Victor Porton's Personal Weblog

I expect that professional biologists have considered this idea already, but who may know, I will tell my theory, if it is indeed new it is valuable.

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Here is my theory why the AIDS virus has long (many years) incubation period.

I suppose that lymphocytes know (either from genetic pre-knowledge, or from a few first failed attempts about which the knowledge is distributed to other lymphocytes) that they cannot successfully eat the virus of AIDS and so it is potentially dangerous for them. (I recall that AIDS viruses instead of being successfully eaten by lymphocytes infect lymphocytes themselves and force them to produce several new viruses.)

Because of this lymphocytes refuse to eat AIDS viruses.

However either because some lymphocytes (by mistake) indeed attack AIDS viruses and in these cases the virus wins, or because AIDS infects other kinds of cell except of lymphocytes, the number of the viruses in the blood slowly increases.

As the number of the viruses becomes so big that lymphocytes notice that these objects are many, lymphocytes so to say feel the danger for the organism and begin to attack the viruses which leads to even more quantity of the viruses. So the incubation period ends.

Also on an other issue: Why AIDS is specialized on attacking lymphocytes and does not attack all kinds of the human cells from the beginning? My guess is the following:

If AIDS would attack all kinds of cells on its way then, in my opinion, the organism would easily overcome this virus by T-cells destroying the infected cells.

But I suppose that a lymphocyte infected by AIDS virus while this lymphocyte remains alive becomes an enemy which may attack T-cells or at least prevent T-cells to kill them. (Most other kinds of human cells are not armed with weapons and cannot resist T-cells, but lymphocytes probably can.) So T-cells could not successfully war with the infected lymphocytes. It may be the reason why AIDS chooses to infect namely lymphocytes.

Then the cure against AIDS may be something which would decrease activity of lymphocytes (so that they would become unable to resist against T-cells) but yet would left lymphocytes enough functional to eat viruses. Also something which would cause lymphocytes to eat anything even dangerous for them things may probably be a components for the anti-AIDS medicine, it may be something which in greater doses causes leukemia.

All this can be rather easily modeled with mathematical modeling. I am too busy with other deals to do this, but in my model there are nothing complex, so I expect any institute can do this. So continue this research without my help.