re: Has there been no SIGNIFICANT medical breakthroughs......

While very interesting, I'm not sure I'd put terribly much faith into that HIV cure. One of its major problems is how terrible it is at replicating itself. It does it fast, and with a ton of errors. There are about 1,000 base pairs in the viral genome. Its rate of reproduction and error are such that every single error (1,000 possible) occurs in a 24 hour period at least once. Moreover, about half of the double recombinants (base 1+2, 18+920, etc) occur in that same time frame. The breeding ground for resistance is quite high. Should every single virus be expressed and attacked by triple therapy at once, it's possible. But that's kind of a long shot. And it takes but one, single viral particle that is resistant to three drugs to become the new, dominant strain, rendering the three other therapies inefficient.


It's a screwy little bug. It would take some careful genome mapping to get the "attack" phase right.