[extropy-chat] magic johnson, aids, longevity ...

[ben]

Martin Striz wrote:

>> If antibiotic cocktails are not a good idea, why is this, exactly?

> Because creating stronger selection pressures increases the rate of 
> evolution, in this case, of resistant strains.

Um, then why does it work against HIV?

If this is right, then given the extremely fast rate of mutation in HIV,
multi-drug therapy should fail. It should make HIV stronger. I don't
think it's quite accurate to say that stronger selection pressures
increase the rate of evolution. At the most, this would only be true up
to a certain point. If the selection pressure became TOO strong, nothing
would be able to adapt fast enough, and the organism would die off.

So, for either bacteria or viruses, the way to avoid resistant strains
arising would be to hit them hard enough, from enough different
directions, that they had no chance of adapting.

It might be possible to devise a treatment strategy that traps the
disease organism in an evolutionary local maximum, then changes the
landscape so that the only way to survive is to leap to another peak,
which is too far away for natural evolution to manage in a few steps.

If we had 3 or 4 such treatments for any one organism, we could keep it
at bay indefinitely, by switching treatments periodically. Any new
strain would develop from the wild population, and have no evolutionary
memory of the previously treated ones (cos they're all dead), so there
would be no adaptation to this strategy over time.

There's bound to be a catch with this idea, isn't there?

ben
---
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: those who understand Ternary,
  those who don't, and those who are just showing off.