Doctors Inject HIV Into Girl Dying of Cancer in an Attempt to Fight ‘Fire With Fire’

My brother Jeff is a cancer survivor, and has a particularly soft spot in his heart for children who battle the disease that knocked him down, but not out. Jeff shared a video that absolutely shocked me, and I'm still having trouble wrapping my brain around.

The subject of the video, titled 'Fire With Fire', explains the effort to save the life of Emily, a young girl with leukemia. When there were no other options, doctors injected a form of HIV into her blood stream. My first thought was, "What are these idiots thinking?" HIV kills!

But the virus the doctors used has been engineered so that it can't cause disease anymore, and it retains the ability to attack things in the body, like cancer cells.

I didn't make this up. Here's the video explaining what they did:

The battle against cancer has been going on for centuries, and there's still no cure. While doctors and researchers heroically continue the fight and patients continue to battle for their lives, the mere thought that ending cancer any time soon seems about as unreal as the idea of injecting HIV into a child to save her life. Asked if it was hard for him to say the words "we're trying to cure cancer", the doctor in the video said "I think sometimes it's hard to think that you might actually succeed.".

I'm still somewhat in disbelief. It seems like a cruel hoax, but it's not. Is this incredible experiment going to lead to the cure for cancer? I don't know, but the mere thought gives me chill bumps.

Let's hope.