No, that's standard boilerplate these days in papers. You have to "sell" the science a bit to reviewers and connect your work to the broader picture. Those in the field usually ignore statements like this.

When I was a research assistant in college I was encouraged for one of my presentations to emphasize safe hydrogen storage as a vehicle fuel source, when really the research was all about how minuscule amounts of hydrogen change the electrical/optical properties of thin metallic films (and desorption was on the order of days). Selling it as a building block for safer hydrogen storage was necessary to get people engaged.

Yup! I published a paper on organoselenium chemistry and was asked to add commentary about potential "anti-cancer" properties.

Sure my work could be extended in that direction, but I had done zero work to pursue it.

Even in Nature?

This paper is in Scientific Reports, which is published by Nature but is not regarded as a top-tier journal. It has an impact factor of 5.5 vs. 41 of Nature.

But I would say that "selling the science" occurs more often for high-profile journals because the authors need to convince the reviewers that the paper has a significant impact. Papers in more field-specific journals tend to write conservatively.

Oh you're right, I didn't notice that. Thanks for pointing that out.

If you're going to deliver enough lentivirus into an HIV patient to edit all the HIV out of their T-cells, you're going to provoke a massive immune response. This is not the first time people have demonstrated the ability to excise HIV from the genome - I recall a cool system that involved evolving a novel endonuclease that recognized the HIV LTRs. Aha, here: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17600219

This is 2007 - doing this again with CRISPR is, frankly, just using a flashy new toolkit. The fundamental problems with gene therapy remain and are, as usual, the major hurdle to any of this shit being effective. It's easy to edit genomes in a dish; doing it in the human body is orders of magnitude harder.

> If you're going to deliver enough lentivirus into an HIV patient to edit all the HIV out of their T-cells, you're going to provoke a massive immune response

From a layman's point of view: isn't that exactly what HIV does in the first place, only faster? As I understand it, on initial infection there can be a major immune response, causing skin rashes or worse.

>If you're going to deliver enough lentivirus into an HIV patient to edit all the HIV out of their T-cells, you're going to provoke a massive immune response. Not if the HIV infection has progressed to AIDS. Even with a regular HIV infection the immune response would be diminished.

No; HIV targets CD4+ T cells; you will still have CD8s being activated by the lentivirus all over the body and killing cells in response.

"potentially serve as a novel... toward curing.." is academic speak for "well, anything's possible"

'still better than nothing'