Who's the Berlin Patient?

The Berlin Patient. You may have heard about him, or his story may be news to you. If he is reading this, a warm hi from us at the AIDS Policy Project--we hope to have a beer some day with you.

So--basically, the Berlin Patient is an American man of about 40 who lived in Berlin, had AIDS and also leukemia. His leukemia doctor needed to give him a bone marrow transplant to treat the leukemia. But he used a special person as a donor--someone who was born with the "CCR5 deletion" (remember those initials) which means that the person cannot be infected with AIDS. About 1/1,000 Northern Europeans is born with this--it's a mutation.

And the rest, literally, is history.