Indian children discovered to have natural AIDS resistance. Now what?

On May 31, 1987, as panic about AIDS spread, a reporter for the New York Times spent a month investigating the transmission of the global epidemic. “In the kingdom of AIDS,” he wrote, “a penis itself, often likened to a sword in folk tales, again becomes a deadly weapon…As for our friends the gays, they are not so very gay anymore.” Since the 1980s, much has changed: AIDS is no longer considered a “gay” disease, anti-retrovirals have extended the lifespan of those infected, and the general illogic that accompanied the initial terror of the epidemic has, if not disappeared, at least in many places morphed to include basic facts of the disease. What hasn’t changed is that until now, there hasn’t been a cure. But this spring, researchers at the Pediatric HIV Clinic in Mumbai published a paper in the Indian Journal of Medical Research reporting the first known cases of...