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Didn't the double mutation give you immunity to the plague in Europe too? Unfortunately if you survived and your village did not, you were obviously a witch and summarily burned at the stake.

My understanding is that it has negligible side effects other than some good immunities. If you run into a conspiracy type person it's a great rabbit hole to send them down. Mention HIV is probably a conspiracy and an elite group of people are immune to it. =)

Not necessarily, as population bottlenecks sometimes concentrate a random mutation in a population.

The gene might also be beneficial in some other way we don't yet understand.

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Yes. In fact, in some ways it's already been done. Back in the early 60s Dr Jose Delgado did experiments with brain implants. In his most famous experiment, he implanted a radio receiver into the brain of a bull wired to very precise locations in the bull's brain.

The result was that he could get into the ring with that bull, get it mad enough to charge him like in a bullfight, press a button and make the bull totally lose interest in charging.

Basically, he could use a remote control to turn off anger.

In I.T. circles there is an old adage "always mount a scratch monkey". But not everyone knows its origin. Back in the late 70s, U of Toronto researchers had a monkey trained to swim, use a scuba breath regulator and so on. Mable the monkey also had many electrodes implanted in her brain so they could record the signals that her autonomic system created.

Note that this was research using 70s era hardware and a lot of kludged together signal amplifiers and processors all feeding into basically a mini mainframe in another room.

At some point, the computer Mable was hooked up to developed a fault. The manufacturer field technician got there and ran some diagnostic tests against the hard disk. However, this also meant the same diagnostic commands were also being amplified and fed into Mable's brain.

They basically tried to run a format and reinstall on a monkey's brain stem. Mable died in a massive seizure.

More recently, there have been several efforts to help paraplegics walk again by bypassing the damaged part of their spine. Think splicing a broken wire with a patch cord. Some approaches use wires and chips, others try growing new nerves and implanting them at the site of the injury. There has been just enough success to justify further research but not a complete cure.

So from a hardware perspective, we totally could remotely control another person. But getting the exact spot, would be enormously challenging. Achieving coordinated movement would take a huge jump in technique. About the best we could do mentally is turn moods on or off. We don't know enough about cognition to actually change thought.

Now; as for the challenge of controlling a dead body. Luigi Galvani back in the 1700s successfully made severed frog legs twitch and jump in response to an electric impulse. But a key fact is that he was using very recently killed frogs in his experiments. (Publication of his results was a big part of the inspiration for Frankenstein)

But muscle movement is not a purely electrical phenomenon. Electric signals act as the catalyst for chemical reactions. Some of these chemicals get used up with each movement. Living tissue just replenishes them. (A supply of oxygen and glucose is crucial) ALL of the chemicals involved start to degrade after death. Within a very short time, the chemicals no longer respond to electrical stimulation.

This is why it is physically impossible for zombies from dead bodies to exist. Zombies as living beings infected with a sentience destroying disease is at least possible, albeit wildly improbable, at least as an overnight phenomenon.

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If the same amount material is use I would assume that a sphere is structurally far stronger. There is a reason that spheres and its derivatives ( hemispheres) are widely used in structurally demanding applications ( think deep see diving).

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If the force was applied evenly across the surface of the object, sphere all day. If the force was applied from only one point, for exempt from above, I'm inclined to think a cube would be stronger as the force would be concentrated on a single point on the sphere which would compromise it's structure.

Would that indicate a large population crash in “pre-history” caused by HIV? Leaving only those with the CCR5 mutation to repopulate? That would indicate that HIV has been around for a very long time and have big historical implications.

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I'm sure we do make many choices, some of them quite consciously, that affect the way we speak.

A little late to the party on this post but I work in this industry so I wanted to reply since it doesn't seem like anyone has given you a good answer. I've worked on many studies in site selection for pharma companies and I've worked to support clinical research sites in their advertising campaigns. For some background, to run a study in a town like yours, there has to be a physician willing to oversee the study out of a doctor's office. Usually these are physicians who are interested in conducting research studies and who've worked with pharma companies in the past. So when picking where to do studies, the pharma companies tend to go to the doctors that they're familiar with and that they know can successfully recruit patients and run a clinical trial.

So first off, there are studies going on at every city in America, so your town isn't particularly unique in that it was a place selected for trials. What happens is that sometimes doctors who run studies realize how much money can be made so they decide to open up a research clinic. These clinics employ staff who do nothing but see patients for studies all day, running many, many clinical trials. I've sometimes heard these practices referred to as "research mills" in the industry and pharma companies tend to be wary of them. Their staff is usually overworked, they have high staff turnover, and their work is often sloppy, which is not what you want when testing investigational drugs. Usually these clinics run studies for rather common "lifestyle" diseases like diabetes, heart disease, or fatty liver. (More complex studies such as oncology studies are typically ran by cancer clinics that specialize in various types of cancer treatment.) These lifestyle disease studies are fairly simple to execute and usually just mean taking vitals, collecting some blood samples, and sending the patient on their way with a refill of the experimental drug. It's likely that the advertisements you're seeing are from a clinic that's carpet bombing advertising to try to appeal to members of your community affected by these types of diseases but may not be able to afford regular healthcare. Or it could be that they're trying to appeal to patients who have these common diseases and would like to make a bit of money, as patients often receive $75-100 every time they have to come in for a study visit, which is often 10-20 visits over the course of a couple of years. I would guess that you would have seen similar ads if you spent time in lower income areas in your former city as they are being conducted in bigger cities too. For statistical purposes, studies need high diversity in many different areas, with a good mix of different races, income backgrounds, and also from both rural and urban areas, among other factors.

If you want further insights on your question, I'd recommend reposting it to r/clinicalresearch.

If you're interested in looking up your town or city to see what studies are going on near you, I would recommend checking out ClinicalTrials.gov, it gives a listing of very clinical research study that's going on in the US.

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Its exact role in the immune system is unknown and it doesn’t seem absolutely necessary, similar to how people who are heterozygous for sickle cell anemia do not display symptoms because they have sufficient amounts of normal blood cells even if some of their blood cells are sickle cells.

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