What viruses are capable of?

[Vagabond -SC2-]

Not all viruses lyse the cell they infect. Many leave the cell viable and can continue to produce "pedagogy" and or gene products for the life of the infected cell.

[HydrogenBond]

Medicine is a reactionary science. If someone gets sick due to a virus, we react to figure out how to stop it from spreading. But if a good virus enterred a person and caused a positive change, one would assume it was already in the genetics and leave it at that.

It is not beyond the realm of possibility for a family to carry a good virus that can be passed on from person to person that imparts some positive asset to that family. It would be assumed to be innate genetics, but nobody has ever done a study to determine if this is the case.

Maybe the cure for AIDS could be a reflective virus, that infests cells and reverses the affects of the AIDS virus. This is possible but needs a new type of analysis to make any sense.

Computer viruses are good examples of how viruses work. A virus is a command line that can change the output of the computer, usually for the worse. It may reproduce itself and spread via e-mail. When microsoft does a security update, it gives us a positive virus, that causes changes that make the system work better. We call these positive viruses updates but they essentually doing the same thing as a virus, but in the opposite sense of "computer VD".

[Vagabond -SC2-]

Hydrogen,

I will look for the paper, but i heard this in a talk a few years back where someone was actually use two viruses to help cure AIDs. It looked great on paper and as an academic endeavor but it required the use of injecting patients with one replication defective virus and one replication competent virus (something which would be extreme difficult if not impossible to get past safety boards)

edit: for really bad sentence structure

[Michaelangelica]

HIV clue to treating cystic fibrosis

* March 19, 2007

A MODIFIED version of the virus that causes AIDS could become the basis of a prenatal gene therapy for cystic fibrosis, new research has suggested.

British scientists have discovered that a form of HIV, adapted to be harmless, is a promising vector for ferrying replacement genes into the lungs of affected foetuses.

Experiments at University College London have already shown that the modified virus can infect the lung tissue of unborn mouse pups, suggesting it could be used to correct the genetic defects that cause cystic fibrosis.

HIV clue to treating cystic fibrosis | Science & nature | The Australian

[HydrogenBond]

The DNA can be seen as the hard-drive of the cell, in that it contains all the data and much of the software needed to run the cell. If we input something into the cell, the hard-drive reacts with a certain output.

A virus is sort of a portable data storing device that one can plug into their PC or laptop. It doesn't really contain much in the way of software, but rather uses the software in the DNA to run its data. Although, if one wanted to, they could copy the data onto the hard-drive so they can use the portable device for other data.

This second use of the portable data device leads to some interesting ideas about virus and the DNA. For example the HIV virus has been undergoing it own type of evolutionary change, implying that its data content is being changed over time. It is almost analogous to the hard-drive DNA, deleting/pasting data into the portable virus memory device.

Virus have to start somewhere. An interesting question is what would the hard-drive have to do to partitian itself into a secondary data source, that could become a portable data device? For example, the junk genes make nothing needed for the proteins in the cell. If these were to become active they would create something not nornally part of the cell. The cell may discharge it for another cell to use.

[Monomer]

There is a hepatitis virus, GBV-C, that seems to be keeping HIV patients alive for longer:

Men infected with both HIV and GB virus type C (GBV-C), previously known as hepatitis G, for at least five years were three times less likely to die than HIV-positive men who did not have GBV-C.

"We found strong evidence that HIV-positive men who have persistent GBV-C infection survive longer than those who do not have GBV-C. The survival advantage is large and depends on how long the GBV-C infection persists," says senior investigator Jack Stapleton, M.D., of the University of Iowa and Iowa City Veterans Affairs Medical Center. Carolyn Williams, Ph.D., epidemiology branch chief in NIAID's Division of AIDS, was the lead investigator on this study.

HIV-Positive Men and Longevity, March 3, 2004 Press Release - National Institutes of Health (NIH)