Tonight, somewhere in America, a young person, let’s say a young man, will struggle to fall to sleep, wrestling alone with a secret he’s held as long as he can remember. Soon, perhaps, he will decide it’s time to let that secret out. What happens next depends on him, his family, as well as his friends and his teachers and his community. But it also depends on us—on the kind of society we engender, the kind of future we build.
They are wearing different ties in these pictures which means that on at least twooccasions Obama and Joe Biden have run around the whitehouse waving pride flags, and that makes me really happy
Frances Goldin is 92 years old,
has attended the NYC Pride
Parade for over 3 decades, and
sits in the exact same spot with
the same sign every year. Source
“I was taking a law school admissions test in a big classroom at Harvard. My friend and I were some of the only women in the room. I was feeling nervous. I was a senior in college. I wasn’t sure how well I’d do. And while we’re waiting for the exam to start, a group of men began to yell things like: ‘You don’t need to be here.’ And ‘There’s plenty else you can do.’ It turned into a real ‘pile on.’ One of them even said: ‘If you take my spot, I’ll get drafted, and I’ll go to Vietnam, and I’ll die.’ And they weren’t kidding around. It was intense. It got very personal. But I couldn’t respond. I couldn’t afford to get distracted because I didn’t want to mess up the test. So I just kept looking down, hoping that the proctor would walk in the room. I know that I can be perceived as aloof or cold or unemotional. But I had to learn as a young woman to control my emotions. And that’s a hard path to walk. Because you need to protect yourself, you need to keep steady, but at the same time you don’t want to seem ‘walled off.’ And sometimes I think I come across more in the ‘walled off’ arena. And if I create that perception, then I take responsibility. I don’t view myself as cold or unemotional. And neither do my friends. And neither does my family. But if that sometimes is the perception I create, then I can’t blame people for thinking that.”
It is a mystery that has confounded HIV researchers: How does HIV manage to
enter the nucleus of immune system cells? Many related viruses do this by waiting until the cell divides, when the protective membrane surrounding the nucleus breaks down. But HIV has the insidious ability to enter the nucleus in a non-dividing cell with an intact nuclear membrane.
The answer comes from new research from Loyola University Chicago. As reported in the journal PLOS Pathogens,
a motor protein, called KIF5B, interacts with both the HIV-1 core, the protein shell that protects the virus, and the nuclear pore in a way that allows HIV into the nucleus. Normally KIF5B transports various cargoes within the cell, away from the nucleus. But HIV hijacks KIF5B to serve a different purpose: It induces KIF5B to tear off pieces of the nuclear envelope and transport them away from the nucleus, thus making the pore wide enough for the HIV core, which is 50 percent larger than the pores, to pass through.
The discovery opens a potential new strategy for fighting HIV. Developing a drug that prevents KIF5B from disrupting nuclear pores would prevent HIV from sneaking into the nucleus without detection. This would give the immune system enough time to sound the alarm to attack and destroy HIV.
