HIV: a deadly virus that kills an estimated 5,000 people a day.Spam: annoying emails that infiltrate your inbox and try to get you to shell out for erectile dysfunction drugs, credit cards and international scams purportedly involving Nigerian princes.Could these two things possibly have anything in common? According to Microsoft researcher David Heckerman, the answer is yes.Heckerman is the inventor of Microsoft’s spam filter that protects Hotmail, Outlook and Exchange clients from deluges of unwanted email, but for the last seven years he’s been working on designing a vaccine for HIV.He said it’s not so strange that he shifted his attention from protecting email systems to protecting body systems. He is a doctor, and besides, fighting spam and fighting HIV are not as different as you might think.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2011/12/spam-filter-hiv.html