
San Francisco man becomes first in history to be ‘cured’ of AIDS - inshane
http://www.rawstory.com/rawreplay/2011/05/san-francisco-man-becomes-first-in-history-to-be-cured-of-aids/
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D_Alex
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.

~~~
henrikschroder
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.

~~~
D_Alex
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!

~~~
henrikschroder
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.

~~~
Anon84
"The lack of data from the future makes predictions hard"

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nvictor
"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.

~~~
wtallis
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.

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ck2
Is there actually only one kind of HIV/AIDS virus?

~~~
3dFlatLander
There was a comment here the last time this story was submitted that
summarized things well: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2007265>

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

~~~
cabalamat
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.

~~~
Peaker
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.

~~~
Retric
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)

------
namdnay
J.D. Shapely?

------
GeoffreyHull
The end of condoms as we know it. Good riddance

~~~
StavrosK
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.

