If this doesn't turn out to be overblown sensationalism, then the team behind this (actual!) cure probably deserves a Nobel for their efforts and results.
Curing HIV is an incredible thing to have accomplished but the confirmation of a successful surgery from 3 years ago doesn't advance the bounds of scientific knowledge as much as it was might seem when you see a story like this in the news.
What's your science background/what's your degree in? This really wasn't obvious. It was an open question as to whether or not other cells that were latently infected could produce a new infection via the other co-receptor (CXCR4).
> They just got very lucky
To characterize their hard work as luck is unjust. Yes, patients don't always survive bone marrow transplants, and this patient is indeed lucky to have survived. But the dilligent effort of his physicians is deliberate! Remember that they had to screen a lot of potential donors (61, I believe) to find someone with enough HLA similarity and a homozygous CCR5delta32 genotype. You can call this luck, but it's really just hard and dilligent work. Out of a pool of around 60 million people (worldwide) homozygous for CCR5delta32, you can find someone with enough matching allotypes. (You do know that you don't need all of the allotypes to match, right? That increases the probablity right there. In some cases, a little imperfect matching is a good thing, because the resulting graft-vs-host effect can act against the cancer you're trying to treat. Doctors have been using this effect since the 80s.)
Here is a hypothetical example (because I don’t know much about HIV): Getting rid of frequent headaches (the hypothetical side-effect of managing a hypothetical otherwise deadly disease) with a cure that has a 1:5 chance of death doesn’t seem like a good deal to me.
HIV may not be a death sentence anymore, but it's still a serious disease with profound implications in one's lifestyle, and as far as I'm concerned, a cure can't come soon enough.
Admittedly this is pretty intense, but so are treatments for cancer. Let's hope this leads to improved and safer treatments in the future.
Confounding the mortality stats is the fact that individuals undergoing treatment are very sick from the start. We might see better survival rates amongst comparatively healthy people.
In this case, you don't necessarily need a clean slate. "All" you need is a population of cells generating HIV resistant T-cells. AIDS manifests in individuals with extremely low T-cell counts. If a population of CD4 mutants could take hold within a larger population, it might be enough to prevent AIDS and bring viral titers low enough to eliminate transmission.
Nevertheless, I agree -- it's hardly practical, but it may be a beachhead.
Anybody remember that article? I'd like to find it again.