They are not immune to HIV. They lack the receptor for HIV. Many people lack this receptor naturally.
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AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 days agoIf he got incredibly lucky, they’re immune to AIDS. It’s much more likely that they’re not and will develop symptoms of new and exciting genetic disorders never seen before.
The biggest problem was that the technique used is really unreliable, so you’d expect off-target edits to be more common than on-target ones for a human-sized genome. For bacteria, you can get around it by letting the modified bacteria reproduce for a few generations, then testing most of them. If they’re all good, then it worked, and if any aren’t, you need to make a new batch. Testing DNA destroys the cells you’re testing, so if you test enough cells in a human embryo to be sure that the edits worked, it dies. You can’t just start when the embryo is a single cell to ensure that the whole thing’s been edited in the same way as you need to test something pre-edit to be able to detect off-target edits.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
People without the receptor that HIV targets are immune to HIV because of that, like how a rock is immune to verbal abuse or double foot amputees are immune to ingrown toenails. The immune system being able to kill something isn’t the only way things can be immune to other things.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Immune here means you have an immune response. I’m pretty sure the word here is “carrier”
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 2 days ago
- this is a shitpost community, not a biotech publication, so immune here means the dictionary definition, not any domain-specific technical jargon, otherwise people can’t make shitposts about diplomatic immunity
- lacking the receptor that HIV uses to hijack the regular immune response in order to reproduce means the regular immune response destroys it
- even in a normal person, after exposure, a lot of HIV gets destroyed by other parts of the immune system, often enough to eliminate it before an infection gains a foothold. Once an infection takes hold, it outbreeds the immune response as it’s the part best equipped to deal with a large viral load that it interferes with.
- if you’ve got the virus in your body, but due to the lack of the receptor, it can’t reproduce, then it doesn’t remain viable for very long as each viron accumulates damage over time, and ceases to function once it’s too badly damaged. People carrying a disease have enough viral reproduction going on to balance out the virus being destroyed.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
You do not understand what immunity is. you are using it as a metaphor.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Even if you ignore that there’s an entirely valid sense of the word immune that has nothing do do with biology (i.e. the one in phrases like diplomatic immunity), my original comment is entirely consistent with the dictionary definition of the biological sense of the word. There are probably sub-fields of biology where immunity is used as jargon for something much more specific than the dictionary definition, but this is lemmyshitpost, not a peer-reviewed domain-specific publication.
queermunist@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I think it’s more like how a rock is immune to being covered in vomit.
It’s still covered in vomit, it just can’t smell or care about it.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
When a normal person is exposed to HIV, it reproduces inside of them, so can then go on to expose more people, and if there’s enough of it, infect them in turn (if there’s a smaller amount, their immune system will normally be able to clean it up before it gets enough of a foothold). If someone’s lacking the receptor, then no matter how much they were exposed to, their immune system will eventually manage to remove it all without becoming infected because it can’t reproduce. If they had a ludicrously large viral load, then there’s a possibility that it could be passed on before it was destroyed, but most of the ways people get exposed to HIV aren’t enough to infect someone who’s vulnerable, let alone infect someone else via secondary exposure if there’s not been time for the infection to grow.
SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I feel like we’re ignoring the obvious solution here. Stick the kids with an AIDS needle and see what happens! /s
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That tests the AIDS immunity, but not whether there are off-target edits. IIRC, the mothers were all HIV-positive, so the children are all pretty likely to be exposed anyway, which was part of how he justified the experiment to himself.
eru@mouse.chitanda.moe 3 days ago
the fathers were HIV-positive, not the mothers.
that (besides the obvious ethical concerns) was a big reason behind the backlash from the genome editing community. we had already known a much less invasive method for preventing HIV infection of the embryo in this case, by ‘washing’ the seminal fluid away from sperm (sperm cannot become infected with HIV, but the HIV particles would be in the fluid surrounding the sperm).
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I might be wrong here, but iirc the virus doesn’t automatically pass on to the embryo and HIV doesn’t always “take” either. Even a blood transfusion has a limited chance of infection, like 30% or so IIRC