow death, than just use that supposed miracle cure.

3. Thousands to millions of underlings, who otherwise can't seem to keep much else secret, just toe the line on this one. And again, would rather be loyal to some cartel than save themselves or their friends and family in some cases. And all the retards who lose laptops, or get internal corporate networks virused, etc, lose everything _except_ this apparently. They lose customer files, they leak that their network has blank admin passwords, etc, but somehow they never manage to leak _that_.

4. Somehow the Chinese, Russians, and a fucking buttload of other governments just itching for a pretext to one-up the West, and thumb their nose at the West, also toe that line peacefully. And, you know, all the retards like those in South Africa and various other countries, peddling sweet potato juice and other local snake oil as cures for HIV and as a substitute for paying to the big pharma for a cure, don't just go ahead and and make that miracle cure.

Remember: if it's secret, then it's also not patented. Patents tell everyone that it exists, so they don't work well for a conspiracy.

Etc, etc, etc.

And the same goes for diabetes, cancer, and all the other poster cases used by such conspiracy theories. In fact, for a lot of them half the points above go double. (E.g., insulin is out of patent, and it's a commodity produced by everyone, so profit margins are tiny. Plus you have local factories which don't pay big pharma a cent. So patenting a cure would make a lot of people very very rich. E.g., cancer doesn't really have as easy a defense as using a condom, and as other diseases go down and life expectancy rises, so does the chance that you'll live enough to get a cancer. So that one requires literally believing that the millions of doctors, researchers, pharma bigwigs, etc, would rather die of it and do something as brutal as radiotherapy or chemotherapy, instead of using the miracle cure. Etc.)

So here's an idea: noone understands that conspiracy theory, because it's fucking stupid even as conspiracy theories usually go. It doesn't require even just delusions and or building whole rationales on silly suppositions instead of facts. It requires genuine inability to follow even elementary logic.

Re:Ah, paranoia. How cute

[Anonymous Coward]

I worked for a VC that funded biotech and pharma startups. A big question was always market size and recurring revenues for the drug, as many have pointed out, a cure is one-and-done, a treatment keeps on producing revenue.

It's not that anyone is actively squelching a cure for AIDS, diabetes, etc. It's just that the research into a cure is not being funded the same way research into treatments are. You don't miss what you've never seen and that's the shame of the capitalist pharma program.

This isn't to say cures never get funded - new anti-biotics are constantly being researched and these are cures. Again, there is the recurring revenue aspect.

Video is currently available at...

[dpbsmith]

NewswiseScience News.

(The link from the Rockefeller University main page is currently broken).

Re:Only one problem

[Profane MuthaFucka]

Not stupid, ignorant. Both ignorance and HIV are preventable, and the US government is chartered with the task of protecting their citizens. Instead of allowing equally ignorant religious right backers to make a lot of hay about the gay disease, Reagan should have done his job and used the resources of the US government to protect citizens through education.

You moral values are fucked up. You fail to recognize that ignorance is deadly. You fail to recognize that education is a moral value that should be held in reverence. You fail to recognize that human beings should not be treated like political footballs.