The Man Who Was "Cured" of HIV

 
Sonia Arrison explains how in the future we could live to be 150 years old and about the man who was "cured" of HIV...fascinating stuff!

Excerpt:

"...the average person may soon celebrate over 150 birthdays. Many Big Thinkers wondered whether lifespan extension is even meaningful unless it is also accompanied by an increase in the quality of life experienced by super-centenarians. Arrison couldn't agree more.
What would be the point of living longer, if the Golden Years were filled with nothing but physical suffering? “We are at the cusp of a revolution in medicine and biotechnology that will radically increase not just our life spans but also, and more importantly, our health spans," she says.

More anecdotal, and more striking, is the case of Timothy Brown, known as "The Berlin Patient." Brown first tested positive for HIV in 1995. For a decade afterwards, he lived a healthy life in Berlin, controlling the virus with anti-retroviral therapy. But in 2006, he began feel extreme exhaustion when riding his bike to work. His doctor diagnosed him with leukemia, completely unrelated to HIV - the only possible lifesaving treatment for which was a stem cell transplant from a bone marrow donor. A specialist at Charité Medical University managed to find a donor who was a match, and who also happened to have a gene which made him resistant to the HIV virus.
The transplant was gruelling - scientists are wary of using the word "cure" - but Brown now tests negative on even the most sensitive HIV tests. He is the only person in the world to have ever been rid of HIV. "That’s one example of how scientists might be able to recode our systems to fight off diseases," says Arrison."


READ MORE AND SEE VIDEO HERE...
http://bigthink.com/ideas/41153


You can also read more about Timothy Brown in this New York Magazine article...
http://nymag.com/health/features/aids-cure-2011-6/