It is a great book. I've found it translated into Portuguese and am expecting its delivery from the bookstore. There are things, misunderstandings, or even prejudice ruling common sense in our world. Susan Sontag was (is) a great, great personality.

I wonder whether you might want to know the book I'm talking about...


Illness as Metaphor
From Wikipedia , the free encyclopedia

Illness as Metaphor is a nonfiction work written by Susan Sontag and published in 1978. She wrote it during her own fight against breast cancer and challenged the "blame the victim" mentality behind the language society often uses to describe diseases and those who suffer from them.

Drawing out the similarities between public perspectives on cancer (the paradigmatic disease of the twentieth century), and tuberculosis (the symbolic illness of the nineteenth century), Sontag shows how both diseases have become associated with personal psychological traits. In particular she demonstrates how the metaphors and terms used to describe both syndromes lead to an association between repressed passion and the physical disease itself. She notes the peculiar reversal that "With the modern diseases (once TB, now cancer), the romantic idea that the disease expresses the character is invariably extended to assert that the character causes the disease – because it has not expressed itself. Passion moves inward, striking and blighting the deepest cellular recesses."

This subject is expanded upon in Sontag's 1988 work, AIDS and Its Metaphors.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_science..._lead_to_HIV_vaccine.html

Novel technique developed at CHOP may lead to HIV vaccine

A novel approach that involves inserting genetic material into muscle might lead to a long-sought HIV vaccine, according to a study led by the chief scientific officer at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia published yesterday in the online version of Nature Medicine.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg2022709...o-antibody-factories.html

HIV vaccine turns muscle into antibody factories
22 May 2009 by Andy Coghlan

HOW do you deal with a virus which attacks the immune system that is trying to fight it off? It's a question HIV researchers have been trying to solve for years, and now they may have come up with a solution: bypass the immune system altogether.

Nine macaques have been protected against the monkey version of HIV with a novel vaccine that sidesteps the monkey immune system. Instead, the vaccine turns monkey muscles into factories for churning out antibodies which kill simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) - the monkey equivalent of HIV.

The vaccine is a departure from the usual approach, which is to prime the body's immune system for attack by exposing it to a harmless version of the real pathogen. Thus primed, the immune system prepares for a real invasion by building its own stockpile of antibodies that target the pathogen.

Instead, Philip Johnson of the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania and his colleagues injected the monkeys' muscles with a harmless virus carrying genes for making immunoadhesins, antibody-like molecules pre-selected to attack SIV.

The viruses load the genes into the nuclei of muscle cells, which produce and churn out the immunoadhesins, potentially indefinitely. "Instead of expecting the person's own immune system to do the job, we're giving them their own supply of 'off-the-peg' antibodies," Johnson says.

"It is now 85 weeks since all nine macaques received their jabs, followed by injections of SIV, and they still haven't suffered any infections," he says. "By contrast, four of six unvaccinated animals died of monkey AIDS" (Nature Medicine, DOI: 10.1038/nm.1967).

Johnson says the approach is especially suitable for combating HIV, which overwhelms the immune system that is supposed to fight it. With all conventional vaccines so far "the virus always wins in the end", he says.

Given such a strong proof of principle, the team is already gearing up for clinical trials, with four potential "superantibodies" from people who are HIV-resistant.

"Within two to three years, we would hope to have this in the clinic," says Wayne Koff, senior vice-president of research and development at the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative, which is collaborating with Johnson on this next phase. "It will be a tremendous test of the concept to see if what has protected the monkeys pans out into people," he says.

Hi Lawrence,

That is a very interesting article about some great structural work done on HIV.

By the way, one of the researchers on that project was Prof. C. David Stout. He is also a member of our FightAIDS@Home research collaboration (see the last volume of the FAAH Newsletter). Many of the recent experiments on FightAIDS@Home have involved crystal structures of HIV protease that Dave Stout grew and solved.

Cheers,
Alex

New Strategy Proposed For Designing Antibody-based HIV Vaccine:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090614153248.htm