Today's Wall Street Journal ran a rather encouraging, slightly remarkable story about AIDS. If you actually believe it's possible, and I do, then it would appear that we're on the verge of something huge in health science.

Basically, findings from two separate studies 15 years in the making suggest that when AIDS (or certain cancers or hepatitis C) shuts off a body's immune system, there is a way to flip the switch back on -- namely a molecule called PD-1, a natural regulator of the human immune system.

There're still problems and setbacks (e.g., six healthy humans testing a new drug in clinical trials in London had their immune systems fly into overdrive, landing them in the ICU), but at least we know which way to point the ambulance. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is funding experiments with Hep C patients to see if they can get their immune systems working again. Good for them. Someone needs to put up the money. We keep thinking it needs to be "somebody else." That's such crap. Every problem affecting the human race is all of our problem. And it's going to take all of us to solve it in money or energy or heart.

I watched Lorenzo's Oil on TV a few weeks ago. I cried my eyes out at Susan Sarandon's character's conviction to find a cure for her son Lorenzo's de-myelinated sheaths, which caused him to lose most muscle function other than blinking his eyes or moving a finger. No big budgets to fund research for this problem (ALD), so his parents led the charge. In the end, they discover the preventative solution to be a concoction of virgin olive oil and a rapeseed oil. Rachael Ray could whip it up in a 30-minute show...for less then $40 a day...with a little EVOO. Rachael Ray drives me crazy.

Anyway, Lorenzo's real-life mom died a few years ago of cancer. I wonder if this new PD-1 molecule could've saved her. I mean it. I honor her. If more of us were like her, I think death will be optional someday.