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HIV/AIDS breakthrough predicted this decade
Patrick Leeman. The Daily News, 04 September 2002. Republished courtesy of Independent Newspapers (Pty) Ltd.
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This is the decade in which the world's scientists will find a cure for HIV/AIDS and it will become a vanquished disease in the same way that diphtheria was conquered.
This is the view of Professor Stephen Fuller, the Wellcome Trust Principal Research Fellow with the School of Clinical Medicine at the University of Oxford.
He is one of the eminent scientists attending this week's international conference on electron microscopy at the International Convention Centre in Durban.
Fuller said he had no doubt that a breakthrough in the treatment of HIV/AIDS would be found, given that thousands of scientists world-wide were probing the HI Virus and also searching for a vaccine.
He pointed out that the tragedy of the onset of HIV/AIDS in the past decades had been accompanied by a flowering of new technical advances and techniques in both light and electron microscopy for the study of the HI Virus.
Fuller said that while this disease remained an urgent challenge for modern biology and medicine, the rapid progress in the world's understanding of this virus, compared with other virus infections, provided a degree of hope for the future.
He said that the understanding by the scientific community of the virus infection had profited from the use of recent methods in light microscopy.
These had allowed for the visualisation of the infection process and had led to a deeper understanding of the disease.
Fuller said he regarded the successful pinning down of the elusive HI Virus as the "challenge of his career". However, he added: "If someone else solves the problem, I'll be happy."
Fuller is a graduate of the University of Chicago and he also spent 21 years with a leading German pharmaceutical company, EMBL, before being invited to Oxford as a Wellcome Research Fellow. |
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