Vincenzo Kolchak ponders the infinite.
NOVEMBER 7, 2008
A Doctor, a Mutation and a Potential Cure for AIDS
A Bone Marrow Transplant to Treat a Leukemia Patient Also Gives Him Virus-Resistant Cells; Many Thanks, Sample 61
By MARK SCHOOFS
The startling case of an AIDS patient who underwent a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia is stirring new hope that gene-therapy strategies on the far edges of AIDS research might someday cure the disease.
The patient, a 42-year-old American living in Berlin, is still recovering from his leukemia therapy, but he appears to have won his battle with AIDS. Doctors have not been able to detect the virus in his blood for more than 600 days, despite his having ceased all conventional AIDS medication. Normally when a patient stops taking AIDS drugs, the virus stampedes through the body within weeks, or days.
[Dr. Gero Hutter] Sixten KoerperDr. Gero Hütter isn’t an AIDS specialist, but he ‘functionally cured’ a patient, who shows no sign of the disease.
“I was very surprised,” said the doctor, Gero Hütter.
The breakthrough appears to be that Dr. Hütter, a soft-spoken hematologist who isn’t an AIDS specialist, deliberately replaced the patient’s bone marrow cells with those from a donor who has a naturally occurring genetic mutation that renders his cells immune to almost all strains of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
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I read this story with great pleasure as a relief from the last eighteen months or so or being marinated in political journalism. Obviously, the soak in political journalism still colors my thinking.
I couldn’t help think about the loonies who viewed AIDS as God’s punishment wrought upon homosexuals. Hmmm — does this mean that being gay is okay with the Big Guy, since He’s the one who provides. I am sure that the loonies don’t think so.
Also, since the mechanism that made this cure possible sounds to be one fundamental to evolution (mutation), then this must be nonsense. Maybe Satan, but wait mutations can’t do stuff like this. Everyone knows that life is part of an intelligent design. Hmmm — that must mean that this couldn’t have just happened, but was part of this intelligent design by whom — Raymond Lowey? – Nah! — the Big Guy.
So he must have put gay people on earth for a reason and has a pretty darn good reason for allowing them to survive. Let’s think this through — the Republicans lost (and thereby the cause of God lost too), so God is allowing homosexuals to live so that they can scare a whole new generation of voters to make sure that Godly people like Sarah Palin can be elected President in 2012. Then, God will mutate the AIDS . . . no that’s not right – God through intelligent design will come up with a new disease worse than AIDS that will take care of the Christian right’s homosexual problem once and for all. So Palin can rule from the firmament and God’s party will triumph.
God sure does work in mysterious ways.
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No Kidding…
Friday, May 25th, 2007
A scripturally-correct Creation Museum to open this week:
SEVEN DAYS IN MAY…
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It may not be my nicest moment, but these people are demonstrating ignorance which can ultimately hurt all of us.*
By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: May 24, 2007PETERSBURG, Ky. — The entrance gates here are topped with metallic Stegosauruses. The grounds include a giant tyrannosaur standing amid the trees, and a stone-lined lobby sports varied sauropods. It could be like any other natural history museum, luring families with the promise of immense fossils and dinosaur adventures.
But step a little farther into the entrance hall, and you come upon a pastoral scene undreamt of by any natural history museum. Two prehistoric children play near a burbling waterfall, thoroughly at home in the natural world. Dinosaurs cavort nearby, their animatronic mechanisms turning them into alluring companions, their gaping mouths seeming not threatening, but almost welcoming, as an Apatosaurus munches on leaves a few yards away.
What is this, then? A reproduction of a childhood fantasy in which dinosaurs are friends of inquisitive youngsters? The kind of fantasy that doesn’t care that human beings and these prefossilized thunder-lizards are usually thought to have been separated by millions of years? No, this really is meant to be more like one of those literal dioramas of the traditional natural history museum, an imagining of a real habitat, with plant life and landscape reproduced in meticulous detail.
For here at the $27 million Creation Museum, which opens on May 28 (just a short drive from the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport), this pastoral scene is a glimpse of the world just after the expulsion from the Garden of Eden, in which dinosaurs are still apparently as herbivorous as humans, and all are enjoying a little calm in the days after the fall.
It also serves as a vivid introduction to the sheer weirdness and daring of this museum created by the Answers in Genesis ministry that combines displays of extraordinary nautilus shell fossils and biblical tableaus, celebrations of natural wonders and allusions to human sin. Evolution gets its continual comeuppance, while biblical revelations are treated as gospel.
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Images: General photos: #1–Tom Uhlman, New York Times; #2–Jeff Haynes, AFP/Getty Images & Tom Uhlman, New York Times: #3–Tom Uhlman, New York Times; #4–Ed Rothstein, New York Times; #5–Jeff Haynes, AFP/Getty Images; #6–Tom Uhlman, New York Times;(golf ball & markings) annexmart.com; (Cain ‘n Able) sabbathtruth.com; (2001 ape) geocities.com; (white beard) olefolkdolls.com; (Mexican officer) sdsoldiers.com; (toy cowboy) ecommwire.com; (dude ranch Barbie) pinkponytail.com; (jockey) msnbcmedia2.msn.com; (2001 bone) content.answers.com; (Richard Boone) Doug Abbott Collection via fiftiesweb.com;(dinosaur killing woman based on One Million Years B.C.) sculpted by Tony McVey via monsterjones.com; (bookstore patrons)(westworld logo) engadget.com;
Please find the entire article here.
