Jacob Kimmel

And so old world monkeys actually can't get SIV, whereas new world monkeys can, and humans can, obviously.

And so it seems like what happened, and you can actually make a few mutations in TRIM5-alpha and find that this is true,

is that Trim5-alpha once protected against an HIV-like pathogen in the primate genomes.

And then there was this challenge from this massive endogenous retrovirus.

And it was so bad that the genome lost the ability to fight off these HIV-like viruses in order to restrict this endogenous retrovirus.

And you can see it because that retrovirus integrates into our genome.

There are like latent copies, like the half bodies of this virus all throughout our DNA code.

And then this particular retrovirus went extinct.

Reasons unknown.

No one knows why.

But we didn't, like, re-update that piece of our host defense machinery to fight off HIV again.

And so we're in a situation where you can go in and take human cells and make just a couple edits in that TRMM5 alpha gene, and it's

currently protecting against a virus which no longer exists.

And you can edit it back to actually restrict HIV dramatically.

So there are plenty of examples.

So you could imagine the same thing for antibiotics.

We're like, hey, this particular, you know, defense mechanism went away because the pathogen evolved its own defense to it.

Well, the pathogen might have lost that defense long ago.

And if you could sort of extract that historical antibiotic, that historical antifungal, potentially it actually has efficacy.

Yeah, I think a great explanation for understanding a lot of evolution and how you're able to actually adapt to new environments, new pathogens, is that gene duplication is possible.