toward the cure

May the force be with them. Hope and pray for the success of this undertaking. Take note: News piece is dated July 12, 2011. Very recent.

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'Hutch' gets $20 million grant to develop HIV cure

Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center has been awarded a $20 million federal grant to study whether HIV could be cured by modifying an infected person's stem cells, part of a larger strategy by Hutch scientists to combat the virus that leads to AIDS.

By Roberto Daza
Seattle Times staff reporter

Altering an HIV-infected person's stem cells not just to combat the virus that causes AIDS, but to eradicate it was — to many researchers — a pipe dream. Even the idea of a cure, while in the forefront of their minds, was thought improbable.

But a cure is exactly what Seattle's Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center will be pursuing with a $20 million, five-year research grant announced Monday by the National Institutes of Health.

dusting off

Atticus said that Jem was trying hard to forget something, but what he was really doing was storing it away for a while, until enough time passed. Then he would be able to think about it and sort things out. When he was able to think about it, Jem would be himself again.

It was the needed paragraph that got me off the hook from reading early morning yesterday. I thought the night was too late for me to continue to finish Harper Lee's book. But it's hard to put down a good book like that unless a universality was lent into words which will wring your head for the dumbfounding truth it evoked. And that was that.

Chapter 26 was fine for the night. I had to stop there. I had to stop not because the clock was warning me but because what Scout quoted from her father (Atticus) about her brother (Jem) resonated an abstraction of reality that I needed to be reminded of, a passage I had to dwell on.

spaced out

Few days back, I just turned 23. This time, I invited my college friends—a bunch of book lovers and level-headed ladies who long before realizing it, had already shattered their rose-colored glasses. Over chicken lollipops and gravied meat, they made me recount a romantic encounter. And in unison that spaced me out, their verdict was: "It wasn't love."

I didn't ask them if something's wrong with me. I knew the answer beforehand. But they all knew, as we most are, that love for me isn't spelled just how other construct it.

by the ear

He sat surely on a white monobloc chair while intimating a story to the doctor. He just died. Suddenly died, he said. The doctor looked appalled. There was a wave of disbelief that etched on her face.

But being a man (or woman, at that) of science, she made her position known. But your friend could have been saved, the doctor said. You think he has AIDS already? The man seemed quizzed, and hinted affirmation.

The nurse suddenly butt in: Paano nangyari? The man tried to review the pages of his memory.

superbug strain

Scientists find first superbug strain of gonorrhoea
KATE KELLAND, Reuters

LONDON — Scientists have found a "superbug" strain of gonorrhoea in Japan that is resistant to all recommended antibiotics and say it could transform a once easily treatable infection into a global public health threat.

The new strain of the sexually transmitted disease — called H041 — cannot be killed by any currently recommended treatments for gonorrhoea, leaving doctors with no other option than to try medicines so far untested against the disease.

laced water

For the sake of purgation, I will tell you how I planned to kill myself.

The first few weeks after receiving the "news" was my vulnerable point. I was lost, confused, afraid and traumatized rolled into one. The first sentence that always crop up in my mind just as I opened my eyes to greet the new day was: "I'm sick...forever."

Given my volatile emotions, devious bordering on the genocidal thoughts entered my head. I thought of suicide. I knew that I had the capacity to end all my misery if I would take my life into my own hands.