AIDS Vaccine Breakthrough 417
Doc Ruby writes "Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in MD, USA announced they've disrupted the means by which HIV stops the immune system from attacking it. From the article: 'Scientists say they have found a way to disarm the AIDS virus in research that could lead to a vaccine. Researchers have discovered that if they eliminate a cholesterol membrane surrounding the virus, HIV cannot disrupt communication among disease-fighting cells and the immune system returns to normal. [...] "By stealing cholesterol from the envelope of the virus, we can neutralize the subversion," said Graham. "We've broken the code; we can shut down the type of interference that HIV is having on the immune system."'"
Such an awesome crowdsourcing success! (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought this was going to be another one of those "wow we have a cure for HIV but xyz" type of articles, but there is so much more to it than that.
The coolest part about this breakthrough is that it was directly generated by people playing the game "fold it". The game (which I've played in the past) involves turning various little nobules on molecules in order to try to match them up to certain shapes. It's fun and mindless, I had *no idea* that the results were actually being used by scientists working on important problems.
This is truly crowdsourcing at it's best - check out the first page of the scientific paper for more details, after that it gets pretty bio-nerdy:
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/zoran/NSMBfoldit-2011.pdf
Re:The future is here at last (Score:4, Interesting)
Not funny, Insightful. We could have Star Trek-level technology and we'd still suffer with the awful legacy of man's basest instincts and the old cognitive bugs from our days stalking prey and eluding predators in the jungle.
If an AIDS vaccine were available on the market tomorrow, the right-wingers would want to stop it from being distributed, worried that it will cause autism or take the danger out of sexual promiscuity (see: HPV vaccine). Scientologists would worry that it will bring volcano spirits back into your soul or something. The alternative medicine crowd would say it's useless and a Big Pharma scam.