Free Fingerprints of God by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

twenty-nine years old— how long am I going to live? ”
    When I met Sheri in December 2006, more than a dozen years had passed since that moment. A slim forty-two-year-old, she had wavy red hair and a tanned, freckled face. She wore no makeup, and didn’t need to, with her intense blue eyes and wide smile.
    She chatted unself-consciously as a researcher at a University of Miami clinic drew several vials of blood. They compared notes on CD4 cell counts, viral load, and a battery of other measures that were the lifeblood of those initiated into this dreaded disease. Every six months for nearly a decade, Sheri has dropped by the clinic to meet with Gail Ironson, a doctor and professor of psychology and psychiatry. Twelve years after her diagnosis, Sheri has somehow beaten the virus into submission. She remains healthy and has never taken so much as a pill for medication. The question that drove Gail Ironson was: Why? Why do some people with HIV never get sick?
    Sheri’s personality holds some clues. She’s pugnacious. She refused to surrender to the disease. Instead she opened a nonprofit support center—“where people can laugh, and fall in love, and meet people, and have a life after HIV.” Under her determined management, the Center for Positive Connections expanded from a nine-by-twelve-foot room to a 3,500-square-foot facility with a half-million-dollar budget and nine employees.
    But something more was at work than a renewed purpose to life. An indefinable current, a pneuma, gave lift to her goals. Sheri’s was not a traditional God—she was raised Jewish but believes in reincarnation—but a living, breathing entity who served as a copilot to steer when she could not see straight for the terror.
    “At first I thought, How could God do this to me, make me the leper of society?” she said. “Then I realized, I was chosen. The message was, I was chosen so I could help create social change, so I took this as my role. I realized God didn’t want me to die, or even get sick.”
    Gail Ironson has been studying people like Sheri Kaplan for more than a decade, looking for clues to longevity. Her hunt began in the mid-1990s, when Ironson, who trained at Stanford and the universities of Miami and Wisconsin, launched a longitudinal study of people living with HIV. She noticed that a rare group of people fared much better than others. Back then, before the most effective drugs were developed, the average life expectancy for those diagnosed with AIDS by opportunistic infection was a year and a half.
    “But many of our people were alive seven, eight years past diagnosis,” Ironson said.“And we were looking for both psychological and immune factors that might be protecting their health. And we found both.”
    The long-term survivors were less depressed. They were better at coping. They were more proactive, finding the best doctors and the best research. Ironson could have predicted all these characteristics: studies have long indicated that your attitude—whether you curl up on the ropes or deliver a counterpunch to the kidneys—often affects the course of a disease. But Ironson noticed another, unexpected trait among her long-term survivors.
    “People kept talking about how spirituality was important in their lives,” she said. “If you ask people what’s kept you going so long, what keeps you healthy, often people will say ‘spirituality,’ or ‘my relationship with God.’ I mean, there were many other things that came up, but spirituality came up a lot as a moving force in people’s lives.”
    Ironson began to zero in on spirituality as a predictor of how fast the disease would progress. First, she compared those patients who felt embraced by God or abandoned by God, and tracked two biological measures—CD4 cells and viral load. CD4 cells are a part of the immune system that helps fight off tumors and viruses such as HIV. The HIV virus also attacks CD4 cells, so as the disease makes inroads, it knocks off