Nanobacteria Discovered?

Great. juuuust great. by Machine9 · 2004-05-20 01:17 · Score: 5, Funny

Great. more reasons never to leave my desk. so many nasty little bugs out there ;)

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Re:Great. juuuust great. by Alien54 · 2004-05-20 01:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

1999 BBC report: Do nanobacteria rule Earth and Mars?
Nanobacteria - Is Cardiovascular Disease an Infection??
1998 Nanobacteria paper for biology geeks and Doctors
bottom line, this stuff has been debated since 1985. Now someone claims to discover a new form of life? That's like not naming the new world Columbus discovered Columbia (with apologies to the American Indians, who were there all along) Plenty of prior art.
Note also the results from the usual Google Search on NanoBacteria

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More Info on Kajander's Site by bcolflesh · 2004-05-20 01:18 · Score: 5, Informative

http://www.uku.fi/~kajander/

bioweapons? by vijayiyer · 2004-05-20 01:18 · Score: 4, Interesting

Sounds like a new generation of biological weapons are waiting to be developed which would be far more difficult to detect...

Re:bioweapons? by analog_line · 2004-05-20 02:37 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.

So... by Roman+Levin · 2004-05-20 01:19 · Score: 5, Funny

Do 10^9 nanobacteria make up a regular one?

Sceptical articles on nanobacteria by alanw · 2004-05-20 01:20 · Score: 5, Informative

New Scientist has a longer article, which goes into more details of the politics between rival teams of scientists.

See also the article by John Cisar (a sceptic) An alternative interpretation of nanobacteria-induced biomineralization

Re:Sceptical articles on nanobacteria by InternationalCow · 2004-05-20 01:28 · Score: 5, Interesting

Scepticism indeed seems warranted here. For one, it is telling that this "breakthrough" has appeared in a low-impact journal. What's even more important is that behaviour as shown by the "nanobacteria" can also be interpreted as being the consequence of conformational changes of proteins in solution induced by the particles. Mutated prions are also capable of doing so (they change the prion normal structure into a beta-sheet), thereby causing disease. Self-assembly of macromolecules also comes to mind as a potential explanation. It is therefore way too early to describe the structures found as "living". Do viruses live? Do prions "live"? They do not, but bacteria certainly do. Craig Venter has rather convincingly shown that most currently known living organisms require a minimum set of genes for metabolism and so on, ie a minimum amount of DNA, organelles, proteins and so on. If the nanobacteria are too small to contain all of that, which they do, I very much doubt they deserve the name bacterium. Their disease-causing potential is a different matter altogether, see the prion diseases. If these structures can accelerate atherosclerosis in model animals I would certainly be intrigued to say the very least.

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----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Re:Sceptical articles on nanobacteria by cluckshot · 2004-05-20 01:41 · Score: 5, Informative

Actually the problem with publishing certain medical discoveries in the "Standard Outlets" is that they are "Standard Outlets." The discovery that stomach ulcers were bacteria caused was so contraversial that the MD who discovered it was nearly cashiered out of the profession. The fact of his ability to treat them effectively had no account. The fact that he had cultured H-Pilori had no account and got him no standing in the standard outlet journals for medicine.

I have worked Heart Transplant Unit as RN. We knew early as 1992 that the causes of heart disease were Viral and Bacterial (Several causes). We also knew that Cholesterol had nothing to do with the problem.

The presence of Homcystine an indicator of cellular destruction was a key indicator but not diagnostic because of other sources of destroyed cells.

The arterial plaquing associated with heart disease is bacterial plaquing similar to that of tooth plaques caused by various bacteria most prominant of which is Hemolytic Strep A. What happens is during your life, you get an infection somewhere. Most likely it is in your gums. This infection seeds germs into the blood which find cavitation points in the body to hide out where the normal immune factors of the blood have a hard time getting to them. There they set up plaques to hold on and to defend themselves from the body. They grow essentially in stasis (very slowly) blooming out when the body defenses are weakened or the body oxygen level drops or the blood sugar level gets too high. These blooms are frequently the events people know as heart attack and stroke.

It would be no surprise that some other agents such as a "Nano-Bacteria" were at the root of this stuff. I would suspect though that these are actually agents of control that are seeded out of the larger bacteria to control the host. Bacteria do this sort of thing a lot.

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Re:Sceptical articles on nanobacteria by InternationalCow · 2004-05-20 01:47 · Score: 4, Informative

Well, occasionally the standard outlets do have it wrong. Most of the times they just adhere to stringent standards of scientific correctness. Sometimes that is a disadvantage but it spares us from having to suffer through junk science most of the time. I would also like to politely disagree with you on the central role that bacteria play in atherosclerosis. Cholesterol has a lot to do with it, if you look at what happens to people suffering from congenital hypercholesterolemia. They die from atherosclerosis. Homocysteine is not there as a consequence of bacterial infestation but because of hyperhomocysteinemia, a rather common metabolic defect. There is currently no proof for a central role of bacterial/viral infection in atherosclerosis. There is also no proof to the contrary, but if you read your science philosophy you will realize that does not mean that your hypothesis is correct.

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----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
Re:Sceptical articles on nanobacteria by RicoX9 · 2004-05-20 02:24 · Score: 4, Insightful

IANIITMP (I Am Not Involved In The Medical Profession)
</DISCLAIMER>

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.
Re:Sceptical articles on nanobacteria by benzapp · 2004-05-20 03:18 · Score: 4, Informative

Cholesterol has a lot to do with it, if you look at what happens to people suffering from congenital hypercholesterolemia.

I think you should preface that with lipoproteins that are low density, due to the cholesterol being oxidized by heat.

Cholesterol is one of the most necessary substances in your body, particularly the brain where lipoproteins are the largest component after water.

Lets not forget there is 10 times as much cholesterol in human breast milk than protein, and that low blood levels of cholesterol is one of the few (and possibily the only) predictor of suicidal depression.

This is actually a critical flaw in the modern medical establishment, particular in regards to cholesterol being given to infants. Not a single infant formula contains cholesterol, despite the copious amounts of the stuff in human milk. It is no wonder formula fed infants are dumber than average, the growth of their brain is severely restricted due to serious dietary deficiencies.

Cholesterol that is undamaged by heat or any other energy source is necessary for human survival, and is not at all dangerous.

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Re:Sceptical articles on nanobacteria by lukesl · 2004-05-20 03:31 · Score: 4, Informative

Actually the problem with publishing certain medical discoveries in the "Standard Outlets" is that they are "Standard Outlets." The discovery that stomach ulcers were bacteria caused was so contraversial that the MD who discovered it was nearly cashiered out of the profession. The fact of his ability to treat them effectively had no account. The fact that he had cultured H-Pilori had no account and got him no standing in the standard outlet journals for medicine.

The flaw in your reasoning is the idea that the viability of nanobacteria is as easy to prove/falsify as the assertion that bacterium X causes disease Y. Medical science is driven by dogma, politics, etc. much more than basic science, as medical scientists have to deal with things that are harder to prove. The guy who figured out that H. pylori causes ulcers couldn't get anyone to listen because he couldn't perform the simple study to prove it, namely putting a bunch of people in cages and infecting them (or giving placebo), then waiting to see if they got ulcers. It wasn't until he drank a culture of the bugs himself and got an ulcer that anyone listened.

On the other hand, if someone is making an extremely simple claim, like "these things in this tube are alive," there are extremely simple ways to test that. The fact that something "replicates" is certainly not convincing evidence for life, only for some sort of chemical reaction. It might be a really really interesting chemical reaction, but if someone "grows" a bunch of these nanobugs, but then can't isolate DNA from them, you have to be really suspicious, because isolating DNA from anything is a trivial procedure.

Oh, BTW, what you're saying about heart disease is BS. You're confusing endocarditis with atherosclerosis, and in neither case are arterial plaques in any similar to dental plaque. IAAMDPHD.

Not everyone agrees by not_a_product_id · 2004-05-20 01:21 · Score: 5, Insightful

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

masks? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-20 01:22 · Score: 4, Interesting

What size particules can standard biofilter masks remove? The kind that the military use? Medical?

Photo Album by $exyNerdie · 2004-05-20 01:23 · Score: 4, Informative

Nanobacteria Photo Gallery

Lucas has the TradeMark by The+Jon · 2004-05-20 01:27 · Score: 5, Funny

one word: medichlorians.

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umop apisdn aw pow f,uop aseald :umop aw pow 'dn aw pow

Re:Mayo clinic by grub · 2004-05-20 01:31 · Score: 5, Funny

The Mayo Clinic is named after the famed 19th century doctor Charles Mayonowski. His family moved to the US from Poland in 1857 where they changed their name to remove the ethnicity of it (this was the mid 1800s, remember)

Charles was born in January 1850 but the exact date isn't known. He was an average student in early school but showed a strong interest in biology. His father would often find him in the barn late at night dissecting newborn piglets.

In 1869, Charles went to England to attend school at Oxford. He later received his medical degree but had to come back to America after suspicion was cast on him when several dozen fresh graves were robbed of their corpses and were later found wrapped in burlap in the university incinerators. (the bodies showed signs of expert dissection).

Moving to Minnesota, he founded a small clinic for the poor. Many of the patients disappeared but Mayo was found to be an excellent practitioner all around. When he died the funeral was attended by over 20,000 people. Many of them relatives of the poor who disappeared (and were presumed dissected) but knew of the importance of the knowledge he gleaned from his bloody experiments.

Actually... that's all bullshit. Sorry.

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Trolling is a art,

RTFA by Alomex · 2004-05-20 01:32 · Score: 4, Informative

r John Lieske of the Mayo Clinic claims they have found irrefutable evidence of the existence of nanobacteria.

They do not claim such a thing. They claim to have found potential evidence of the existence of nanobacteria. Alternate explanations of the evidence have already been given (false positive DNA test, for one).

potential != irrefutable

Well, at least that explains by unassimilatible · 2004-05-20 01:35 · Score: 4, Funny

All my nanorashes and nanoitching and nanoburning.

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Ciftcioglu eh?? by CajunArson · 2004-05-20 01:37 · Score: 4, Funny

Look's like Cthulu's cousin is getting busy!

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AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.

Journal Impact Factors by nucal · 2004-05-20 02:01 · Score: 4, Informative

For one, it is telling that this "breakthrough" has appeared in a low-impact journal.

You really pressed one of my buttons here. Did you actually read the article and judge for youself or did you just assume that it was lousy based on the ISI impact factor? By the way the impact factor for the the journal in question, American Journal of Physiology, is in the "mid-range" (~3-4), but not horrible (there are journals with impact factors less than 1). In fact, the whole idea of impact factors is pretty controversial and has been abused as a criterion for promotions, grant awards, etc.

There's plenty of bullshit published in the "so-called" top tier journals (Science, Nature, Cell, etc.) and plenty of excellent science published in what you are calling a low-impact journal.

Also, the group working on nanobacteria had to revise their work seven times - this is an unheard of level of skepticism and suggests that there is an unusual level of politics going on here.

ogden nash's prescience on this matter.... by margulies · 2004-05-20 03:50 · Score: 4, Interesting

Bigger fleas have smaller fleas
Upon their backs to bite'em
And smaller fleas have lesser fleas
And so ad infinitem.

And the bigger fleas, in turn
Have greater fleas to go on
And these in turn have greater still
And greater still, and so on.

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