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Subscribe to RSSMSNBC's Thomas Roberts talks with University of Washington Center for Game Science director Seth Cooper and researcher Firas Khatib about a video game that helped unravel a protein structure in an AIDS-like virus.
Last updated 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20:
Video-game players have solved a molecular puzzle that stumped scientists for years, and those scientists say the accomplishment could point the way to crowdsourced cures for AIDS and other diseases.
"This is one small piece of the puzzle in being able to help with AIDS," Firas Khatib, a biochemist at the University of Washington, told me. Khatib is the lead author of a research paper on the project, published today by Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.
The feat, which was accomplished using a collaborative online game called Foldit, is also one giant leap for citizen science — a burgeoning field that enlists Internet users to look for alien planets, decipher ancient texts and do other scientific tasks that sheer computer power can't accomplish as easily.
"People have spatial reasoning skills, something computers are not yet good at," Seth Cooper, a UW computer scientist who is Foldit's lead designer and developer, explained in a news release. "Games provide a framework for bringing together the strengths of computers and humans."
Unraveling a retrovirus
For more than a decade, an international team of scientists has been trying to figure out the detailed molecular structure of a protein-cutting enzyme from an AIDS-like virus found in rhesus monkeys. Such enzymes, known as retroviral proteases, play a key role in the virus' spread — and if medical researchers can figure out their structure, they could conceivably design drugs to stop the virus in its tracks. The strategy has been compared to designing a key to fit one of Mother Nature's locks.
The problem is that enzymes are far tougher to crack than your typical lock. There are millions of ways that the bonds between the atoms in the enzyme's molecules could twist and turn. To design the right chemical key, you have to figure out the most efficient, llowest-energy configuration for the molecule — the one that Mother Nature herself came up with.
That's where Foldit plays a role. The game is designed so that players can manipulate virtual molecular structures that look like multicolored, curled-up Tinkertoy sets. The virtual molecules follow the same chemical rules that are obeyed by real molecules. When someone playing the game comes up with a more elegant structure that reflects a lower energy state for the molecule, his or her score goes up. If the structure requires more energy to maintain, or if it doesn't reflect real-life chemistry, then the score is lower.
More than 236,000 players have registered for the game since its debut in 2008.
The monkey-virus puzzle was one of several unsolved molecular mysteries that a colleague of Khatib's at the university, Frank DiMaio, recently tried to solve using a method that took advantage of a protein-folding computer program called Rosetta. "This was one of the cases where his method wasn't able to solve it," Khatib said.
Fortunately, the challenge fit the current capabilities of the Foldit game, so Khatib and his colleagues put the puzzle out there for Foldit's teams to work on. "This was really kind of a last-ditch effort," he recalled. "Can the Foldit players really solve it?"
They could. "They actually did it in less than 10 days," Khatib said.
University of Washington
A screen shot shows how the Foldit program posed the monkey-virus molecular puzzle.
One floppy loop of the molecule, visible on the left side of this image, was particularly tricky to figure out. But players belonging to the Foldit Contenders Group worked as a tag team to come up with an incredibly elegant, low-energy model for the monkey-virus enzyme.
"Standard autobuilding and structure refinement methods showed within hours that the solution was almost certainly correct," the researchers reported in the paper published today. "Using the Foldit solution, the final refined structure was completed a few days later."
Khatib said the Seattle team's collaborators in Poland were in such a celebratory mood that they insisted on organizing a simultaneous champagne toast, shared over a Skype video teleconference.
"Although much attention has recently been given to the potential of crowdsourcing and game playing, this is the first instance that we are aware of in which online gamers solved a longstanding scientific problem," Khatib and his colleagues wrote.
The parts of the molecule that formed the floppy loop turned out to be of particular interest. "These features provide exciting opportunities for the design of retroviral drugs, including AIDS drugs," the researchers said.
Looking for new problems to solve
The monkey-virus puzzle solution demonstrates that Foldit and other science-oriented video games could be used to address a wide range of other scientific challenges — ranging from drug development to genetic engineering for future biofuels. "My hope is that scientists will see this research and give us more of those cases," Khatib said.
He's not alone in that hope. "Foldit shows that a game can turn novices into domain experts capable of producing first-class scientific discoveries," Zoran Popovic, director of University of Washington's Center for Game Science, said in today's news release. "We are currently applying the same approach to change the way math and science are taught in school."
That's something that Carter Kimsey, program director for the National Science Foundation's Division of Biological Infrastructure, would love to see happen. "After this discovery, young people might not mind doing their science homework," she quipped.
One caveat, though: Playing Foldit isn't exactly like playing Bejeweled. "Let's be honest, proteins aren't the sexiest video game out there," Khatib told me. Give the game a whirl, and let me know whether it's addictive or a drag.
Tale of a Contender
The final decisive move in the Foldit Contender Group's solution to the monkey-virus puzzle involved twisting around that floppy loop, or "flap," in the structure of the enzyme. The paper published today notes that one of the Contenders, nicknamed "mimi," built upon the work done by other gamers to make that move. I got in touch with mimi via email, and here's the wonderfully detailed response she sent back today from Britain:
"I have been playing Foldit for nearly three years, and I have been in the Contenders team for two and a half years.
"Although there are 35 names on the members list on the website, when you take off duplicate names and non-active players, it comes down to about 12 to 15 people.
"The team members come from a wide range of backgrounds, chiefly scientific or IT [information technology], although our best player is from neither.
"One of the main features of Foldit is the ability to communicate via chat within the game. There is both global chat, which everyone can access, and individual group chat, which allows team members to talk easily to one another. The Contenders are spread out between Canada, USA, UK, Europe and New Zealand, so this is essential.
"Each player can work on a solo solution to a puzzle, but we can also exchange solutions between the team and add our own improvements to achieve a better result. Often the evolved solution for a team scores higher than the top solo score.
"The game is not only an interesting intellectual challenge, allowing you to use your problem-solving skills, 'feel' for protein shapes, and whatever biochemical knowledge you have to obtain a solution to each puzzle, but it also provides a unique society of players driven by both individual and team rivalry with an overall purpose of improving the game and the results achieved. A body of knowledge has been built up in the Wiki by contributions from players, and ideas are constantly fed back to the game designers.
"In the case of the Mason-Pfizer monkey virus, I had looked at the structure of the options we were presented with and identified that it would be better if the 'flap' could be made to sit closer to the body of the protein — one of the basic rules of folding is to make the protein as compact as possible — but when I tried this with my solo solution, I couldn't get it to work. However, when I applied the same approach to the evolved solution that had been worked on by other team members, I was able to get it to tuck in, and that proved to be the answer to the structure. I believe that it was the changes made by my colleagues that enabled mine to work, so it was very much a team effort.
"We were all very excited to hear that we had helped to find the answer to this crystal form, especially since it had been outstanding so long and other methods had been unsuccessful. The feeling of having done something that could make a significant contribution to research in this field is very special and unexpected. Foldit players have achieved a number of successes so far, and I hope we will go on to make many more.
"You may be aware that we asked for accreditation for the Foldit Contenders Team within the article, rather than being named individually.
"Many of the people playing the game are known only by their user name, even within a team.
"I would be grateful if you could refer to me as 'mimi' rather than using my full name."
Update for 12:45 p.m. ET Sept. 20: I've added an MSNBC video about the Foldit project, and I've also heard back via email from another one of the Contenders, a player known as "Bletchley Park":
"We are all very excited about the discovery, to see the story unfold now is very gratifying. The main motivator of the Contenders group, and most Foldit players for that matter, is the advancement of science. It is very typical for mimi not to have her real name listed or even to claim the discovery as her own.
"Contenders is a group of like-minded individuals. The strength lies in comradeship, cooperation and perseverance. Most of us have been 'folding' for several hours each day over the past years.
"To be part of this adventure is a very fulfilling experience. Quite a few of us have or have had family members who suffered from the modern terminal diseases and find energy in those experiences to keep folding with the intention to make a difference."
More games for science:
- Play a game and engineer real RNA
- Fight disease by playing a game
- Xbox's Kinect could improve surgery
- Help scientists decipher a 'lost' gospel
- Join a worldwide planet search
- Look for icy worlds over the Internet
- Still more research games from Zooniverse
- SETI @ home and much more from BOINC
In addition to Khatib, DiMaio, Cooper, Popovic and the Foldit Contenders Group, the authors of "Crystal Structure of a Monomeric Retroviral Protease Solved by Protein Folding Game Players" include the Foldit Void Crushers Group, Maciej Kazmierczyk, Miroslaw Gilski, Szymon Krzywda, Helena Zabranska, Iva Pichova, James Thompson, Mariusz Jaskolski and David Baker. The authors also acknowledged "the members of the Foldit team for their help designing and developing the game and all the Foldit players and Rosetta @ home volunteers who have made this work possible."
The work was supported by UW's Center for Game Science, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the Czech Ministry of Education, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Microsoft Corp. (Msnbc.com is a joint venture involving Microsoft and NBC Universal.) Foldit was created by computer scientists at the Center for Game Science in collaboration with the UW's Baker Laboratory.
Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding me to your Google+ circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
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Think that's cool? The computer gaming market has (Through graphics processors) been the driving force in chipsets that make better, more efficient supercomputers than anything the top-down-driven eggheads have been able to manage.
You can't beat the free market for pushing the development envelope.
*Recently
Before that it took government money (pooled taxpayer money), eggheads and bureaucratic to push the boundaries on something that might not have any payout. After the idea reached a stage where it was marketable, the free market ran with it and made it a thousand times better rather quickly.
To say one or the other method of development is the better is short-sighted at best; most ideas, tools, and procedures we use took multiple approaches, investments, and attempts to get to the stage we have them today.
this is clearly not the free market, though. It was not driven by money. If people pursue answers and new technologies for the sake of interest and the work itself, it's actually a lot closer to marx...
Niel Degrasse Tyson made an awesome point about how gov. funded programs like NASA form the scaffolding for business to build upon. There was no profit made to get someone into space the first time or to the moon, but proving the concept itself was a big pay off to the nation as a whole. Programs like NASA provide the path of least resistance for business because it is in the vested interest of a nation of people as a whole than a personal preferance of a brand.
The government created the internet, not private business. They identified the need and invented it.
Private business never could have built the Hoover Dam, coordinated technology advances needed to win WW2, or taken us to the moon.
Private business did the work, but have always needed big brother to give them direction and a helping hand.
No, the government did not create the internet, it was created initially by the academic community for the sharing of information between colleges and universities.
No, the government did create the internet. ARPA created it as a response to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik to deal with the technological blow the US received as a result of the launch.
Leftyd that was the first civilian use of networking, but the backbone of the internet has always been the military's ARPANet.
far too many people fail to realize the importance of government funded research as an incubator for technologies that are considered too risky or too expensive for the private sector to invest in. these technologies, not all of which will prove to be effective, are transferred to the private sector to run with once the concept is proven.
The same effort that has been put into the space program should be put into video games... GPGPU computing through augmented reality, social play, and simulation - the next few decades of innovation will no doubt derive from the industry (already beating hollywood revenues)...
Far too many people are dependant on government. Which is exactly the opposite intent our founding fathers had.
How can people think the government knows what it's doing when it can't even balance a budget?
Bobby Jones Bia
Our founding fathers also thought that the wealthy large land owner aristocracy should have soul voting rights as only property owners could vote and depending on your servants free or slaved your vote was stronger.
And you probably think Aberham Lincoln was a founding father.
To the post of the thread: This was a game. No money changed hands. Nothing was bought or sold. It was entertainment. And this social experiment would be more closely be related to Marxism. They were doing it because they felt it would be fun, their own desire to be challenged, they're competing not for profit, but just for fun, in fact they may lose profit in the process, their opportunity cost could have been spent maximizing real profit. There wasn't any profit motive for the game players.
The Internet certainly appeared as both the DARPAnet and the InterLibraray Loan system. I used both from 1979-1984 as a researcher in the field of human perception (auditory perception was my focus) at Syracuse University. Bob Metcalfe, (one of my real life heros) is known as the co-inventor of the Internet for his pioneering work inventing the Ethernet protocol by refining several other protocols such as tcp-ip.
www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/metcalfe.html
www.wired.com/wired/archive//6.11/metcalfe_pr.html - A great in depth interview
Please, no jokes about Al Gore- that "attribute" has flown the coop long ago!
Whats up with the comments about free market and government. This was a collaberative effort by interested people. This doesn't have anything to do with the regulation of buying and selling goods and this doesn't have anything to do with the freaking founding fathers. Somewhere, someone came up with the idea that maybe this could help look for an anwser. And they were right. If this leads to more Foldit players, who can solve other important protien problems, then good.
"Aberham"?....Really?!
Bobby Jones,
Actually read US economic history if you wish to decipher the Founders intent and if you do so for 30 or 35 years you are likely to find out that their intentions were as or more varied than they are today. The basic divisions of Federalist and Democratic Republican are convienent but not all defining. The Founders decided on the Federalist model with Washington, a Federalist at the head of the government. The ratification of the Constitution was an exercise in Federalism and the only opposition came from those who saw the new country as an agrarian experiment. Both Federalists and Democratic Republicans were overwhelmingly liberal espousing the values of the Enlightenment. From the Whiskey Rebellion on the primacy of the Federal Government was established and affirmed by the Supreme Court. Seeing as how the original Supremes and those following for about 20 years were the Founders or served in the Revolution including George Washingtons heir Bushrod Washington. For the next fifty years they used the Federal Treasury to build bridges, turnpikes, canals and railroads the hero of the American right Thomas Jefferson exercised extreme Federalism in the Louisiana Purchase and then the damn socialist and his followers gave it away.
Get a clue my friend
jkh
I heard this molecular puzzle was going to be one of the Riddler's Challenges in Batman: Arkham City...
Guess they'll have to come up with something else now.
To me this is what the Internet is supposed to be ! Gamers think outside of the box. This method of solving problems has incredible potential. This gives a whole new meaning to parallel processing. I know that many people have been involved for years donating part of their computer's processing power toward solving this or that problem, but this entirely novel. My hats off the the Gamers who participated in this problem solving venture. And please - this really has nothing to do with Obama, Bush, politics, religion or the like!
There have been a lot of similar examples in mathematics where some optimal solution to a problem: routing, organizing elements of a matrix, coloring graphs. Some of these problems have been worked on by millions of people for hundreds of years, each competing to find the best solution in some well-defined sense. These problems seem to me very similar to the folding problem discussed.
One of the things mathematicians have learned from such efforts over many years: often, the "best" solution found by these methods turns out in the end NOT to be the best or maybe even correct solution.
My point is: 1. This sort of thing is NOT NEW. It is thousands of years old. 2. Anyone who blindly accepts that this method produces the correct, optimal solution will be in for a very very big surprise. Maybe not for this problem, for for some similar one and many others.
"Crowdsourcing" does not work the way the mindless, greedy, free-market teabagging nitwits want you to believe it does.
@Renee - I would like to know what type of scientific or mathematical accomplishments you've made in your lifetime, since you feel the need to post such a negative opinion about this one.
I think the idea that gamers are better than scientists, or that science is so easy anybody can do it, would be the exact wrong lesson to take away. Doing science is really, really hard. But scientists can come up with tools, such as Foldit, that can let gamers and other folks participate in the scientific adventure. And that's really, really cool. I do wonder whether some politicians might eventually point to this as an example of "taxpayers' money being spent to play games." That would be an exactly wrong conclusion as well.
Ah yes. Thanks Renee for showing your liberal colors, you mindless emotion driven liberal Demwit trainwreck. God you basket cases on the left are pathetic hate-filled wretches.
It's on both sides get over yourself. The mere fact you took what one person said to JUDGE all others shows more about yourself then anything else.
Yes Mike it's on both sides. But unfortunately, the majority of the hate and vitriol (and lies) comes from the left these days and targets anyone they don't agree with. Kinda ironic for an ideology that is supposed to be diverse and tolerant of others methinks...
I think the term "free market" in itself would have to be corrected would it not.
So which problem you know, that millions have been working on for hundreds of years? Name that, I'm curious.
An it always sad that people are so fast to find something to blame "teabaggers" or "liberals" on. As if those labels had some well defined meaning.
Hmm, I hate to see this turn into a Tea Party vs. liberal argument ... If things get out of hand I'm going to start trash-canning further comments.
Well, this is certainly an interesting direction for science, used in other fields nowadays as well, such as astronomical searches involving tens of thousands of amateur astronomers and their home computers. And I suspect that both 'left' and 'right' of the political spectrum can let loose with erroneous diatribes and Science should steer clear of such extremes. But I disagree with Alan, science is not 'hard', just very in-depth; but even 'beginners' can have success at developing advances in many areas.
Alan: I agree. If they don't stop it, I'm gonna pull this blog over...turn it around, and we'll all just go back home right this minute. No pool!! No Ice cream!!
Unfortunately for me, I cannot even comprehend what most of you are talking about. But, being a person who believes that we should go where no man has gone before, I hope you gamers take this world and create a friendly place to live.
Alan, I agree this is not libral or T/P, but very fastionating for someone like me. Polictics are hateful, but this... WOW (no not World of Warcraft).
i dont think Renee is saying that gamers are exactly better than scientist, he's just saying that sometimes u need to think outside of the box of what you learned in order to make more creative descitions. since gamers haven't learned mcuh about this kind of science they are able to do just that. Renee is simply saying that this has been a fact for over a thousand years not that gamers are better,
I don't really see this as gamers vs. scientist as much as I see it as human intelligence vs. computer intelligence. The scientists needed more hours to be dedicated to the problem, and computer processors weren't getting it done, so they designed a "game" to allow people to put their wits up against a challenge. They turned a few hundred brain hours into thousands and got the job done.
HOORAY, HUMANS!!
Gamers save the world again.
First Zombies, now this. Awesome!
Unless of course you are playing "Thermonuclear War". I'll stick to tic-tac-toe...
It would seem that the limiting factor is the ability of gaming software to model whatever challenge is to 'gamed'. Technically, I think the ability of crowd-sourcing/gaming as a way to find solutions has been fairly well-proven. Look at how accurately betting sites are able to predict election outcomes.
Great article! (Thumbup smilie)
Wow! or WOW. Way to go gamers!
gamers 1 science 0 xD and they say video games roy your brain HA!
Except that the game article failed to mention that this game was designed and hosted by scientists. :P
I hope the fact that the game was designed and hosted by scientists came through, thanks to the multiple references in the article to the designers and creators of the game. If not, I'll underline it here: This game was designed and hosted by scientists. In fact, some of the game players are scientists as well.
I'll concede Alan. A good scientist needs to have efficient speed-reading skills. As a still burgeoning scientist, mine apparently still need some work. :)
In case you didn't know; all computer developers are scientists, mathematicians, and engineers in our own right. When we develop solutions, games, or utility software we always consult the experts in that field so we can create the most accurate and realistic virtual representation of the real world within your computer.
Do you like Call of Duty? Well those guys had an entire team of consultants from the military that they worked with to get every detail right in the carrying out of military operations. There was also a team of physicists to ensure that the games physics engine accurately modeled bullet trajectories and other aspects of the physical world.
We are scientists of a different breed. We are subject to understanding all forms of scientific endeavour. Our strength lies in our ability to understandthese scientific concepts as explained to us by the subject experts, and then interpret those concepts into a virtual realm where anyone can leverage that knowledge with the click of a button.
To state that "this game was designed and hosted by scientists" really does nothing to discredit the accomplishments of these gamers. The fact remains that the gaming community succeeded in ten days where the general scientific community has failed for the last ten years. All the "scientists" did was create a tool that held all of the knowledge for how to do the work; allowing otherwise unintelligible individuals to step in and utilize the intellect of the tool to create.
9 deleted, Politics Suck pro-AIDS-trolling. You're suspended for a day for violating #5 of the Code of Honor.
Such as fornication, promiscuity, adultery?
Good news, everyone!
Extra points for Futurama reference.
haha Excellent!
And bonus points to Mr. Boyle for knowing a Futurama quote! There's hope for journalism yet...
Many people don't realize that the gaming market generates more revenue than even Hollywood. While you won't be seeing any PhD's coming out of Call Of Duty, thinking outside the Xbox is a good thing.
Two heads are better than one. Add any exponent, and the results become better yet.
That theory is only true until politics and egos become involved. My rule of thumb is the collective intelligence of any committee is the highest IQ of any member of that committee divided by the number of feet.
Scientists seem to have a slightly better success rate of putting aside the egos and politics, because the good ones only care about getting the answer instead of caring about which answer.
Kids these days are learning way more complex ideas than we did, just look at any complex RPG game and the math skills it takes and then remember what you were playing with as a kid.(really speaking to 40+ but not exclusively)
Isn't this how Eli got involved in the Stargate Program? :P
If only money/resources were not a factor in finding a cure to save sick and dying people.
Amazing story. This really demonstrates the power of games and gamification to re-imagine how things can be done and solve major problems. We created the Gamification Wiki to document things like this, we added this story to the wiki:)
Silly article. It makes scientists look like idiots, when in fact this game was created by scientists with the express intent of using the responses of the players to solve molecular problems.
Actually, I think it makes the scientists look like pretty smart folks who realize that they could use help from the general public (or the game-playing public) every once in a while. And who figured out a cool way to take advantage of that. If this article makes scientists look like idiots, you're not reading the same article I intended to write.
agreed you can win by doing it all yourself and get all the credit. However it takes a trully enlightened and humble person to admit they cant figure it out and ask everyone. The computing power of everyone is very very large so why not use it.
Actually, the article was quite clear: the scientists realized that they might be able to solve the problem by using "wet computing" (like that? I just made it up) - the collective minds of a large group of people. They accessed this collective mind via the game, and it worked.
"Wet Computing" yes I like that! I am going to use that.
This is so cool! I see the power of massed intellects pursuing a goal that requires a high degree of figuring-out. Bravo and congratulations to all the sharp thinkers out there!
Now the question is who is going to claim this and make billions off the research that they got for free? Not like I'm complaining as I think this is a wonderful way to solve complex problems. I do hope this method expands into many more fields of interest with humanity being the benificiary. I just think that if you make a discovery like this then the minds behind it should make the money or even better let the profits go into the public trust of the respective countries involved.
I hope the Foldit Contender's Team relaxes a bit and allows the team members' true names to be reported. They at least deserve name recognition for the very significant advance they have made.
In this case, it was the team's decision to go with teamwide recognition. It sounds as if some of the team members, including mimi, would prefer not to have their names revealed ... for whatever reason.
For over 12 years, online, I have been {DvT}Hex. If you were to search Google for my real name and common variants such as my initials and last name, my first, middle, and last name, first and last name only, diminuatives of my first name, etc., as nearly as I can determine, you would find only 3 references that actually have anything to do with me...and all 3 of these date back to the early 1970's.
Why? For one thing, read the comments here: "scientists are clever," "scientists are stupid;" "this shows how dumb liberals are," "this could not be done by private industry" ... 2 morons read the same article and come to opposite conclusions. I prefer to have personnel managers and other nosey types come up empty when searching for the real-life me on-line. Just like any other internet users, as a faceless group, they cannot be trusted to view what they see for what it is, without injecting their own agenda.
I am {DvT}Hex on-line and if I were part of this group, I would be adamant about having the teamwide recognition and on-line names used when crediting the contribution. My position would be that we did it as a team and we did under our on-line monikers and that is how it should be credited. Credit the people who did the work and the work was done by the on-line avatars. Ask the members of the team who contributed and your answer will be something like, "Well, let's see, there was mimi..."
Good point. You can read the full list of Contenders contributors on their webpage, but in addition to mimi, two other players were mentioned in the NSMB paper: spvincent and grabhorn. Congrats to the Contenders. The Void Crushers were mentioned because they were the top-scorers in a different competition discussed in the paper.
It is unfortunate to say that in 2011 we are still calling AIDS a retrovirus or even a virus for that matter!!!! AIDS is NOT a retrovirus. HIV is. AIDS is not a tangible thing. It is not a disease. It is having a HISTORY of a collection of diseases. AIDS cannot be cured because it is a t-cell count and just a word that is typed on a piece of paper, then put in a file. To cure AIDS you should get some white-out. Lets try and call things as they are. Gamers blah blah...HIV.
I hope that this is just the beginning and that all future difficult science questions can obtain their answers this way! It's absolutely marvelous.
If we can just get the germs to play more games and stop pestering us, then we'll really be in shape
power to the masses a true democratic feel good story. This one needs to be put on the tele. I think one day there will be a free market and it will work. Not yet cause we aren't ready but things like this remind me that your right you cant get things for free..... unless there totally awesome ie comodo firewall, avast antivirus, enzyme solving leet nerds. When ppl do things cause they have a passion they do such a better job than for money. Only question is how do you get ppl to do the jobs know one wants to do?
Here is the simple solution to the AIDS epidemic in the USA. About half of all HIV infections in the USA are caused by male / male sexual intercourse. In descending order the bulk of the rest are caused by recreational IV drug use and sexual intercourse with male recreational IV drug users. All other causes combined contribute less thab 10% of HIV infections in the USA. Stopping AIDS in the USA is ridiculously simple. Don't participate in the activities that spread the epidemic.
Where's the sport in that?
Bob, the facts are so non-politically correct.
My husband was diagnosed with a rare lymphoma 3 years ago, he was first misdiagnosed with HIV. The western blot on the HIV test came up positive because of the characteristics of the true diagnosis: Waldenstrom Macroglobulinemia. He is monogamous and never used IV drugs. He had a blood transfusion at a hospital in Augusta, GA, the same hospital that had used contaminated equipment and spread HIV to a young boy, who had a law suit filed against them. Before we found out he really didn't have HIV, but WM instead, don't you think we were thinking he was contamintated too ? So the factors you describe for transmission did not apply to my husband and yet we thought he had HIV. Even being in the 10% is still a life and death issue, it is still a reason for curing this disease. I lost countless nights of sleep wondering if the hospital was responsible. When someone you love might die from a disease, the way it was transmitted just doesn't matter, their life is what matters. Even if they fell under your 10% rule.
So you're telling gay men to not have sex? You do understand that they are attracted to men right? How would you like it if someone told you to stop having sex with women?
That is the stupidist thing I ever heard! A 19 yr old young lady in my region contracted HIV from a young man that did not shoot drugs and was not gay. She was a virgin having sex for the first time. Where did you get these ridiculous numbers from? This is my job, to teach others about HIV and AIDS. You never know what someone else is doing. You can have sex with your wife next week and contract HIV if she cheated on you with someone that had the disease. Explain how to avoid that. Abstinence?
Ah, excellent! Congratulations to the gamers! Not to steal anyone's thunder, but it reminds me of the time I was playing rock 'em sock 'em robots, when suddenly I was on the receiving end of a surprisingly strong uppercut (and I must interject, I harbor no ill will toward the red robot who was behind this). When I came to, I had the most amazing epiphany on how to create a 6 dimensional counter-clockwise spinning timespace vortex by which my own Wormhole Generator (temporarily called the iHole for the time being whilst I negotiate with Apple) might be actuated. Well, to make a long story short, here I am in the distant past, conversing with you fine people! I remember it all, as if it only happened tomorrow! Unfortunately, clockwise vortices are even harder, so I might be here awhile. Anyways, my main point was congratulations to the gamers. And I implore you, please stay away from a game called "Global Thermonuclear War". Trust me, that's gonna be a mess. Also, one more note to my future self: stay away from Christine, she's bad news.