A Cure For HIV Found?

Next. ACT scores say nothing about a person's intelligence. Knowledge does not equal intelligence. Anybody can do well on the ACTs and in HIGH SCHOOL (pl;ease, high school is a joke). You are correct, cefka, that you are not ignorant. Because you're at least educated and somewhat knowledgeable. But, if the people accusing you of ignorance are not lying about things you have said, then perhaps you are not as intelligent as I would like to give you credit are. I sincerely hope that you are intelligent, and have more to show for it than ACT scores (Critical thinking skills are a start.)

Hey davymid. I bet there are a lot more ignorant IABers than me. Just because I have very rightist views does not make me ignorant. How would you like it if I went around calling every atheist, gay, democrat, a "communist moron?" Oh wait, I essentially do do that. I guess you "tolerent" liberals can discriminate against a religious conservative if you feel the need to. Anyway, I consider myself one of the smartest members of this website; in my high school this year, I was named the top foreign language scholar in the school and I got a 30 on my ACT. If you consider me ignorant, I would hate to see what you consider the rest of the members on this website to be."

Thanks for that answer, Fartacus. Makes sense.

To have the full monty resistance, you need to inherit the CCR5-delta32 mutation from *both* genetic parents.

It's possible to be infected anyway, just very unlikely. It's also possible that at any time a new strain of HIV might appear that uses something else to bind with the cell and therefore isn't affected by CCR5-delta32.

But.. don't we not have a cure to ANY virus?"

This resistance functions as one in people who have it.

A virus needs to attach itself to a cell in the infected host as the first step towards using that cell to reproduce. That requires a "match" between the two, sort of analagous to plugging something into something else - the plug and socket must fit each other.

The delta32 mutation on the CCR5 gene results in a person's cells not having the receptor that HIV (or some strains of it, anyway) uses to bind itself to a cell. So the viruses cannot bind, which means they can't infect, which means they can't reproduce, which means they will in time die and be dealt with by the body's waste handling systems.

I'm an interested observer, davymid. My formal qualifications only go as far as A level physics, but I've been interested for as long as I can remember. My earliest memories are of sitting on a stair hallway at home reading an encyclopedia. We had over 3000 books at home, many non-fiction. It was a good start.

It boils down to the fact that I like to know how things work and science is a reliable way of doing so. I was asking how stuff worked as soon as I could speak. I think my mother taught me to read in self-defence, so she could tell me to look the answer up in a book when I got too much for her :)