By TOM PAULSON
P-I REPORTER
Seattle scientist Keith Jerome has won $100,000 from the Gates Foundation to test his "crazy" idea of engineering a parasitical protein that attacks the DNA of yeast to instead turn it against human cells infected with HIV, the AIDS virus, as an innovative -- and admittedly bizarre -- strategy for ridding the body of this deadly infectious virus.
"They said they were looking for really different ideas," said Jerome, a microbiologist at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center who studies how viruses evade the immune system. "This is certainly off the beaten track. We now have a year to try to show that this crazy idea just might work."
So do more than a hundred other scientific teams with more-or-less equally crazy ideas.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, at its annual "Grand Challenges" global health research meeting held this year in Bangkok, Thailand, on Wednesday announced it had donated more than $10 million worth of $100,000 grants in support of 104 scientific projects highly unlikely to have received funding through more traditional agencies or donors.
One Japanese scientist will explore using mosquitoes as a flying syringe -- delivering malaria vaccines rather than malaria parasites. A Korean scientist was funded to see if a peculiar green-fluorescing protein found in jellyfish (first identified in the San Juan Islands, by the way, which led to this year's Nobel Prize in chemistry) could be used as a novel flu vaccine.
more:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/384359_gatessci22.html
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