More than 2 decades after researchers identified the virus that causes AIDS, they’re still struggling to understand it. How does it so successfully co-opt a person’s immune system? Why do some people infected with the virus develop AIDS quickly and others not at all? Answers remain slow in coming, at least in part because the course of the infection can’t be predicted by any single attribute of a person’s immune system or the causative agent–the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.
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