Benhur Lee may have discovered a medical silver bullet that can disable pandemic HIV, exotic Ebola, the common flu and possibly every kind of enveloped virus on the planet. An added bonus is that those viruses likely are unable to develop resistance to the compound.

If this sounds too good to be true, you are not alone. Lee was skeptical himself, and that is why it took four years of detailed work by his lab at the University of California, Los Angeles, (U.C.L.A.), along with collaborators spread across the country before the first paper was published on the potentially revolutionary discovery, on February 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lee is an expert on the viral envelope, the dynamic outside surface of a virus that latches onto a cell, then changes its shape to let the ... Read more »