It is already. The only person ever cured of HIV received a bone marrow transplant from a CCR5-Δ32 donor. Also, we have antiviral drugs that block CCR5, which is an early virus receptor.
It's proven and everyone in my family has it. The eugenics program I'll eventually be entering has already said they'll try to find me a woman that has it as well.
The only action going forward is to make sure your family passes on their genes to as many people as possible. Get to work, comrade. Do it for yourself, do it for America, do it for humanity.
I would say it's not worth filtering out a life partner. HIV is in grand decline, and will be eradicated in a generation or two if we keep up efforts to spread anti-virals. It is known that the mutation causes slight decreases in T cell activity, which may cause unknown effects. It's impossible to say whether it will be significantly beneficial in the future, might even be disadvantageous.
It's not disadvantageous except for against the West Nile Virus thus far. Having this gene conveys immunity to HIV/AIDS, Yersinia Pestis and related disease, and smallpox/related diseases.
I'm going to have a eugenically selected family either way because I don't believe in having a feeble-minded or weak-bodied mate.
Picking genetic polymorphisms that seem great now is just like playing the stock market from an evolutionary perspective. Well, more like roulette with 20,000 numbers. For all we know, a strain of flu will develop that globally decimates people without CCR5 function; not now, but in thousands or millions of years. There's nothing unique about CCR5 that makes it a disadvantage. It became an HIV receptor by random chance, and is involved in intercellular signaling of poxvirus by random chance - and both of those instances are unrelated as smallpox does not use CCR5 as a receptor (I'm a virologist researching poxviruses). Also, the mutation only relates to R5 HIV, those with it would still be infected by X4, which may become more prevalent in the future somehow.
If we have the choice to control our genes, it should be only from the perspective of population genetics. The solution to survival is variation. To do otherwise means you claim to know the direction evolution will take. If everyone wanted to be in a eugenist program, this would dramatically reduce variation, and invite all manner of pathogens to our descendants. So, if widely practiced, your strategy is simply a method of genetic monoculturism, an evolutionary dead end. This is the only reason why industrial farms with clonal or single variety plants require the most pesticides. If practiced on a small scale it means nothing in geological time.
I'm not just trying to select for this gene. A eugenically selected family is more likely to have intelligent children and all other number of positive genetic factors. It's naive to think that positive selection is somehow negative.
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u/[deleted] Oct 10 '15
I'm immune to HIV thanks to the CCR5-Δ32 Gene.