A rare group of children is immune to AIDS, scientists believe.
The 170 boys and girls in South Africa are known as ‘non-progressors’.
They were all born with HIV, after being infected in the womb, and still have extremely high levels of the disease in their blood.
But they are completely healthy.
The first of 50 patients to complete a trial for a new HIV treatment in the UK is showing no signs of the virus in his blood.
The initial signs are very promising, but it’s too soon to say it’s a cure just yet: the HIV may return, doctors warn, and the presence of anti-HIV drugs in the man’s body mean it’s difficult to tell whether traces of the virus are actually gone for good.
That said, the team behind the trial – run by five British universities and the UK’s National Health Service – says we could be on the brink of defeating HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) for real.
There are two kinds of people in Washington, DC, says entrepreneur Dean Kamen. There are the policy experts, whom he calls cynics. And there are the scientists, whom he deems optimists.
Kamen, speaking at the White House Frontiers Conference at the University of Pittsburgh, places himself in the latter camp. Unlike policy wonks and politicians who see diseases like Alzheimer’s or ALS as unstoppable scourges, Kamen points out that previously terrifying diseases were all toppled by medical innovation. The plague, polio, smallpox — all were civilization-threatening epidemics until experimental scientists discovered new ways to combat them.
If that sounds like the kind of disruption that the tech industry has unleashed across the rest of the world, that’s no accident. Kamen, the founder of DEKA, a medical R&D company, says that the same trends that have empowered our computers and phones and communication networks will soon power a revolution in health care. He says that medical innovation follows a predictable cycle. First we feel powerless before a disease. Then we seek ways of treating it. Then we attempt to cure it.
The American Dream is ending, and its automated software and hardware technology that’s ending it.
Now that machines can diagnose cancer, trade stocks, and write symphonies, they’re not just going to make humans more efficient as they have in the past—they are replacing them entirely and wrecking the economy along the way.
Researchers have developed a wireless brain interface that allows monkeys to control the movements of a robotic wheelchair using their thoughts alone. The breakthrough suggests that similar interfaces could allow severely paralyzed individuals to navigate all sorts of robotic devices with their minds.
Inside Doris Taylor’s lab at the Texas Heart Institute are ethereal white pig hearts, stripped of their cells and now a blank slate of an organ.
Removing cells from an organ is fairly simple for scientists like Taylor. Rebuilding the organ by injecting stem cells is the tricky part.
But that’s exactly what Taylor hopes to do: grow a human heart by injecting human stem cells into a “decellularized” organ.
It probably goes without saying, but medicine has improved a lot in modern times. No one would willingly go back to the days of sketchy anesthetics and experimental surgery.
We know a lot more about what ails the body and how to treat disease.
But could we do better? Sure. Some conditions yet confound doctors. Patients still suffer. As much as the situation has improved—some things haven’t changed a bit.
