San Francisco man becomes first in history to be ‘cured’ of AIDS | Hacker News Reader

San Francisco man becomes first in history to be ‘cured’ of AIDS

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65 pointsinshane41 comments

In 1982(-ish)i have first heard of the AIDS virus. My father (a biologist) said "I feel sorry for the young people of your generation, this will make life so much less fun" or something like that (I was 16). And I said something like "You old fellas just do not appreciate how potent science is today, we'll have a cure in 5 years max"...

The fact that 30 years later we cured ONE person has really deflated my hubris. Also, no mission to Mars, no general purpose AI, no flying cars, etc, so many disappointments!

I have a theory why it is so, I'll not bother you all with it, I'll just say that the other symptom of the underlying cause is the GFC.

Strong AI is impossible, flying cars are impractical, and what would we do on Mars?

But look at all the cool stuff we got instead! Augmented reality! Internet everywhere! 3D printing! Controllable prostetic limbs! Gigaherz multicore computers! Terabyte storage! Sliced bread!

Also, almost noone dies of AIDS of anymore, or has died in the last 10 years in our western countries. The HIV suppressants are so good that even if you are infected with HIV, you'll have the same life expectancy as everyone else. It's not cured, but the quality of life is very similar.

Yeah, internet, sliced bread and all that are great. But flying cars and a cure for AIDS would have been nice too.

My point is that in the '80s there was a lot of optimism about humankind's capabilities, people were saying "it's not a question of what CAN we do anymore, it is what SHOULD we do", implying we COULD do anything. I believed that at the time, but have grown increasingly skeptical (and I blame the brain drain away from science and into zero-sum games like finance for not fulfilling our potential).

Also, you are wrong about AIDS - apparently in USA alone there are around 18,000 AIDS caused fatalities each year (http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/resources/factsheets/us.htm).

You are wrong about AI too, it has already been implemented - in meat, of all things!

We can do everything we want, just not in 5 years. It took thousands of years to get from living in caves to having a steam machine, and a fraction of that to where we are now. The next 30 years are going to be awesome - it's a great time to be alive. (I think this several times a day, look at how awesome our lives are (well those of us reading this, obviously not yet everybody on earth))

Well, the more you know, the more you know that you don't know.

Predicting what we'll have in the future is always going to be hard, because it's very hard to know the pitfalls, the actual hard problems of a technology. Sending stuff to Mars isn't hard, but having a human survive the trip is really hard because of radiation and psychology, and it took a while to figure that out.

Meanwhile, noone in the 80's thought we'd have the internet, tablets, or mobile phones.

"The lack of data from the future makes predictions hard"

AI in meat? Care to share more about that?

I guess he meant that "strong AI" is you and me.

"Strong AI is impossible"

What makes you think that? Given that we have one class of systems that have evolved general intelligence I can see no reason why we can't engineer others. This may, of course, be rather difficult but I'm not aware of any good argument that engineering a general intelligence is impossible for fundamental physical or logical reasons.

Well, it's based on a bit of a philosophical cop-out, but basically anything that claims to be strong AI will always only be a philosophical zombie. It might behave intelligent, it might claim to be intelligent and conscious, but it's impossible to prove that it actually is intelligent and conscious, since it's impossible to objectively measure or describe consciousness.

In short, I'm with Searle. We can never have strong AI, but we can certainly have weak AI.

Isn't that just a denial of the terms/definitions? Isn't it also a solipsistic argument, i.e. doesn't it equally apply to all other people?

I agree with everything you said except the bit about quality of life being similar. Don't those drugs have major side effects? Even if they don't, sex with another person is pretty much over at that point. Even if the other person has AIDS too there is a risk of reinfection.

Granted, having a similar life expectancy is nothing to sneeze at.

Actually, if you're on HIV suppressants, the virus levels in your blood is so low that it's almost impossible to infect other people through sex, even if you have unprotected sex.

The risk isn't 0%, but it's less risky to have unprotected sex with someone infected, but on suppressants, than to have unprotected sex with someone who doesn't know if he or she is infected.

I just want to grow some species in Mars. Fly with my car for fun. And talk with my computer about private stuff :-)

"what would we do on Mars?"

All the cool stuff in life resulted from the words "I wonder.." and "let's go see..". I am sure people will figure out the answer to your question.

GFC? I've looked over this list http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GFC, and still don't have a clue which you might mean.

He probably refers to the financial crisis -- there have been theories flying around that our society is rotten to the core because of money.

Taking money out of the equation would be an interesting experiment - what if you'd had access to wealth based on your achievements that benefit human kind and not based on whether you're playing stock market games?

So in other words, we are doomed :)

On the other hand, as a cynical contrarian that I am, I'm thinking that medicine may have gone too far. Natural selection doesn't work anymore.

Yes, I meant the financial crisis. I did not mean that our society is rotten to the core, but it seems to me that an inexcusable proportion of our best brains are drawn in to play zero-sum games (much of finance, also law).

Finance isn't a Zero-Sum game (well, not all of it anyway). Investing money in the right place can create more wealth for all of humanity.

This becomes an especially cringing realization when considering that a LOT of people are celebrating twitter, facebook and "apps" as the glorious, big and important inventions (almost paradigm shifts) of our time...

"Doctors still aren’t exactly sure what part of his treatment allowed his body to purge the virus, but clinical trials are scheduled to begin in 2012."

there you go. the catch.

A double-blind test with proper controls can prove the efficacy of a treatment without anyone understanding how it works inside the body. There are plenty of medicines that are commonly used and proven to work, but through an unknown or unclear mechanism.

What's the catch?

  > Doctors still aren’t exactly sure

  > clinical trials are scheduled to begin in 2012

or just

  > 2012

?

Is there actually only one kind of HIV/AIDS virus?

There was a comment here the last time this story was submitted that summarized things well: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007265

Nope. HIV-1 versus HIV-2, and this treatment would have been less effective against HIV-2.

No, there are many, many strains of HIV virus. One person's infection evolves into a wide variety of strains during an infection due to immune system pressure.

What's more interesting is apparently some people are immune to HIV. I can't believe that's possible.

Humans, and other large animals, are prone to infectious diseases. Yet large animals aren't extinct, which means that infectious diseases seldom kill off an entire species. Which leads me to suppose that for any species and any infectious agent, some members of that species will probably be immune to that agent.

It has been hypothesized that the main advantage of sexual reproduction -- which causes every member of a species to be genetically different -- is resistance to microbes and other parasites.

The main advantage of sexual reproduction is faster evolution. It makes evolution like a huge parallel computer instead of like lots of small, very slow serial computers.

If you examine asexual reproduction: you get a "tree of evolution". Each node in that tree is slightly "more evolved" than its parent on average (natural selection prunes the devolved ones more than the evolved ones).

However, each branch in the tree has to evolve every single feature independently from its sibling branches. You only inherit evolutionary enhancements of your own ancestors.

Assuming a tree of depth N: each node in the tree has only O(N) ancestors, and thus, about O(N) evolution experienced in each node.

With sexual reproduction, you also recombine the evolutionary advancements of two ancestors into new nodes. It is no longer a tree, but a DAG of nodes (Directed Acyclic Graph). Each node now has O(2^depth) ancestors. Evolution can recombine features that took a long time to develop into a new baseline, and evolve from there.

This is an exponential increase in evolution speed -- and I believe that is so incredibly huge of an advancement, that I predict that even species we believe are incapable of sexual reproduction, are probably sexually reproducing (e.g: exchanging DNA in some way) because it is too huge of an advantage to give up.

Lastly, I find that it is interesting that there's a similarity between sexual-based evolution process to one of the frameworks we use for parallel computing: "Map/Reduce". Take a single node in the tree, and just "Map" (mutate & select) over it multiple times, you get slightly better nodes. Now combining the mutated & selected nodes together into descendants is much like "Reduce". "Map" is not a useful parallel computation, but "Map & Reduce" is.

That's the basic idea but single celled organisms can and do directly swap DNA segments at any point in their life cycle. Unfortunately, multicellular can only meaningfully swap DNA when they are at the single cell stage. So sex is simply the maximum DNA exchange possible while multicellular life is at the single cell stage.

The disadvantage to sex is you need vary similar organisms so your N^2 ancestors becomes (species population size) * number of generations. Where direct DNA exchange can cross DNA from far less compatible organisms (~total life population size)

Practically immune to HIV. A blood transfusion from a late stage AIDS patient would still infect a CCR5 delta 32 homozygous person. The mutation also grants less resistance against the rarer HIV-2.

Yup, the Delta32 version of CCR5 is pretty nice. Its more of a "strongly resistant" than an "immune" though, and may mean being more susceptible to West Nile Virus. In the modern world thats a pretty good deal, but was probably less so when humans were doing most of their evolving.

See wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCR5_delta_32#CCR5-.CE.9432

There's another gene with a variant that confers similar resistance to noroviruses, also called stomach flu.

Why is that so hard to believe?

There are people out there who are completely unable to feel any pain at all.

Why shouldn't there be people who are immune to HIV?

Not feeling pain is your brain not processing signals from your body. It is a broken connection.

HIV immunity is not at all analogous to that.

Nope, HIV immunity is pretty much the same thing.

You see, there are receptors on white blood cells - which are involved in lots of things the immune system does, if you're interested you can find an explanation elsewhere. Normally, HIV uses the CCR5 receptors to enter white blood cells, in which it replicates. However, in some people the genes that generate that receptor are mutated, with a small portion being deleted. It still works for most of the things the immune system does, but HIV is no longer able to enter cells through it (I'm not entirely sure if it's unable to enter or just unable to enter anywhere near as well; the former would suggest total immunity while the later would be partial immunity).

Basically viruses work by fucking with the DNA of cells. These people obviously have cells that are too different in some key aspect for the virus to take it.

J.D. Shapely?

The end of condoms as we know it. Good riddance

I don't know about you, but AIDS is the last thing I use condoms for. Unwanted pregnancies and the occasional STI are far more common than AIDS.

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