  AIDS is the pandemic of our era. A disease that scares us not only because it
is fatal but also because its insidious time course makes us all potential
carriers long before it hands us our heads in a basket. The strange three stage
dynamics of aids is also one of the major puzzles in describing the disease
theoretically (1). Aids starts, like most diseases, in a peak of virus
expression (2,3), which is practically wiped out by the immune system. However
it then remains in the body at a low level of expression until later (some time
years later) when there is an outbreak of the disease which terminally cripples
the immune system causing death from various common pathogens. In this paper we
show, using a microscopic simulation, that the time course of AIDS is
determined by the interactions of the virus and the immune cells in the shape
space of antigens and that it is the virus's ability to move more rapidly in
this space (it's high mutability) that causes the time course and eventual
'victory' of the disease. These results open the way for further experimental
and therapeutic conclusions in the ongoing battle with the HIV epidemic.
