Originally posted by onlyinmydreams
Byrd,
as a man who critiques the scientific standards of others on this board, surely you understand that this article is too short and vague..
Mea culpa. I picked that one because it was in plain English rather than the original papers and evidences which would put you to sleep in six
seconds and would be fairly incomprehensible without a good background.
In one or two sentences, the authors talk about gene splicing through ingestion (!?)... now, doesn't that seem rushed to a man of science like
yourself???
It's a web article. They have word length limits for articless that they accept. They gloss over techniques and explainations, assuming that their
audience is savvy enough to google unfamiliar terms. The focus of the article wasn't the methodology but the results.
Yes, Newscientist is a cool sciencemag, but this article is far from explaining the origing of HIV. If I've misread the under-tones of this
article, please correct me
It gave a good and concise "smoking gun" evidence for the ancient origin of the disease. This is something that scientists have been pursuing ever
since it was discovered that the disease crossed from other anthropoids into men. Because the anthropoids didn't die off from it, the search for
possible cures is in that genetic lineage.
I frequently complain that belief in the incredible blinds folks to reality. The "illuminati created it" ignores a lot of research and evidence,
including good evidence that it's been in the anthropod lineage for years, that outbreaks of it HAVE occurred many times in the past (but were
contained because it's not that infectuous (not everyone having sex gets it)) and that the disease exists in a number of monkeys and apes.
...but I'm getting into the Epidemiology 101 lecture here, and I'll stop. (I get too tempted by epidemiology topics; my research papers for my
first Masters' were in epidemiology, and one of my first grant requests for my PhD in medical anthropology (which I start this fall... I"m nuts, I
tell ya... NUTS! (because I'll be working full time at my regular job AND getting the degree so I can change careers in 6 years)) will be for a
retrospective epidemiology study on missionary families.)