By a fortuitous twist of genetic fate, a small percentage of humans, roughly one in 100, are able to resist infection to HIV. Wouldn’t it be even more fortuitous if one of these exceptional people, prized by scientists as walking exemplars of what a therapy might ultimately accomplish, happened to be an AIDS researcher as well? Meet James Hoxie, director of the Penn Center for AIDS Research at the University of Pennsylvania.
“I give lots of blood and still do,” Hoxie says in his office, surround by tropical plants, books, and diagrams of viral envelope proteins. “I think I’ve been asked to give seminars at places just so people could bleed me,” he laughs.
Hoxie didn’t know he was a carrier for the crucial mutation until he had been elbow-deep into AIDS research for years. Since the mid-1980s researchers, including Hoxie’s group, had been hunting for the coreceptor on CD4 ...
