Finnish HIV Vaccine Testing To Begin 72
First time accepted submitter ultranova writes with news of a new phase in trials for an HIV vaccine. From the article: "Some 1,000 patients throughout France and Switzerland will take part on the trials, with the first phase involving hundreds of HIV sufferers. Participant numbers will increase as the program progresses. ... According to Reijonen, the GTU technology developed by FIT Biotech is also suitable for use as a preventive HIV vaccine, however, he says that such a drug is still ten years away.The central idea behind HIV vaccine development is the use of genetic immunization. Genes are introduced into the body in order to generate a controlled immune response against HIV. Gene Transport Unit (or GTU) technology refers to FIT Biotech’s patented method by which genes can be safely introduced into the body."
Is it a "Vaccine" or a "Cure" (Score:1, Insightful)
I thought a "vaccine" was something you got to prevent you getting a disease, and a "cure" was something you got to rid you of a disease.
Is it a "vaccine" if they are testing it on people who already have HIV? Seems more like they are testing it as a "cure?"
Or do words not mean things anymore?
Re:More outright FRAUD... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, you sound like an absolute nut, as does the website you link to. Hell, it even tries to attack some scientists personally through obscure and out-of-context quotes as if that makes you right.
I have no medical knowledge. I don't need any to see what I judge to be a nut. I've seen enough in my own fields to know that people who decide to tell me what's going on in a multi-billion-dollar field full of PhD's as if they know everything that the PhD's don't (without context), tend to be nutters.
I have a girlfriend in genetics. She gets any amount of nutters every day telling her that her field doesn't exist, doesn't do anything useful, is "wrong", is contrary to their religion, etc. that I have to sympathise with her on this one.
Come back when you have ten years of medical school behind you and have proved this all wrong in peer-reviewed journals that we can't adequately debunk. Until then, you're a nut repeating things that other nuts have said to gain attention.
I met a guy on the QE2 once. We were sitting, just socialising as you do on such a beautiful ship, with all kinds of people. We started to play cards. Mid-way through, he tried to tell me that he'd "solved" the three-houses, three-utilities puzzle. (Oh, this was after he told me he invented the card game of Uno). He was utterly serious. He was mortally offended I didn't believe him. He gave me a string of qualifications. Asked him to show me how he did it right there. There was no rush, he had time enough to spout all of this bullshit to me, we were just being friendly. I offered to even publicise it if he could show me his "answer". Strangely, he was unable to produce it, and kept dodging the question. I was genuinely intrigued as to how he'd managed it - I assumed he'd found a hole in the wording of the puzzle used, or some kind of "trick" (e.g. folding the paper, etc.). You know the best kind of thinkers? The guy in the Patch Adams movie, who was a genius, got committed to an institution, and constantly asked how many fingers that they could see when he held three up, and laughing at people who gave the "right" answer... except he was thinking sideways. We have two eyes. That kind of genius is rare, misunderstood, and can create wondrous things. I was genuinely intrigued if this guy was similar.
But no. He hadn't come up with some stroke of genius (real, or interpretative of the data). He just hadn't. He kept on refusing to show anything. Refusing to discuss it. Yet before he'd been so keen to tell me I was wrong. He asked me, quite abruptly, how I knew that he *couldn't* when so obviously he was right and had done it in his head. So I taught him Euler's Formula. He got most offended and never spoke to us again.