"...potentially serve as a novel and effective platform toward curing AIDS."
Researchers are usually quite conservative and the media are usually the ones to sensationalize titles. Given the above quote, this is likely a major step forward.
Researchers are usually quite conservative and the media are usually the ones to sensationalize titles. Given the above quote, this is likely a major step forward.
Sure my work could be extended in that direction, but I had done zero work to pursue it.
But I would say that "selling the science" occurs more often for high-profile journals because the authors need to convince the reviewers that the paper has a significant impact. Papers in more field-specific journals tend to write conservatively.
This is 2007 - doing this again with CRISPR is, frankly, just using a flashy new toolkit. The fundamental problems with gene therapy remain and are, as usual, the major hurdle to any of this shit being effective. It's easy to edit genomes in a dish; doing it in the human body is orders of magnitude harder.
From a layman's point of view: isn't that exactly what HIV does in the first place, only faster? As I understand it, on initial infection there can be a major immune response, causing skin rashes or worse.