Woman appears cured of HIV after umbilical-cord blood transplant

Note that binding to the same active site as something the body produces is also a strategy for imagining that you produce less of that thing. There's "binding to the same active site [and triggering it]" and there's "binding to the same active site [and plugging it]".

As to how often this strategy is used... what other strategies are there? You produce the effect you want by triggering it to occur. You inhibit the effect you don't want by blocking it from occurring.

You could think of something like a lactase supplement to help you digest milk, and that wouldn't be binding to active sites of your own molecules, but it still works by binding to particular sites on the lactose. Chemicals have their effects through chemical reactions.

From what I've read, there's a tradeoff with time prior to removal however. The earlier in your life you take them out and freeze them, the higher their regeneration factor is. The DPSC (Dental Pulp Stem Cells) should always be there as long as the tooth is alive.

The common cold is a low level respiratory infection caused by a known suite of virus candidates. If we made ourselves permanently immune to those without going through the mucus and sore throat part there would be no negative consequences.

And it has to be said that we do appear in fact to know with a good degree of certainty that at least one of the common cold viruses is very, very new in humans.

OC43 (a coronavirus) almost certainly arrived in humans in the 1890s (and is now thought to be what caused the deadly "Russian Flu" pandemic).

And we have another one to add now.

It has a whole chapter on the hygiene hypothesis, which parts have been debunked, which parts have weak scientific evidence, and which parts have strong scientific evidence.

I don't think I wrote anything out-of-line with mainstream science. It might be wrong -- scientific knowledge progresses, and we're still learning a lot -- but it's not "paleo diet" junk science.

The key mistake you're making is to assume the immune system benefits from some form of "fitness;" it doesn't. It's not a muscle to be exercised. Diseases harm you and getting sick is not good.

There are exceptions.

The key thing to remember is that the immune system does most of the damage to your body in most diseases; viruses and bacteria rarely kill you, since collateral damage from your immune system fighting them usually kills you first. There's a fine balance of how active the immune system ought to be. Parasites dampen your immune system. We co-evolved with parasites, and without them, your immune system is a little bit overactive (which may contribute to the massive recent rise of autoimmune diseases, allergies, etc.).

We know that modern diseases aren't helpful because at this point, we understand how they work. Modern viruses and bacteria -- which evolved with civilization -- are incredibly specific to humans. They "spoof" signals your body uses, for example to modulate the immune system's response. Historically, we'd have diseases which attacked many types of animals, and didn't do that; those were very different.

To give an analogy to defending a city, there's a difference between a broad attack and a targeted attack. Classic diseases are a bit like invaders at the city walls. Modern diseases are a little bit like spies and saboteurs.

Yes, education I'd say is in the top 10 or 50. But how can you possibly fill out the top 1000 without including umbilical cord stem cells?

NHS hospital sells placentas for cosmetic use

https://web.archive.org/web/20210217162113/https://www.teleg...

Not 50k a pop, but shows that it does happen.

Thanks for this.

"Meanwhile, journalists and federal health officials discovered several troubling lapses in the conduct of the study. For example, the researchers had earlier told the FDA they would tighten up the trial’s eligibility criteria, but they never followed through. When two patients suffered serious side effects, the scientists did not immediately inform the agency or put the study on hold as required. It turned out Jesse’s pretrial test results showed he had poor liver function, indicating he arguably shouldn’t have received the OTC gene injection.

But perhaps most damning were failures in the informed-consent process. Researchers hadn’t told Jesse about the earlier patients’ side effects or about two lab monkeys killed by high doses of adenoviruses. If he had been properly briefed about these previous issues, he might have dropped out of the study and still be alive today. Wilson was also accused of a conflict of interest: he had a stake in the company that owned the gene-transfer technology and stood to benefit if the trial succeeded.

...

The investigations drew attention to wider problems in oversight of gene-therapy experiments and human research generally. For example, the FDA and NIH revealed that 691 volunteers in gene-therapy experiments had either died or fallen ill in the seven years before Jesse’s death; only 39 of these incidents had been reported promptly as required. The agencies tightened monitoring of trials, increased inspections, and created a new system for reporting serious side effects, among other steps. Penn responded to the crisis by strengthening the institutional review boards that oversee its trials, putting in new protections for patients, and prohibiting researchers from having financial stakes in their trials."

Truly nothing new under the sun.