Scientist as Subject

By a fortuitous twist of genetic fate, a small percentage of humans, roughly one in 100, are able to resist infection to HIV.

kerry grens
| 3 min read

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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 ...

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Meet the Author

  • kerry grens

    Kerry Grens

    Kerry served as The Scientist’s news director until 2021. Before joining The Scientist in 2013, she was a stringer for Reuters Health, the senior health and science reporter at WHYY in Philadelphia, and the health and science reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio. Kerry got her start in journalism as a AAAS Mass Media fellow at KUNC in Colorado. She has a master’s in biological sciences from Stanford University and a biology degree from Loyola University Chicago.

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