Wow.
I’m flat-out stealing this from the venerable AnyCheese, [well, her buzz feed anyhow] but this story exploded my thinker.
A 42-year-old HIV patient with leukemia appears to have no detectable HIV in his blood and no symptoms after a stem cell transplant from a donor carrying a gene mutation that confers natural resistance to the virus that causes AIDS, according to a report published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine.
“The patient is fine,” said Dr. Gero Hutter of Charite Universitatsmedizin Berlin in Germany. “Today, two years after his transplantation, he is still without any signs of HIV disease and without antiretroviral medication.” – More from CNN
They do point out later in the article that the process is prohibitively dangerous to use in all but the most extreme of situations, and that the process itself kills one in three patients. My thoughts are that the skeptics can tell it to Christiaan Barnard.
I’m not arguing for a technocracy, but when are we going to get The R&D Candidate?