HIV+ volunteers are bequeathing their organs to a new project

MUCH of the medical research conducted on HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, looks at patients’ blood. This is no surprise. Blood is both easy to collect and easy to preserve. But HIV is not confined to the bloodstreams of those infected by it. It is found in almost all of their bodily tissues. In the view of Davey Smith, a virologist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), focusing only on the metaphorical “trees” of the blood is therefore a mistake. It misses the “forest” of the other organs.