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."

Comments

Great. juuuust great.

[Machine9]

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

More Info on Kajander's Site

[bcolflesh]

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

So...

[Roman Levin]

Do 10^9 nanobacteria make up a regular one?

Sceptical articles on nanobacteria

[alanw]

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

[InternationalCow]

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.

Re:Sceptical articles on nanobacteria

[cluckshot]

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.

Not everyone agrees

[not_a_product_id]

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!

Lucas has the TradeMark

[The Jon]

one word: medichlorians.

Re:Mayo clinic

[grub]

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.