Word: variants
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...finding five years in the making. Virologist Robin Weiss of University College London began to study the relevant receptor in 2003, after seeing earlier research that showed how variation in another gene similarly blocked the receptor that allows HIV to enter white blood cells; far fewer people carry that variant. In the lab, Weiss found that the African-specific receptor, called DARC, or duffy antigen receptor for chemokines, also interacted with HIV: the receptor binds to a wide array of proteins that suppress the virus's replication. Intrigued, but unable to explain why the lack of the receptor increased...
There's no doubt Africans have borne the brunt of the AIDS epidemic. Now researchers in London and Texas say it may have something to do with a single gene variant that could account for 11%, or about 2.5 million, of Africa's HIV cases...
Published in the journal Cell Host & Microbe, the findings center around one gene variation that blocks a receptor from being expressed on the surface of red blood cells. Scientists had previously studied this genetic variant - found almost exclusively in Africans and their descendants - because it also conferred protection against an early form of malaria. (The malaria parasite needed the receptor to infect blood cells; without the receptor, the parasite starved and died.) More than 90% of sub-Saharan Africans lack the red-blood-cell receptor, along with two-thirds of African-Americans. But the variant that once saved its carriers...
...Remember, these are the people whose critical enthusiasm raised Alfred Hitchcock from genre master to world master. Indeed, you could argue that Tell No One is a variant on one of Hitchcock's favorite themes: the running man whose story no one (except us in the audience) believes. These fictions, of course, depend for their success on the French respect for rationalism (and their horror when reason is torn asunder by criminal irrationality). They are also greatly enhanced by the firm, but casually stated, French respect for life's realities. A drama like Tell No One takes place against...
...book - some below the belt, many studded with expletives - it's probably unwise to expect Houellebecq to accept her terms to a truce. Her account of her earlier life as a wandering, post-war version of a New Age-ist doesn't really differ from Houellebecq's variant of how and why Ceccaldi left him with his grandmother. Where they differ most is in analyzing the consequences of her decision...