Everyone with an email account has at one time or another received spam emails. In a recent article from Howstuffworks.com, fighting spam might help in the fight against AIDS. What makes preventing spam email so difficult is that spammers use names that are recognizable to humans but not to the spamming filter, such as "pharmaceutical" as "ph@rm@ceut1cal." Due to these various mutations of spam, the computer has to go through many possibilities. However, recently Microsoft has developed an algorithm that reduces to the time to go through these possibilities from a year to just a day. David Heckerman, one of the Microsoft team's leaders, is not only a computer scientist, he's also a physician. He realized that the same theory used to block spam could also be used to kill HIV. After all, spam and HIV work in similar ways. When HIV attacks an immune cell, it creates thousands of replicas of itself. These aren't exact replicas, though. Each one is a slight variation on the original, and each of these goes on to attack more and more cells, each time replicating into mutated versions of the virus. This makes it difficult to design a vaccine to kill HIV. To create a vaccine, scientists include antibodies that look for specific strains of HIV. Subtle mutations of the virus not targeted by the vaccine may survive, much as the spam blocker allows junk e-mail to pass through when it doesn't see any flagged words. The Microsoft researchers hope to apply their antispam algorithm to HIV to calculate each possible HIV mutation. If they succeed, they can then provide HIV vaccine researchers with this data, and vaccines can include antibodies designed to kill all -- not just some -- of the mutated viruses. This is an excellent example of how technology can impact our lives. Something as trivial as filtering spam may lead to major developments in eliminating HIV and AIDS. These advances are very exciting, and I hope some progress can be made in the fight against AIDS.