Scientists Image an HIV Particle Being Born 129
FiReaNGeL alerts us to a huge development in virology and microscopy: by using a specialized microscope that only illuminates a cell's surface, scientists at Rockefeller University have watched, in real time, hundreds of thousands of molecules coming together in a living cell to form a single particle of HIV-1. A video is available on Rockefeller's front page. "By zeroing in at the cell's surface, the team became the first to document the time it takes for each HIV particle, or virion, to assemble: five to six minutes. 'At first, we had no idea whether it would take milliseconds or hours,' says Jouvenet. 'We just didn't know.' 'This is the first time anyone has seen a virus particle being born,' says Bieniasz, who is an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. 'Not just HIV,' he clarifies, 'any virus.'"
A viral video... (Score:5, Funny)
Only one problem (Score:3, Funny)
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Blood transfusions aside, AIDS is still a preventable condition.
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OK - there's the snidey 'Evolution at work' part, but the fact is that if you indulge in unprotected sex as part of a promiscuous sex life, you're odds-on to catch something sooner or later - doesn't matter whether you're straight, gay or into bestiality.
Must be some Mac users modding this today~
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Re:Only one problem (Score:5, Insightful)
You moral values are fucked up. You fail to recognize that ignorance is deadly. You fail to recognize that education is a moral value that should be held in reverence. You fail to recognize that human beings should not be treated like political footballs.
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I'm sure Reagan could have multitasked a bit more and paid attention to other issues. More than 25 million people have died of AIDS since 1981 (and that's those that are accounted for), far from what Stalin did, but still a pretty big number.
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I'm sure I could hazard a guess as to the annual death rates caused by the two factors - as of 1997, it was estimated that Communism had caused 97 million deaths - so around 1 million per year on average.There's not much Communism around anymore, so we'll take 1 million per year as a reasonable figure.
AIDS currently kills about 2.1 million [avert.org] people a year (as of 2007). If AIDS carries on for another 30 years, it will overtake Communism and then some.
So who's the partisan h
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Are you seriously suggesting one should, at any particular time, work only on solving the problem that happens, at that particular time, to be the biggest, ignoring all other problems until it is solved? You do realise that this approach is optimal only in a world where each problem takes the same amount of time to be solved, and problems don't get worse while you ignore them?
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"Conservatism is a failed ideology which has joined communism in the trash heap of history."
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It's an ugly baby... (Score:2, Funny)
It's a trap! (Score:3, Funny)
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"Up to today there is actually no single scientifically really convincing evidence for the existence of HIV. Not even once such a retrovirus has been isolated and purified by the methods of classical virology."
Dr. Heinz Ludwig Sanger, Emeritus Professor of Molecular Biology and Virology, Max-Planck-Institutes for Biochemy, Munchen.
So he's probably watching the video with his tin foil hat and is thinking it's a fake made by the men in black...
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Cue hundreds of dumbass threads from Slashdotters who know nothing at all about 'HIV'.
HIV is not the cause of AIDS.
Read "Science Sold Out". Go to Virusmyth.com.
NewAidsReview.com
etc.etc.
Indicator disease + 'HIV' = 'AIDS'
Indicator disease - 'HIV' = Indicator disease
Circular argument.
Why aren't millions of people in the West DYING from so-called 'AIDS', since all REAL STD infection rates have been rising every year for the past thirty years? Why aren't teenagers dropping dead from 'HIV' in their millions, since millions of them are infected with REAL STDs?
Cue Slashdotters' brains imploding because they can't even begin to question the bullshit of the establishment position. How embarrassing.
That's like just what the Illuminati and the aliens want you to believe, man.
404? (Score:1, Redundant)
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Unable to locate the News Relase you specified.
Thats what I get, if only they had the power of a Slashdotting, they might be able to eliminate HIV...
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I remember (Score:5, Funny)
Coincidence?
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Coincidence?
The real coincidence was that it's same amount of time you have to wait for everything in the background to finish loading to get a fully functioning machine.
Re:I remember (Score:4, Insightful)
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Your use of the words "fully functioning" is somewhat debatable...
blah blah Windows is bad blah blah..
Wait isn't this an article on HIV? I guess it doesn't really matter..
How much longer until a cure? (Score:1)
Re:How much longer until a cure? (Score:5, Funny)
*cries*
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Not like this is gonna change things much for typical slashdot readers
Anyhow, many religious leaders believe that God sent HIV to punish promiscuity, and are not welcoming a cure.
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The pharmaceutical companies (or any companies at that) don't care about the good of the industry in general, they only care about the maximization of their own profits. If one company discovers the HIV cure before the others, it is going to make sh&tloads of money, giving it a huge step ahead of the competition and allowing it to tap exclusively into a marketshare that it has up till now only shared.
Re:They already have a cure. (Score:4, Insightful)
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Well, they do spend more on marketing than they do actual research...
I've noticed that this is often brought up when discussing drug companies. I'm never quite sure what to make of it. The often efficient properties of capitalism notwithstanding, isn't the need to deploy money into advertising an inefficient aspect of a competitive economic system rather than some evil aspect of Big Pharma?
Perhaps I simply don't see a more elegant solution, but it seems that in order to eliminate the need for marketing in drug development competition would need to be eliminated (perhap
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((as an aside, I always pick a young doctor as my primary care physician simply because they will generally be more up to date. I also generally choose female doctors because I know that they still have to work harder than their male counterparts to gain the same l
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the wolf brings to the table his warrior's instincts, his brains and his training. the sheep remains a sheep no matter how well armed.
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Owning sheep, I'd like to clarify...
Sheep will try to defend themselves, but they lack the ability to form an alliance with other sheep or prey animals... Sheep will try to attack once or twice. The only tool they have is ramming. And adult male sheep (Rams) do in fact kill lots of humans every year.
Most canine predators have the ability to form alliances for the common go
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I can't see the evolutionary advantage in this strategy, we might have bred it into them.
I have heard it explained before that it evolved as it allowed a group of sheep to prosper in areas with predators (one sheep would give up, the predators would take the easy kill, and the rest would live another day). I have also heard that "falling sheep" (can't think of the real name for them at this moment) were bred as a way to protect other animals (farmers would keep the "falling sheep" in the herds of other animals so predators would go after the easy prey instead of the more valuable animals).
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Is there any chance you've seen this on QI, the source of all
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Ah, paranoia. How cute (Score:5, Insightful)
Any company which discovers a cure gets a monopoly (patent) on it for 20 years. Which is a lot.
Now picture having this choice:
A. You get the existing anti-virals which tend to do a lot of damage. (There's a reason you don't get them for a cold or even a flu: they do more damage than the flu.) And they might or might not work. In fact, you'll probably just buy you some time. And everyone makes them, so while there's some money milking potential in the "but mine work better" factor, you're still just getting a slice of the pie.
B. You get the miracle cure from Company X, which actually works and presumably with a lot less side effects.
Choice B is a no-brainer. The company which would get a 20 year monopoly on B, is going to sit on a freaking huge fortune at the end of those 20 years. Not only they'd get the lion's share of the existing pie, they'd get a whole merry bunch of retards who'd rather buy the cure later than use a condom. Again.
So basically, you're telling me that a whole lot of CEOs, doctors, their investors, etc:
1. Would rather work for the general benefit of their competitors in preserving a status quo, instead of making a metric buttload of money for themselves.
2. A lot of rich and powerful people, and some of those same CEOs, doctors, etc, would rather die themselves or watch friends and family die a slow death, than just use that supposed miracle cure.
3. Thousands to millions of underlings, who otherwise can't seem to keep much else secret, just toe the line on this one. And again, would rather be loyal to some cartel than save themselves or their friends and family in some cases. And all the retards who lose laptops, or get internal corporate networks virused, etc, lose everything _except_ this apparently. They lose customer files, they leak that their network has blank admin passwords, etc, but somehow they never manage to leak _that_.
4. Somehow the Chinese, Russians, and a fucking buttload of other governments just itching for a pretext to one-up the West, and thumb their nose at the West, also toe that line peacefully. And, you know, all the retards like those in South Africa and various other countries, peddling sweet potato juice and other local snake oil as cures for HIV and as a substitute for paying to the big pharma for a cure, don't just go ahead and and make that miracle cure.
Remember: if it's secret, then it's also not patented. Patents tell everyone that it exists, so they don't work well for a conspiracy.
Etc, etc, etc.
And the same goes for diabetes, cancer, and all the other poster cases used by such conspiracy theories. In fact, for a lot of them half the points above go double. (E.g., insulin is out of patent, and it's a commodity produced by everyone, so profit margins are tiny. Plus you have local factories which don't pay big pharma a cent. So patenting a cure would make a lot of people very very rich. E.g., cancer doesn't really have as easy a defense as using a condom, and as other diseases go down and life expectancy rises, so does the chance that you'll live enough to get a cancer. So that one requires literally believing that the millions of doctors, researchers, pharma bigwigs, etc, would rather die of it and do something as brutal as radiotherapy or chemotherapy, instead of using the miracle cure. Etc.)
So here's an idea: noone understands that conspiracy theory, because it's fucking stupid even as conspiracy theories usually go. It doesn't require even just delusions and or building whole rationales on silly suppositions instead of facts. It requires genuine inability to follow even elementary logic.
Re:Ah, paranoia. How cute (Score:5, Informative)
It's not that anyone is actively squelching a cure for AIDS, diabetes, etc. It's just that the research into a cure is not being funded the same way research into treatments are. You don't miss what you've never seen and that's the shame of the capitalist pharma program.
This isn't to say cures never get funded - new anti-biotics are constantly being researched and these are cures. Again, there is the recurring revenue aspect.
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A cure for HIV etc would be a license to print money, because as the GP said, people are fucking retards and would rather pay for an STD cure then use protection. I have heard various sources say
That's still a misunderstanding (Score:2)
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Don't forget some of them would go down in history as "the guys that cured AIDS". That's hardly a bad legacy to attach to one's family name...
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Heard by the technician: (Score:1)
Resolution (Score:1)
Maybe, I am wrong, but I would like to see a bit more data in this article. I suspect this might be one of these cases of "publish this before anyone else does" and then follow with
Re:Resolution (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are known antiviral drugs that can work by either inhibiting or even accelerating viral capsid assembly.
To my knowledge, the best example of this is Hepatitis B. In addition to being a very real pathogen, it serves as something of a model system since the assembly is so well documented and controllable.
If you cause the HBV capsid to assemble too rapidly, it forms aberrant shee
Did it have two dad's? (Score:1)
ID (Score:4, Funny)
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Amazing (Score:4, Funny)
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Not when it's slashdotted.
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I saw God's finger poke into the mix at 0:34.74sec of the video. I told you! ... hmmm, or maybe it was a noodly appendage.
Although you aren't original for making an ID joke on slashdot you bring up a good point whether you like it or not. The point being that those particles are not alive and yet they are forming something that is. This totally beats anything biogenesis/evolution could do due to the speed at which it occurs. That same something started somewhere in the world many decades ago for some reason out of the blue, possibly even outside of a living organsim which then somehow got inside of an animal or human. Now mi
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My point was not to convince you God did it but to not assume that biogenesis and evolution did it. As far as being blessed, that will only happen when you stop being a sarcastic asshole.
so we can see it... (Score:1)
I know next to nothing about this (Score:2)
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Re:I know next to nothing about this (Score:5, Insightful)
A cure would involve kill cells that have the virus inside. Detecting and killing such cells is one step to finding a cure, but probably impossible. Finding drugs which inhibit the virus entering cells, reaching the DNA, or leaving the cells are all partial cures.
Development of antibodies which attach and kill cells with the virus particles partially formed on the surface of the cell is the next most likely achievement. To achieve this, they now know that they need something which can completely enclose the surface of a cell within 5-6 minutes.
Also, they now have a new technique to visualise the behavior of virus particles in a cell. They can watch to see how any potential treatments interact with the virus within the cell in real-time.
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Re:I know next to nothing about this (Score:4, Funny)
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Re:I know next to nothing about this (Score:4, Funny)
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I thought it was fricken funny!
But then most here are too dense to understand the difference between effect and affect, then and than, your and you're etc etc.....
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So could someone explain how this effects us? How is this a major leap as the article says? Watching it be born seems cool and all but how does that help us kill it?
Good question actually. Let me try an answer.
If we know the steps that HIV uses to assemble its virus particles, we can look for a way to jam up one of those steps.
This video (and the research behind it) helps us understand how HIV assembles its virus particles. It helps researchers figure out a way to jam up the works.
Researchers have already figured out how to jam up the works in some of the other steps in HIV processes. As a result, HIV used to kill people after about 6 years. Now they can go on
Not quite accurate? (Score:2)
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Video is currently available at... (Score:5, Informative)
(The link from the Rockefeller University main page is currently broken).
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Particle? (Score:2)
There is something about the theory of fractal similarity at different scales--HIV gathering on a cell resembles flies assembling on dead meat.
The video caption is "individual HIV particles (white spots) assembling on the surface of an infected cell" but the article is titled "single HIV particle". That's fishy.
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Interesting... (Score:1)
Where's the Video? (Score:1, Troll)
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100% Troll
You TrollMods are colossal idiots [slashdot.org].
The best care is being ignored (Score:1)