1. A research team at MIT led by Professor Essigmann has been working on finding a way to destroy HIV. 2. Tiffany Amariuta, a 2011 high school valedictorian, joined the team as a freshman at MIT in 2011 and within a year helped discover a molecule that kills HIV by causing it to mutate itself to death. 3. The molecule, 8-oxo-deoxy-guanosine, increases HIV's mutation rate until the virus destroys itself.