These are notes I made while listening to the podcast. Some very interesting stuff about AIDS. It seems to be teaching scientists quite a bit.
FIB 32: Controlling HIV Evolution
AIDS has an uncanny ability to modify itself faster than the body can keep up. There is more diversity in one human body infected with AIDS than a year of Influenza. We can all see the difficulty our scientists have in coming up with the right Flu vaccine. Often a person has antibodies to a strain of AIDS that they had 6 months ago, but the virus has mutated away from that structure.
The problem with curing AIDS is that the virus, upon entry into the cell, bonds itself to the cell. Our current concepts don’t contain a way to excise that portion of the cell. The entire cell must be killed. That’s why current therapies only suppress the virus.
The interesting bit is that viral materials fuse within the cell. So, how much of our DNA/RNA comes from a virus? How much of our evolution comes from viral materials that represented a positive trait and were passed on to children? Obviously, to be passed on the virus must fuse with DNA in male sperm creating cell and/or a female egg cell.
1% of Caucasians seem immune to AIDS, because their cells lack CCR5 on the surface of cells. This is used by