Science lesson: You can never tell

From the New Zealand Herald: "Aussie Scientists Stumble Across HIV Therapy"

Australian scientists have accidentally stumbled upon a simple way to dramatically stimulate immunity to deadly viruses like HIV in what's considered a major discovery in the fight against Aids. <snip> Associate Professor Kent said the researchers had initially set out to devise a test to judge how well an animal's immune system could fight HIV.

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They extracted blood from vaccinated laboratory animals and then coated the cells with HIV peptide markers - which tell the immune system a cell is infected by the virus. When they injected the peptide-coated blood back into the animals - to create the illusion the cells were infected by HIV even though they weren't - they found it triggered a huge immune response.

So far, it works in rats and monkeys. Human trials are a couple of years off. The same technique shows promise against other chronic infections. I suspect it might also be effective against some cancers.

I predicted, when AIDS first started appearing, that curing it would wind up teaching us lots of stuff about the immune system – stuff that would lead to cures for all kinds of other ailments. It looks like this is going to be one of those spin-offs.

One thing that's very common in science is that researchers looking for one thing will trip over another, even more important, discovery. History is filled with accounts of this sort of serendipity, which ought to warn people that pouring money into directed research programs may not be the best way to solve particular problems.