In December, I posted about Timothy Ray Brown who has been dubbed “The Berlin Patient” by the medical community, and is said to have been purged of HIV infection via genetically-engineered stem cells.
Veteran SF CBS reporter Hank Plante, who covered the early years of the AIDS epidemic, talks to Brown in his first television interview.
Brown’s amazing progress continues to be monitored by doctors at San Francisco General Hospital and at the University of California at San Francisco medical center.
“I’m cured of HIV. I had HIV but I don’t anymore,” he said, using words that many in the scientific community are cautiously clinging to.
Scientists said Brown received stem cells from a donor who was immune to HIV. In fact, about one percent of Caucasians are immune to HIV. Some researchers think the immunity gene goes back to the Great Plague: people who survived the plague passed their immunity down and their heirs have it today.
Watch, AFTER THE JUMP…
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