New Initiative to Take HIV Down for the Count The U.S. National
Institutes Health is set to dole out $70 million in a new push
to find ways to eliminate HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, from
the bodies of people living with the virus, reported Science on
July 11. The money will go to three projects over the next five
years. It represents the largest single funding initiative aimed
at scrubbing the virus from the human body. HIV is difficult to
root out of all of the body’s tissues. The virus can lie dormant
in hard-to-reach places until years later. For this reason, it
had long been thought that there might never be a way to
completely eradicate the virus from a person who had become
infected. But the case of Timothy Brown, an American survivor of
a bone marrow transplant to treat leukemia who seemingly was
cured of the disease as a result, had caused scientists to
reconsider. Brown was given marrow from a donor with a natural
resistance to HIV. To receive the donated tissue, Brown needed
to stop taking his H