Around the world, some 40 million people are living with HIV. And though progress in treatment means the infection isn’t the death sentence it once was, researchers have never been able to bring about a cure. Instead, HIV-positive people must take a cocktail of antiretroviral drugs for the rest of their lives.

But in 2025, researchers reported a breakthrough that suggests that a “functional” cure for HIV—a way to keep HIV under control long-term without constant treatment—may indeed be possible. In two independent trials using infusions of engineered antibodies, some participants remained healthy without taking antiretrovirals, long after the interventions ended.

In one of the trials—the FRESH trial, led by virologist Thumbi Ndung’u of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the Africa Health Research Institute in South Africa—four of 20 participants maintained undetectable levels of HIV for a median of 1.5 years without taking antiretrovirals. In the other, the RIO trial set in the United Kingdom and Denmark and led by Sarah Fidler, a clinical doctor and HIV research expert at Imperial College London, six of 34 HIV-positive participants have maintained viral control for at least two years.

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In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, causing one of the largest marine oil spills ever. In the aftermath of the disaster, whale scientist Iain Kerr traveled to the area to study how the spill had affected sperm whales, aiming specialized darts at the animals to collect pencil eraser-sized tissue samples.

It wasn’t going well. Each time his boat approached a whale surfacing for air, the animal vanished beneath the waves before he could reach it. “I felt like I was playing Whac-A-Mole,” he says.

As darkness fell, a whale dove in front of Kerr and covered him in whale snot. That unpleasant experience gave Kerr, who works at the conservation group Ocean Alliance, an idea: What if he could collect that same snot by somehow flying over the whale? Researchers can glean much information from whale snot, including the animal’s DNA sequence, its sex, whether it is pregnant, and the makeup of its microbiome.

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