By comparing bald and hairy patches in scalp samples from 54 men undergoing restoration treatments, George Cotsarelis at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in Philadelphia and colleagues discovered that although both had
similar numbers of stem cells, most of those in the bald patches fail to develop to the next stage.
They observed a significant decrease in the
number of proliferating
stem cells in the brains
of HIV / gp120 - mice compared with
similar tissue from normal, wild - type mice.