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Nanobacteria Discovered?
mfh writes "The BBC is reporting that a new form of life has been discovered, nanobacteria, which was previously only theorized by Finnish researchers Kajander and Ciftcioglu. A team lead by Dr John Lieske of the Mayo Clinic claims they have found irrefutable evidence of the existence of nanobacteria, which is likely responsible for a plethora of illnesses."
I don't think this is proven yet. Some comments from other scientist in the BBC piece suggest that the methods they used can be prone to false positives. This is probably a good one to RTFM!
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We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
IANIITMP (I Am Not Involved In The Medical Profession)
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Both of your comments make a lot of sense. It seems to me that it could very well be that high cholesterol provides an enviornment friendly to something like nano-bacteria (or whatever). Or that there is some other factor (such as an immune system vulnerability) that manifests as high cholesterol in people with a susceptibility to heart disease.
What I'm trying to say is that one does not necessarily exclude the other. Both could be related. Maybe I'm not expressing this correctly, but then again, I'm in the profession of moving IP packets, not blood cells.
Well, the first thing is that not everyone actually agrees that these things are alive. They haven't been able to extract nucleic acids from the structures. So either we need better tools to extract them, or these nanobacteria function in an completely and utterly different way than the rest of life as we know it. Forget anabolic respiration and whatnot. There's obviously SOMETHING happening, however, as they're able to get this stuff to reproduce in culture.
Once we've figured out what it actually is, then we can figure out how it's put together, then we can start tinkering with it, but my guess is that's going to be quite a ways off.