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Artificial Prion Created
jabberjaw writes "Nature is reporting that researchers at the University of California San Diego have created a synthetic prion which, when injected into mice will bring about symptoms similar to those displayed by cattle suffering from bovine spongiform encephalopathy, aka mad cow disease. The researchers first crafted healthy prion proteins using bacteria. They then shook these proteins until they resembled the tangled structure of an unhealthy prion. Afterwords, these prions were injected into the brains of mice who fell ill two years later. Perhaps someone who is more familiar with this field of research would care to fill us in on the details as the article was rather light."
We gave mice mad cow disease! Yay!
:)
This is the first step, I'm sure, to giving it to politicians.
On perhaps a bit more serious of a note, what does this do for us? Is this highlighting that we now know HOW the disease is created, so we can start developing a cure? Or am I wrong. Again.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
They've found a way to infect creatures with the brain-eating protein . . . I guess that's just as good as curing a disease that threatens the mind of this generation.
MOUNT TAPE U1439 ON B3, NO RING
Don't eat the beef that comes from those experimental mice.
If I had unhealthy prions injected into me, I'd be pretty pissed too.
Why did I first read that as "Artificial Pron" now ? My eyes !
they should get an award just for keeping mice alive for two years. When I was a kid my pet mice lasted like two months and I kept good care of them too. I'm not as interested in the mad cow/mice disease as I am in the mouse longevity.
I thought the idea was to make things healthier - not simulate diseases.
:)
And even though I didnt read the article, I thought I'd shoot my mouth off anyway
You can't expect to wield supreme executive power, just because some watery tart threw a sword at you
1. Turn mice into gigantic mad cows 2. ??? 3. Profit!!
If you have to ask, you'll never know.
because prions are more basic and fundamental than even germs/viruses. most modern methods of treating diseases and fighting virus involve disrupting the replication process of the virus/germs, usually by the means of inhibiting certain proteins. however prions themselves are malformed proteins that malform other good proteins. this mechanism is quite hard to stop because it is so simple, there is no complicated repoduction chain to disrupt like a virus. there is only one way to stop this chain, which is to basically burn the protein to a crisp.
They couldn't fix my brakes, so they made my horn louder.
Artificial pri0n?! wouldn't realdoll be prior art?
I've not read the article.. but a little synopse of how BSE works... Everyone already has the protein for BSE in their brain. Except in its natural form in the brain.. its meta-table.. Meaning it can unfold and refold into its original shape. The interesting thing about BSE is its super-stable fold of the protein. What makes this dangerous is proteins can learn new and unique ways of folding.. so if in contact with a BSE protein it'll learn to fold the BSE way. Meaning.. it'll learn to fold superstable.. which is basically a knot you can't untie. Proteins are the messengers of the body.. and if they can't unfold to be read.. its basically dead weight. After a couple years too many proteins have been retrained, leading to loss of cognitive abilities.. tada... your cow has the mad shakes!
We know how to create it I assume its easier to cure it?? Or create a vaccine? I'm not sure?
Was it a problem trying to replicate it in a lab or was it too costly to have a lab full of mad cows, just easier with mice?
of course the Mad cow Link
This must be Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
That seems to suggest there were other WMDs. Coulda sworn they haven't found any...
Terrorists don't need weapons of mass descruction. The States has been mired in fear for the past three years and all the terrorists had were box cutters.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
For a second there I thought the title said Artificial Pr0n Created....damn...
A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
what's wrong with malarya, or other deseases like aids. They could just have someone with aids bleed to death in the "water supply". Poison is not the probelm, guarding and monitoring the supply is. Its a step forward though, they more they know about it, the more they know how to stop it.
If we shake up a prion, it morphs into the type that causes mad cow disease.
If we shake up a pop singer, it morphs into the type that causes property damage.
Connection, anyone?
Um, artificial pr0n has been being created for a LONG time! Do some Googling next time:
n
;P
http://www.google.com/search?q=fake+celebrity+por
Oh...wait...the title is Artificial Prion Created. NM, carry on
John Kerry is a Joke!
To be fair, we've apparently had them for two years!
"If we let things terrify us, life will not be worth living."
- Seneca
is that we have more of a problem then previously realized. Here in colorado, we are heavily infected with Chronic wasting disease in our elk and deer. The first problem is that these deer/elk are intermingling with cattle to obtain water and grain (we are in a severe drought). About 3 year ago (pre 9/11), the state went after funding to research more of CWD/MCD/CJD/Scappies/etc. The GWB admin shot it down and then last year allocated the same program at UT to research the problem here. Amazing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
When I first read this, I thought it said "artificial pr0n".
"Those representing the U.S. meat industry say the U.S. government's testing program is more than adequate."
-CNN
One more reason to stop eating meat
"This increases the likelyhood that disease is transmissible by prion," is what I menat to say. Sorry, was thinking about my Mickey D stock.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
I can hardly wait for the Haliburton weaponized version of said prion.
You're only likely to see prions dumped in water or food supplies if somebody is looking for quiet destruction over the long term. Maybe al Qaeda(sp?) would be happy with this, but I suspect not -- they'd probably prefer to trumpet their triumphs to the world, and that means they want immediate glory, for propaganda purposes.
The abstract for the original Science article is here. However, you need to register(free to see abstracts) first. You can also pay to see the fulltext.
X-Has-Sig: yes
I know people have been struggling to show that a synthetic prion can cause a disease, thereby proving beyond any doubt that it really is the prion protein (no virus, no bacterium) that causes the disease, and this may be the proof. But at 2 years of age mice are usually about to die, so this doesn't seem that convincing... It will depend on the details. Btw., there is a lot of other evidence that prions cause the mad cow disease and the human variant Creutzfeld-Jakob's disease, but if this report is true, that really nails it. Another btw.: the original paper was published in Science, Nature only refers to the Science article.
This was done at UCSF, not UCSD. Read the article
There are still a few people the dis-believe the prion theory of disease put forward by Pruisner. For those who aren't familiar with the subject, prions are essentially misfolded proteins that can induce their mis-folding by interacting with copies of themselves. So, if protein A become randomly misfolded into A', it can bump into other copies of A and induce them to form A'. In many of the disease cases, these misfolded proteins can form plaques or tangles which then disrupt or rupture and kill cells.
While Pruisner's evidence for such a mechanism is more or less overwhelming there were still a couple people who didn't buy the story. The experiment talked about here (and I haven't seen the actual paper yet, but look forward to reading it) is rather difficult to do and is pretty much the last nail in the coffin of those disagreeing with prion theory. They do complain that the protein activities of the mutants were really low and that the mice used were not of the ideal strain buut this is missing the forest through the trees. As far as all of us whose opinions matter are concerned, the case is no more than closed and the pro-Pruisner side has won.
BTW, I've heard Pruisner say that a lot of neurological diseases are really prion based...but that case is far from being closed...so keep your ears open for such discussions in the future.
-Devon (who should disclose that he's a neuro grad student at UCSF, but works on neurogenetic diseases and not prions)
Yes, I am a microbiologist, and I've done research on prions.
Basically, prions are proteins which are able to act upon other proteins and thereby create functional copies of themselves (identical copies are not needed). BSE (mad cow disease) and CJD (essentially the human version) are caused by 'rogue' prions which destroy tissue by converting large quantities of protein into more prions. Prions are basically the most elementary form of an infectious disease (as they are simply protein, no genetic material required).
Now, what these researchers have done is to prove that prions can spontaneously develop, without the need for viral or bacterial infection. Random changes in protein structure MAY result in prion creation. You needn't eat some mad cow (nor cannibalize some CJD gray matter) to contract CJD or some other prion-induced malady. Nor is a viral/bacterial infection required; the disease may develop spontaneously.
Hopefully this makes sense... I've had a few too many Schooners (beer).
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Here is the US CDC's page about BSE (aka "mad cow") and CJD (it's human cousin).
And call me paranoid, but I haven't had beef in seven months. (I live in the US and seven months ago was the first confirmed case of BSE in the USA)
Everyone that read the headline as "Artificial Pron Created" raise their hand.
*raises hand*
There is a wave of comments, all pointing out that " I READ IT AS ARTIFICAL PRON" Slashdot moderators should keep in mind, useless information should be banned so should information that SEEMS useless. I'll start a paypal account... people need lasik.
Basically, there is controversy over whether the "mutated" prions actually are the cause of CJ/BSE. This paper provides strong supporting evidence that the modified prions are the causative agent.
...you read that as "artificial pr0n created".
So direct synthesis of a prion, and demonstrating that it was disease-causing, was a useful research project. Now we know.
They then shook these proteins until they resembled the tangled structure of an unhealthy prion.
Right. Won't catch me dead on this protein-shaking carnie ride, then: The Zipper+Roller Coaster. Sweet jesus, you'd be sure to develop mad cow disease!
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
You will not catch AIDS by drinking water, but prions might do the trick, given how they survive cooking and even burning.
Great, now we have yet another form of weapon of mass destruction.
Artificial prions are chemical weapons, just like VX, sarin, and other nerve agents. Unlike nuclear weapons, chemical weapons are technically not weapons of mass destruction because only a nuclear reaction can destroy mass.
Or more germanely, it may be advisable not to inject your next Big Mac straight into your brain...
You're fairly new here, aren't you? On /. we make beowulf clusters with old jokes.
For those who don't want to register, here is my paraphrase(I tried to remove highly technical terms as well)...
1) Ordinary mouse prion protein was cloned by recombinant DNA technology in
E. coli. The recombinant protein was polymerised into amyloid fibrils(the
same stuff that forms in Alzheimer's disease etc...). The fibrils were put
into a mouse brain. The mice used were transgenically modified to express
larger amounts of normal prion protein when compared to wild-type mice.
2) After 380-660 days, the mice got a neurological disorder.
3) Prion protein that was resistant to protease(i.e. a protein which cuts up
another protein) activity was found in the mice brains when the proteins
in the cell were analysed on a Western blot.
4) These protease resistant prion protein extracts caused disease in 150-90
days if put into the brain of either a wild-type or the transgenic mice
in part 1.
5) This suggests that the researchers managed to create a new prion.
6) This helps to prove that prions are infectious proteins.
X-Has-Sig: yes
"Artificial Pr0n"?
God, I need a girlfriend.
raise your hand if you didn't read the rest of the comments before posting the 100th comment about artificial pr0n........
There are some rumors that the prions which cause mad cow disease were developed as part of the extensive biological and chemical weapons programs of the former Soviet Union. Agencies such as: Biopreparat, the FSB (formerly the KGB), and the Soviet Military were all involved.
In another chilling development, Vozrozhdeniye Island in the Aral Sea, where much testing of biological agents including anthrax, bubonic plague, glanders, and other extremely infectious agents occurred supposedly contains massive amounts of anthrax hastily buried by Russian scientists amidst the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. More fodder for the conspiracy theorists out there...
If you'd just stop felching them they would live longer. "ARMAGEDDON!"
I just hope they don't behead people with box cutter ...
It took 1 to 2 years to *create* the prion. After that, it could be passed on to other normal mice in 90+ days.
X-Has-Sig: yes
I'm curious.
Does this have the potential to develop into a weapon?
One more reason to stop eating meat
:D
I quit 12 years ago. Being vegan is for wimps. Real men go raw foodist.
The analogy I like to use is that prions are the protein version of "The Living Dead". One zombie protein will convert any healthy proteins it comes into contact with, those newly created zombie proteins will convert other ones, etc., until there aren't any healthy proteins left. It doesn't hurt that the analogy involves brains...
Maybe the Administration is trying to cover up GW's own case of brain wasting disease? you might mod this flamebait, but sometimes I wonder just how advanced Reagan's alzheimer's might have been toward the end of his Presidency ((shudder))
Do prions misfold in a consistent manner? If so, now that they have more or less been established as the culprit for these types of diseases, shouldn't we be able to develop antibodies to them? That would seem like the logical next step to me.
That's taking the low-carb craze a little too far.
... 38% of Slashdot readers cannot read.
The way in which a prion can influence a protein to mis-fold and become a prion is oddly reminiscent of the way an Ice-Nine molecule could make ordinary water molecules crystallize into a form which was solid at room temperature. To clarify: Ice-Nine was a fictional concept described in Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Cats Cradle." I wonder if it could have had any influence in real science, as opped to science fiction.
The guy in charge of the project wasn't interested in pursuing the results because the intersection of protein dynamics and hydrodynamics wasn't somewhere he wanted to go.
It will be interesting to see if they can develop anything more than handwaving explanations for how the shaking is causing the prions to change structure. Standard molecular dynamics simulations of proteins don't model mixing behavior of the water molecules surrounding the protein. Part of this may be due to the different time scales of the two phenomena.
...and as far as I know, none of those bombs you're referring to are WMDs.
Besides, that's not what I was suggesting; clearly terrorists have weapons that go beyond box cutters. But the point of terrorism is to inflict terror - and you don't need to have weapons of mass destruction to do that. You don't even have to kill that many people to create an undue amount of fear.
And yes, there is a real threat, but it's probably not big enough for most people to worry about it: the odds aren't really anything to get worked up over. (This isn't to say that you shouldn't be worried about terrorism, but it's wise to be rational about it.)
But back to the original point, you don't need WMDs to be a successful terrorist. It's much easier to build a bomb than to build and harvest prions and successfully introduce those into a population, so terrorism is more likely to be carried out through low-tech means.
"Why can't everyone just be straight with me?"
"Because we live in a bendy world, dear."
The mice developed BSE-like symptoms one to two years later, the team report in Science1. They became weak and shaky, and post-mortem analysis revealed that their brains were full of holes and rogue prion proteins.
Critically, when the mouse brains were ground up and injected into healthy rodents, they too became ill. This is the acid test for any prion disease, says Legname.
Note that the mice didn't just die. They developed BSE-like symptoms and their brains showed BSE-like degeneration. And the ground up brain material was capable of passing on the disease to other mice. Assuming that the research was properly controlled and it can be reproduced by other labs, it pretty much nails the issue.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
or maybe we make jokes out of old beowulf clusters? Of course in Soviet Russia, the beowulf clusters makes old jokes out of you!
...isn't that the new hybrid-power Toyota?
Umm, I can't POSSIBLY be the only one who read it that way at first glance...?
DiscDividers tabbed plastic CD dividers: divider cards f
Yes, maybe we could end the world with the nasty prions!
so if in contact with a BSE protein it'll learn to fold the BSE way.
So this sounds very close to an Ice 9 like scenario, with this particular molecule in a brain. Is that the kind of model you're describing?
Have scientists now just created [prion] life from scratch[protein], or am I just confused?
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
I thought mass COULDN'T be destroyed, no matter what.
The products of a uranium or plutonium fission reaction have less mass than the reactant. The reaction converts some of the mass to heat, that is, it destroys matter and creates an equal amount of heat energy, preserving mass-energy according to Einstein's formula E = m*c^2.
Stuff burns, but there's ash and smoke totaling up to the same mass as before.
This is true of trinitrotoluene (TNT) and other explosives that depend on chemical reactions, which liberate energy from the high-potential-energy configuration of electrons in the explosive. Nuclear reactions, on the other hand, are much more powerful because they convert a significant amount of matter to heat energy.
As has been hinted at in other entries here, a prion is an alternate, stable, but nonworking and here's the kicker *infectious* conformation of a normal brain protein.
Proteins fold and twist, combine, etc., into little functional specially-shaped nuggets, sheets, strands, etc. What's strangely intuitive about functional proteins is how many of them function based on their shape. No obscure chemsistry or quantum effects here; they make little socket wrenches, funnels, motors, lock-and-key assemblies, etc.
However, that's not to say that because their core function doesn't have to do with their electronic properties, that these aren't important. Since their individual atoms do still have charge effects, they can be deformed, ("denatured",) reshaped, etc. They can also do this to each other. E.g. certain enzymes have two "sockets": the one that would normally work on a target molecule is bent out of shape and inactive until some other "cofactor" atom or molecule snicks into the back of the enzyme, bending it differently and opening up the active area.
So proteins are a little flexible, and can affect each other's shapes if they're close enough. As previously mentioned, the kicker: you can take certain sheet-like molecules in the brain and mutate them so that not only do they no longer work right, but they generate a charge field around themselves that will eff up other, similar molecules that encounter them, *and so on*
So you end up with this Night of Living Dead effect where as soon as you make a legit molecule of this kind, it goes off all peppily into the brain, doing its deal, until it encounters a zombie prion, and hey, you don't look right...but...somehow..seductive...yes! I will join you in your plaque pile! I must tell others! So you get scrapie or CWD or mad cow or some others.
What I have always thought strange is that no one seems to have looked at prions as a possible cause of Alzheimers', another poorly-understood neurological disease marked by pileups of nonfunctional protein plaques in the brain.
The reason this is significant? Folks, I thought this was one of your core beliefs! The only way to really truly understand something complex (a cake, a compiler, a neuropathic protein) is to build one that works.
This is not a 'troll' despite its rating and that it was posted by an AC. Prion diseases are actually quite similar to Alzheimer's in that both are caused by aggregation of proteins in the brain, resulting amyloid plaque formation.
I hadn't heard about mice having the syndrome before. Are these novel prions? i.e. are they creating a new thing that's similar to mad cow, but differnt and never before seen? Since these things can be transmitted from one group of animals to another, (i believe it's sheep and cows that can trade it, and cows and humans that can trade it, but not humans and sheep directly (is that right?)) I'm just hoping that there careful not to contract it to a new animal population in the wild. It might come back to us through a animal other then cows.
Inject the protein into the mice first, then shake them until they become twisted.
Hmm anybody want to fund my experiment, just need $80 for some mice, a paint can, and a paint mixer.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
and I thought: Wow! But how do they keep the people there?
-silence
Dyslectics of the world, untie!
That being said, in this prion story, we have an some example of postulates 2-4. The Prusiner team synthesized an artificial agent that's implicated in disease, and used it to infect and create new diseased organisms. This is a scientific step forward. Previously, the prion agent itself correlative with disease, but as to whether it is the causative agent, it was unclear.
The brief criticisms in the NY Times articles may have some merit though. It's still possible that the disease has some other underlying cause, and the artificial prion only hastened onset. This is an important point, because the signs of aggregate prions (the amyloid plaques) are found in BOTH healthy and diseased animals, thereby violating the first Koch postulate in some sense. However, I warn the reader that my knowledge is deficient here. Perhaps the amyloid plaques are composed of misfolded variants of other proteins also.
This is a rough summary of what I know. I hope I haven't offended any experts who know the details. Please feel free to correct what I'm sure are numerous mistakes.
Sounds like this will be used as a biological weapon. Such a thing could cause a "prion holocaust" in a country, killing huge numbers, with total plausible deniability.
Vegetarian diets sound like a better idea all the time.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Somewhere else in thread, someone asks if this is a first step to a cure. Not wanting to sound alarmist, but I will anyway.
Suppose some not-so-nice people find a way to medicate the symptoms away(needing injections/pills/treatments) to make you functional, do you think they(he-who-would-profit) would create a cure? Look at diabetes. Nasty. If there was money in a cure, nobody would need insulin shots. Truth is, cutting down on sugar intake is a better preventative.
This(BSE) however, is insidious. It takes years to manifest, and by that time, you could be done for. Another worst case-if you have a treatment for the condition, if you displease someone who wants you gone, all it takes is for them to MAKE the prion fold wrong(tampering with the treatment to cause it) instead of mitigate the bad folded ones, you would be none the wiser, and it wouldn't show for years. Not saying that Pharmas have ethical problems...*cough*
I see it as a tool, and how this tool will be used will determine what the outcome is.
And a short blurb about Alzheimers. It appears some of the people diagnosed with it actually have CJD(human equivalent). I'll leave it up to newsies/linker types to Google it.
Oh, FYI-the prion 'dies' at around 1000 C. You'd kill any patient you try to 'clean'. Perhaps it resonates at a different frequency than the normal folded sequence. Detection(absorption) and irradication(more power) might be possible.
Yeah, it creeps me way out. Appologies for bad grammar, spelling-it's late. Sweet dreams...
This mind intentionally left blank.
The KKK a bunch of sheetheads? You decide!
sure, go ahead, ruin all the fun with your fancy physics.
Here
more and newer biological warfare agents!
And look! Its being researched in the US of A!
yeah yeah troll, flamebait, whatever. The USA has a long history of using WMDs against civilian populations, mod me as you will.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
YES, IDIOT, DESPITE THE FACT THAT HALF OF THE COMMENTS BEFORE YOURS SAID THE SAME THING, YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE.
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(Insert Mice Banned Country XXX Joke Here)
"You Insesitive Clod, Mad Cows...Ummmm Mice, have feelings Too!"
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
One more reason to stop eating meat
If you want to avoid food that contains beef by-products, you'll need to stop eating more than just meat. For example, most cheese is made with animal-based rennet. Its source is the stomach linings of mammals like cows.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
Here is the hypothesis of prion-induced disease:
A prion is a protein that, when misfolded, can [i]induce[/i] the misfolding of another protein of the same sequence. Once one prion protein becomes misfolded (the scientists here use urea and vinegar to denature the protein) then it can effectively _produce_ more prions. What you get is a positive-feedback loop where more misfolded proteins induce the misfolding of even more misfolded proteins and so forth. The misfolded proteins can't be properly degraded by cells and so the proteins start to clump together into fibers which then cause damage.
The experiment they performed was to artificially create a prion protein, inject it into mice, and watch whether the mice became sick.
One other possibility is...
-- The protein they injected is actually a regulatory protein for gene expression. The activation or repression of specific genes then causes the disease. This same regulatory protein are also expressed by these genes and so the disease may be transmitted by the transferral of these regulatory proteins. Note that gene expression is still the cause of the sickness, but the regulatory proteins cause the genes to turn on/off.
So the evidence is interesting because their hypothesis is not disproved. But I still think they need to eliminate the other possibility.
Favorite
Am I the only one here that mistook the heading for: "Artificial Pr0n" ? Mod me down, i dare you!
- Flesh of creature A, including malformed protein, is consumed by creature B. (Consumption is apparently part of the mechanism of infection.)
- Malformed protein avoids chemical breakdown in digestive system
- Malformed protein is absorbed in whole into the bloodstream (proof of this alone would require radical rethinking of our understanding of digestion)
- Malformed protein manages to get past blood-brain barrier
- Malformed protein in brain causes other proteins to become malformed, causing neural disorder. This is what the experiment showed was happening, so they have shown that once there are malformed proteins in the brain, they can be the mechanism for progression of the disease.
- ... uh, profit? Nope, I guess that doesn't work here.
All they've really shown is that the presence of malformed proteins can provide a mechanism for the disease, but not how they get there in the first place. Until someone threatens to inject cow brain extract into my head, I'm not worried. And until a mechanism for transmission is shown, I still think that prions are bunk!!Even heroes have the right to dream
Remembering how everyone reacted to the whole mad cow disease scare, I think it is important that people realize the following:
(1) There has not been a single proven case of a human becoming infected with a TSE (transmissible spongiform encephalopathy) from eating TSE-infected beef.
(2) There is no proof that bovine spongiform encephalopathy ("Mad Cow Disease") can be transmitted to humans from cows; in fact, it is rather unlikely, as the cow proteins are likely dissimilar enough to our proteins that the self-replicating effect would not occur.
I'd like to extend my congratulations to our country's brilliant scientists for coming up with yet another way to torture and kill lab mice. Keep it up!
P.S.: Try the microwave oven too
What makes this dangerous is proteins can learn new and unique ways of folding.. so if in contact with a BSE protein it'll learn to fold the BSE way. Meaning.. it'll learn to fold superstable.. which is basically a knot you can't untie. Proteins are the messengers of the body.. and if they can't unfold to be read.. its basically dead weight.
I'm not sure what you think you mean by "messengers of the body", but proteins are not information storage devices. They are products of genes, which are encoded by DNA, which is the information-carrying molecule of living organisms.
Proteins are functional or structural objects -- they act as scaffolding, motors and chemical reaction centers. They can be modified in ways that allow the transmission of information (e.g. phosphorylation), but that's a secondary responsibility.
That said, your description of BSE is incorrect. Proteins are not unfolded for "reading." They fold to assume their functional shape, and unfolding destroys their function. It's not something that happens to healthy, useful proteins. In fact, the cell has mechanisms to hunt down and destroy unfolded proteins, lest they do some sort of damage.
BSE is the result of a rarity in the protein universe -- a protein that has two stable folds. Most proteins have only a single, naturally stable conformation, but the protein responsible for BSE has another. What's more, this oddball protein fold can actually catalyze the folding of other proteins into it's own shape, thus destroying their previous function. What ultimately causes the disease, however, is the propensity of these misfolded proteins to aggregate, forming solid clumps that kill the cells in which they accumulate.
BSE has nothing to do with proteins "learning" of new ways to fold. Proteins don't learn. Proteins fold correctly, or they don't -- and in this case, failing to fold correctly has a nasty consequence.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
... and mace (but most people seem to think the hijackers only had box cutters).
Prions are hard to transmit, and that's no accident: naked proteins don't make it to your brain very easily.
The precursor proteins to prions appear to have important functions in your brain. The fact that they sometimes can harm you should be no more mysterious or scary than the fact that occasionally even a safety belt or air bag may be responsible for your death. On balance, you are still far better off with them.
Heh - it gets scarier.
Do a google search on "downer cows". Check out what the US meat industry has been serving up to the world for years and years.
(I'm not currently a vegetarian. But when the fish is polluted with heavy metals and PCBs, the meat is contaminated with who knows how much prion-infested caracsses, it really starts to look like an attractive option.)
Isn't this more like a complex poison? Though it works on a fairly complex biochemical layer, is it propagating itself? No, it's just accidentally corrupting biological structures. It's malforming proteins at a subtle level, but that's different from just destroying them accidentally (with bodily trauma, a caustic agent, radiation, etc). It falls short of arbitrarily damaging them in the pursuit of propagation. There's no end, just a means. So it kind of falls between a real disease and mere poison.
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
So what? It's almost impossible to get this disease from meat. Even if I DID eat meat from tainted cows, I'd be more likely to die from the chair spontaneously collapsing. And I'm only 200 pounds.
For those of you who don't study biochemistry, here is some background information regarding the importance of this discovery:
For starters, an enzyme is a protein which specializes in catalyzing a specific reaction (lowering the amount of energy input needed to allow a reaction to occur). Proteins/enzymes are synthesized from DNA/RNA templates. The synthesis occurs in a linear fashion producing a long chain of amino acids which will eventually fold to become the protein/enzyme. The structure is classified according to proximity (primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary). The primary structure is the amino acid sequence. Secondary structure is folding that occurs over short distances due mostly to polar attractions; this includes alpha helices and beta barrels. Tertiary structure is more of the overall shape that results forming a subunit. Quaternary stucture is the association of the subunits to create the overall protein/enzyme. Hemoglobin, for example, consists of 2 alpha subunits and 2 beta subunits around a heme (iron) core to create the complete enzyme.
The interesting thing about prions is that they are not malformed proteins due to a mutation in the primary structure as is seen in most diseases (sickle cell anemia, cancer). A prion has the exact same amino acid sequence as its healthy and properly formed counterpart; the prion simply folded in the incorrect way. When amino acid sequences are processed through molecular modelling programs to determine their final 3D conformation, often times there are multiple conformations which are thermodynamically equivalent.
When a prion is present it causes enzymes with the same primary structure within proximity to adapt its misfolded shape, thus spreading itself. The concept is similar to "ice nine" that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. describes in "Cat's Cradle" where a single crystal of ice nine is the seed which causes all other water molecules to crystalize into ice.
The significance of artificially creating a prion is that medicine may one day be able to create prions to correct enzymatic problems rather than create them. This could lead to a cure for vCJD/BSE and other undiagnosed disorders due to prions (although I do not know if it could ever correct primary structure mutations such as sickle cell anemia).
Matt
I mean, seriously. Prions are fastinating and terrifying at the same time. If one security protocol fails this thing could make it out into the wild and...um...I forget what I was going to say.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
its very easy to buy vegitarian cheese.
Tillamook has a mild chedder
Great stuff, its very easy to eat vegitarian stuff. most labels now contain a little blurp about what type of ingredients are in the product, like beef, eggs, wheat, soy... ect.
Imagine my disappointment when I discovered the headline wasn't "Artificial Porn Created" as I first read it......
Oh, I thought it said Artificial Pr0n :(.
Has anyone else noticed that prion diseases act like "ice-9" from Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut? All it seems to take is one super stable "seed crystal" and all the other proteins (or water molecules) conform to is shape (or crystal structure).
There is no belief, however foolish, that will not gather its faithful adherents who will defend it to the death.-Asimov
Crazy terrorist PETA supporter! take your soviet salad eater propaganda and get the hell out of here!
I think it might be require more than not feeding dead cows to cows. Other species suffer from prion related diseases and there is a possibility of cross-species transmission.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Probably quicker to just grab a few mice and chuck them into the hopper at a McDonald's factory. After all, it's not as if anyone would notice the difference in taste... :-)
Something like, for instance, an attack calculated to "shock and awe", perhaps?
G.W. Shrub fits most of the definitions of "terrorist" quite handily.
What the fuck was that all about? Take your meds please before posting. Thank you.
Life at the molecular level is a very interesting topic. It's mysterious, it's a great unexplored frontier, and understanding it has direct consequences on our lives. I think you'll feel the same way if you read the following article. It's written specifically to be more accessible to the average reader but I assure you as a biochem major it is not a trivial explaination. You'll really understand what prions are and just how protein mis-folding is responsible for mad-cow and alzheimers.
Unraveling the Mystery of Protein Folding by W. A. (Bill) Thomasson
http://www.faseb.org/opar/protfold/protein.html
Enjoy!
RECOMMENDED COMMENT EOL
I wish at was Friday, but I dont want to wish my life away. So I wish it was last Friday.
I could be completely wrong( I probobly am) as my only information was gleaned from two paragraphs in a 500 page medical book which most doctors uses for consultation. I just glanced at it.
In short Mad Cow Disease isn't a virus, bacteria, or a fungus. It's also not a regular chemical poisoning. Now you see why it was so difficult to research.
By my understanding, the prion is malformed in such an unusual way, that when it collides with a brain cell( maybe not just brain), a special reaction begins. The details were a little beyond me, but believe it or not, the final result of this reaction was a destroyed brain cell and another malformed prion. Not the same prion, a new one. The old one was destroyed in the reaction. I'm not actually sure if only one new prion, of more were created. I suppose it's a little like nuclear fission., with prions as the neutrons and brains cells as the Uranium. Lots of 'Plutonium' in your head after a while.
I could be completely wrong on this, but that was my understanding anyway.
May the Maths Be with you!
A lot of people have heard of "Mad Cow". Some of them have even heard of BSE or CFD. And most people don't realize that this is nothing novel, nothing new, and not at all limitted to cows.
The result of these prions in the brain is spongiform encephaly - literally, holes being eaten in your brain by the prion's interaction. Not a very fun thing!
Now, prion-caused sponfigorm encephalies have been found in a good number of animals. At a minimum, humans, goats, sheep, cows, squirrels, deer, elk, etc..
In cows, the condition is called "BSE" ("Bovine Spongiform Encephaly"). In humans, it's usually called Creutzfelt-Jacob's Disease (I'm sure I murdered the spelling). Those are merely terms for the resultant condition from the prion infection.
Now, the prion responsible for BSE isn't all that bad, as far as infectious prions go. First, it's not really transmissible in cows without the direct ingestion of infected nervous tissue. That means that if we just didn't feed cows ground up cows or ground up sheep, a very large part of the problem is solved.
However, there are other prion agents that are a bit nastier. In the case of CWD and scrapie, the prions have been shown to be transmissible to other individuals through the environment if (a) a n infected carcass or (b) excreta from an infected animal is in the area. Even better, even after all of the animals have left the area, CWD and scrapie agents have been shown to remain and still be contagious to other individuals years later.
Here's the good part: Researchers have already found genes that cause resistance to prion infections, or at least to certain types of them. The genes are found most commonly (and most heavily) in populations that practiced (or still practice) cannibalism. On the down side, it's not something as nice as getting infected and developping an immunity - we're talking about the cannibalistic societies being mostly wiped out by prion-based diseases, leaving only those (luckily) able to resist as the sole survivors, to pass along the genes to their offspring.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
brilliant. not.
If you'd like to contribute to work studying the mysterious nature of protein folding, consider donating your spare CPU cycles to the Folding @ Home distributed project - a worthy project made even more relevant in the light of these new discoveries. I don't pretend to understand much about the biology behind it all, but this stuff fascinates me, and it looks like the more focus this field receives, the more humanity on the whole will benefit.
Perhaps the answer to the problem of teenagers dropping bricks from motorway and railway bridges is to sue Tetris.
Actually, to stop eating meat doesn't save you from anything like a spongiform encephalopathy.
By the latest research, milk is considered to be absolutely secure, meat as secure, inner organs like the liver or spleen as possibly risky and brain as risky. But even if you avoid eating cow meat at all, there are many cosmetic products that contain ingredients made from cow inner organs and brains.
Cow brain protein is used to make perfumes, the collagen from cow ligaments is used to make gelatine that is used in lotions, body oils an various others cosmetic products.
Ni.
Scientists have created something that kills mice when injected into them. There's already thousands of things that can do that.
If you want to eliminate CJD, BSE etc... you need to improve the conditions that animals are raised in. Allowing them to be raised in poor conditions and then expecting the scientists to cure them when they get ill is stupid. Not to mention all the animals that will have to die and suffer just to cure animals for cheap food.
Wasn't feeling like /. without some idiotic conspiracy theory. And hey, look, it's the old favourite: those evil pharma corporations are all refusing to develop a cure.
Never mind that:
1. There _is_ money in a cure. If you had a cure for, say, Cancer and a 20 year patent on it, you could sell it for any sky-high amount of money you'd want to. It's the perfect extortion scheme. You pay up or you die a slow painful death.
2. Lo and behold, they did make cures and vaccines for a metric buttload of diseases.
3. Most importantly: there are doctors, pharmacists, managers at pharmaceuticals corporations, etc, who die of Cancer every year. Or have a bad case of diabetes. Or whose _child_ is dying of some disease.
Now you're telling me no less than they'll rather patiently wait for their own death -- or the death of those they love -- rather than break the conspiracy oath and divulge the cure. Doesn't that strike you as a completely retarded idea? If _you_ could make a cure, and you'll _die_ if you don't, wouldn't you just make the stupid cure already?
4. We're talking millions of doctors, pharmacists and researchers world wide. Some in countries where they don't even have private enterprise as you know it. (E.g., until recently the USSR and to some extent still China.) Or where it's not even easy to keep in touch with a western conspiracy. (E.g., the USSR block was pretty much isolated and guarded by a paranoid secret police.) And which invested hundreds of billions in researchs. (E.g., in developping their own nuclear weapons, sattellites, chemical weapons, biological weapons, ICBMs, etc.)
Yet you'd want me to believe that _all_ those are part of the same global conspiracy to keep some diseases untreated.
You know what? There's a medical name for that. It's called "Paranoia".
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The fact is, that the Mad Cow Disease and the Alzheimer are close relatives.
The pathological mechanism of both diseases is almost the same. There is a protein (in cause of Alzheimer it is the Tau protein), which has 2 stable conformations. One of those conformations is the natural, healthy and useful one, the other is the bad one. It is capable of converting the healthy conformation into the infectious one. It is stable to proteases. It forms aggregates that kill the infected cell.
The only difference is, that Alzheimer is not infectious. It cannot be transferred from one person to another by eating the infected ones brain. And, it is unclear, what causes the Tau protein co convert to the infectious form.
Ni.
As if the world isn't filled with mad people, the "artificial prion", no matter for whatever noble reason it was created, will eventually be used as yet another weapon for Bio Warfare.
Think of it
Drop something like this, over a population, wait for 5 - 10 years, and you enemy will be infected, and become "mad".
And btw, a protein isn't something that's included in any international convention regarding biowarfare agent. It isn't a toxic gas, nor germs/bacteria/viruses. Plus you can always argue that the thing occurs in the nature !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
I do not believe that it is a normal practice, so long as competition exists for whatever the product is (another problem made worse by lengthening of patent laws). But, it has been covered in many major journals (Nature, SA, JAMA,) and circulars (NYT, Wall Street, ...).
Any corp, especially rich powerful ones, have their fill of *evil* people. And they do tend to gravitate to the controlling roles. If you ever have any question about the motive of any action, or the predicted course of any action of a company, remember in the end, it is only about profit. Either they do and stay in business, or they do not and the corp dies.
InnerWeb
What is Kuru?
some tribes of papua new guinea were known to dig up their recently deceased relatives and eat them, including their brains. this feed back cycle is the same feed back cycle that led to bce, the mad cow disease. farmer's thought "hey, all this brain matter from slaughter, we're just throwing it away, it's good protein! feed it back to the cows!" except it wasn't "good" protein. that is the source of mad cow disease. we gave it to cows so we could save a few bucks on cattle feed.
the lesson folks: don't eat brains. not even from other species. i don't care how cool the dish is, you're encouraging yourself to get a prion disease.
now if you were a soviet scientist investigating cool new infectious agents, wouldn't you start with kuru, which already works in humans?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I can't donate blood here in NZ anymore since I happened to live in the UK between certain years and ate beef (ah, drunken burger stops on the way home from the pub). I hope they do figure out what causes this so 1. I know I don't have it and 2. I can once again feel the joy of having a needle stuck in me and the life blood drained out!
They then shook these protiens.
I want to get paid to shake protiens, sod real research though.
Everybody (else) who read "pr0n" instead of prion, please sit down and think about what's going on in your life...
Sorry about that.
because the intersection of protein dynamics and hydrodynamics wasn't somewhere he wanted to go.
Hydrodynamics at a molecular level has to be mean, real mean.
The only thing I really know about hydrodynamics is that it's a very bad place to trust your intuition.
If you have something on a balance-point, tiny input changes make big output changes. Balance the Washington Monument on its point and make it fall one way or the other with a feather.
Greedy people, they sure have. Very greedy even. Some even evil.
But people who'd die a slow painful death themselves for that greed? I really don't think so. I'll say that:
- No amount of money in the world can make every single pharamaceuticals executive rather die of cancer than search for a cure. When you're dead, all the money in the world is no longer of any use.
- No amount of money in the world can make all of them just watch their child or parents die a slow death, rather than search for a cure. Maybe one or two assholes, yeah. But all of them? No fscking way. Your average mother would probably rather die herself than watch her 5 year old in a casket.
People, even politicians, have been known to make 180 degree turns when their loved ones are in danger. See the recent swing in stem cell research policy in the USA, when it looked like it could save a few rich old people.
Some stuff turns around even a politician who got elected for bible-thumping and promising the exact opposite. So I'll go on a limb and say that if a cure is possible, something like this _will_ convince at least one doctor or pharma manager to search for it.
I'll also say that for most diseases you don't have anything to gain from _not_ making a cure. Contrary to the popular conspiracy theory you just can't milk them of money for ever.
E.g., someone with cancer typically dies within 3 years. Most even sooner. That's it. Whatever milking you're going to do, that's the deadline. You milk them of money, but then they die.
If you could make a treatment which costs a lot for 3 years, and then they're _cured_, you'd have a lot more money to gain. Until the patent expires, everyone would want to pay for 3 years and _live_, as opposed to pay for 3 years and _die_. You could make them pay a helluva lot more.
_Especially_ those "evil" greedy corporate types are very good at understanding that kind of logic. They're there to make money, and blimey, that's one cure which would bring in _tons_ of money.
E.g., diabetes was mentioned. Well, you know, insuline isn't protected by patents or anything, and everyone produces it. It's a _commodity_. It does't bring in that much money. If someone could make a pill that just cures diabetes, and get a 20 year monopoly on it (via patents), they would. It would bring in far more money than being the 100'th company selling cheap insulin.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Did anyone else misread this article as "Artificial pr0n created?" Hello....wake up call to 2004. Weird Science. That is all...
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
What prevents the disease prion from getting into cheese or other dairy products?...
For example, most cheese is made with animal-based rennet.
I hear that they sometimes use animal-based milk as well.
Free Mac Mini. Yes, I'm
The current theory is that normal prions are cleared from the body, but the damaged (tangled up - misfolded) prions have different chemical properties. Even worse, when the damaged prions bump into normal prions, they have a catalytic behavior turning normal prions into bad prions.
Instead of getting cleared from the body, the damaged prions clump together and precipitate out of solution.
The clumps grow bigger and bigger, forming plaques in the brain, the areas around the plaque die. Over time the brain has holes in it where the dead tissue is / or was. (Thus the 'spongy' name - and not the funny square pants kind.)
It is hard to cure because it is in the brain, and the brain has a blood / brain barrier.
(The blood/brain barrier screens out drugs and other chemicals in order to protect the brain from the stuff floating around in your blood.)
One concept is to develop some sort of vaccine to teach the immune system to detect and destroy the damaged prions before they turn into big clumps.
The more you read about it, the less likely you'll want to go to the drive through window for a triple cheeseburger with XTRA-large fries and a 64 oz. drink!
Never, never, never shake a prion ...
Silpon Designs
Scented Paper Products
"Afterwords, these prions were injected into the brains of mice who fell ill two years later."
Yes, they used very strong words. I can't bring myself to say them here, but let's say they would make my mother blush.
Now you've brought up an interesting point. I'm probably ill-informed, but from what I've heard/read, prion diseases seem to be showing up in herbivores induced into unnatural diets. Domesticated animals get it through feed we give them.
How do deer get it, because I've heard of it there, too.
Why don't scavengers get it? It seems to me that it would be a rather normal cause of death, or at least normal to be found in early stages, at time of death.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
I thought it said Psions. Sigh. Well, we can hope.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
bilogical weapon. This is scary stuff. Imagine some sick pysyco getting ahold of this and injecting the
artifical prions into food. I've always believed that AIDS was a bioengineered virus. And to weaponize it someday who knows, it could be spiced with the common cold. Imagine how some sick bastard can weaponize an artificial prion. This is pretty damn scary if you ask me.
The Point: What effect might low-energe EM fields have on the folding process of newly-synthesized proteins? IIRC, all proteins are initially a linear strand coded by TRNA at the ribosome, and have to be carefully folded into their final form before they're ready to do their job.
The article talked about 'shaking proteins', though didn't say how they shook them.
Low energy EM fields...
The tinfoil hatters have been going on and on about power lines, cellphone towers, and other sources of low energy EM fields. The business community has been going on and on about how the energy of the EM fields is too low to cause any ionization, the normal culprit in organic damage.
But are the low energy EM fields sufficiently strong to disrupt the initial folding process?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Anyway, while these results from Prusiner and colleagues go a long way toward demonstrating the infectivity of prions, there are still some problems with the experiment before one can conclude that Koch's postulates have been satisfied.
I've listed some of the problems (potential and real) with the experiment here:
BTW, my scientific background is not in prions. I direct a lab that works on Epstein-Barr virus.
The Nature reference is an editorial discussion, there is one in Science as well.
miaow!
What about stomach ulcers and Helicobacter pylori?
In 1982 some scientist discovered that a large percentage of ulcers were linked to Helicobacter, and found that simple antibiotics would cure it. Of course, most doctors for the next 10-15 years left their patients on expensive acid blockers instead. More money in those than a cheap cure! So much for no conspiracy theory...
I quote from link above:
"Even after the National Institute of Health and the Food and Drug Administration recognized that ulcers could be cured, 90% of doctors continued to treat their patients with drugs which only controlled the acid, but did not cure the condition.
According to a Fortune magazine article in 1997, ulcer expert Dr. Martin Blaser of Vanderbilt University concluded that there was no conspiracy, just no economic incentive for doctors to support Barry Marshall's great discovery. In 1980, Tagamet sales worldwide were "nearly $600 million.) It soon became the best selling drug on earth until it was replaced by Zantac in 1988. From 1992 to 1997 "Americans have spent nearly $25 Billion on drugs to slow the production of acid....Billions more have been spent on "visits" to doctors.
In February 1996, Scientific American magazine noted that the cost of eradicating H. pylori bacteria and curing ulcers: "Less than $200 for a standard one-week therapy."
It's casein, which is a milk-derived protein. For packaged vegan cheeses...I'd reccomend not going there. They're all disgusting.
Try mixing Nutritious Yeast with crushed sesame seeds and shake. Tastes like parmesan.
Haha! You tpyoed! Learn to spill!
Bot Assisted Blogging
i knew it all along. ... ...
...
...
... /. articles that wolfes are ...
...
it's mad cow disease. some countries occupants
are full of it, but since they get "dumber" they
can't realize it.
hey! maybe a great many cultures, say maya,
inka, romans, greek, etc. have been made dumb by
a disease like this
what is interessting, it takes a while(two years
or more) so it's difficult to notice for a sick
person. a soar throat shows over night
further more, it seems, once infected the
original infecting prion can use "healty" prions
to grow itself. like a crystel in a mine. with
enough reactant and the right conditions, you
can have 1 meter high crystals. only this
crystal grows in your brain
question: is the "defectiv" prion more stable
then the "healty" one? since these are protein
structures, it should not be difficult to find
an enzym (or engineer one for that matter) that
uses ATP or something else to "search and re-
flip" anomalous prions in the brain or blood
stream
makes you wonder what would happens to a person
treated with this enzym. maybe she/he losses all
long term memories?
i believe the beeff industry is not happy with
this result. oh and where do you put the dead
infected lab mice? a prion isn't alive so it
can't die u know
and i rcall an older
immune to a BSE form in deer
enzym enginner is the way to go
Thankfully, Nature provided the reference to the original report printed in Science. Since this thing's right up my alley (I'm a biochemist), and since I know few people will read the real article, and since I'm a karma whore anyway, here's a summary of the original report. It assumes you know a little about prion diseases (BSE, CJS, GSS) already -- see other posts in this thread, or Wikipedia, for more info.
First: some background. There is a gene in mice that, if a certain mutation occurs, causes the mice to develop a neurodegenerative disease (hereafter abbreviated NDD) at an early age. If brain extracts from the diseased mice are transferred to healthy mice, the healthy mice contract the same disease. We're talking about an extant, previously-known prion-like disease in mice. Previous work by Kaneko, et al (see article if you really want the reference) took a short amino-acide sequence from the mouse protein believed to cause the NDD, and folded it into two different conformations: a non-beta-rich and a beta-rich (beta-rich structures are believed to be the NDD-operative part of other prion diseases such as BSE and CJD). They then injected the two different conformations into two different groups of mice. The non-beta-rich-protein group was fine, but the beta-rich-protein group developed the NDD anywhere between 1 and 2 years after injection. All this was work published previously, before the current paper in Science.
Okay, now we get to what Legname's paper is about. Taking the previous knowledge into account, Legname, et al took a similar beta-rich segment of the possibly infectious protein (called MoPrP -- roughly moprion protein) and made two preparations of it: one MoPrP which was just separate strands (called "unseeded"), and one MoPrP which was clumped in amyloid fibrils (called "seeded" -- basically an abnormally polymerized clump of protein, the presence of which correlates with NDD's like BSE and Alzheimers). Note that the critical difference here between the current work and the previous work is that the previous work folded the MoPrP protein into a known beta-rich (infectious conformation), whereas the current work just polymerized it into an amyloid plaque. The former doesn't necessarily happen spontaneously in vivo, whereas the latter certainly can. Anyway, the two preparations, unseeded and seeded, were injected into mice. Two years later, the seeded mice had a much higher rate of NDD than did the unseeded mice.
So, some of the conclusions that come from this:
- Strong evidence that prion diseases are in fact caused by misfolded proteins -- generally believed to be true, but some people thought otherwise.
- "amyloid fibrils harbor detectable levels of prion infectivity"
- "PrP [prion protein] is both necessary and suffienct for infectivity"
- "spontaneous formation of prions, which is thought to be responsible for sporadic forms of prion disease in livestock and humans, can occur in any mammal expressing PrPC" and "no exogenous agent is required for prions to form in any mammal" (though an exogenous agent can certainly help).
My own conclusion from the last point: it's possible that Alzheimers is just like a prion disease, just one that starts spontaneously. The issue of infectivity (as far as we know, Alzheimers isn't communicable) is still unsolved, but Legname's work is an interesting addition to the prion work.After that didn't help, they took a look inside her stomach, a not inexpensive procedure. I had it done once to the tune of well over $1,000 USD(paid by my insurance company).
Treatment doctors try is often more dictated by insurance companies than drug companies. Cheaper/easier treatment is always tried first.
After diagnosing my grandmother as having an ulcer(and what type!), they gave her antibiotics.
Of course, all that is not to say that a pharmaceutical company wouldn't try to keep people using their cash cow drug instead of getting cured...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Am I the only one who read this as "Artificial pron"?
Underholdning.info
From what I recall, having mice live for two years before falling ill might be an achievement in and of itself.
On the other hand, we've now learned that a bunch of grad students with some time on their hands can synthesize an incurable, infectious, horrible disease. Yikes.
Disclaimer: I work for a company, but I don't speak for them.
There are enzymes that are supposed to deal with proteins in the gut (e.g. protease).
Do these destroy the prions? Could people that come down with vCJD have been deficient in enzymes?
The only reason I clicked through to the comments is because I thought the headline said, "Artificial Pron Created"
Paving the way for yet another biological weapon.
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
It is the most scary thing I have ever seen or experienced in my life. I've seen folks with advanced AIDS and other fatal diseases. We aren't really sure how he got it (they raised sheep, who get a version of BSE/vCJD called "scrapie"), but after seeing the effect, you wouldn't even want to be in the same building as him. It is very easy to understand the terror and fear folks had when AIDS first came out.
Yes, scientists will need this kind of thing to understand how and why it works, as well as how and why a cure will work.
What could you inject into my brain that wouldn't cause me become ill within two years?
Th
Yah, of course they did... otherwise whey would have to follow through on their free-trade agreements with Canada and stop destroying the Canadian beef industry. One lousy case in Canada received from US cattle and the US stops buying beef, while at the same time not wanting to test their own cattle... Hmm... I hate to tell you American folks, but your all going to go mad in a few years...
They all do.
The transgenic mice being studied are already susceptible to this genetic defect and the researchers antagonized it by adding the purified product of the genetic defect. Is there any surprise that more mice became more sick more quickly?
And the ground up brain material was capable of passing on the disease to other mice
That's because they're using transgenic mice which already known to be susceptible.
Additionally one must look closely at the graphs on page 674. I can't locate in the article what "RML" is, but apparently administering RML caused conditions and antagonized the CNS of the mice even more than the purified MoPrP(89-231). 100% of the RML group experienced CNS dysfunction after less than 200 days. On top of that the researchers haven't proven that there's a clear prion effect. Immunoblot analysis of a brain tissue puree is hardly a characteristic identifier of MoPrP(P101L). The RML and PBS lanes are nearly identical to the lanes of mice which received the bacterial broth.
The authors acknowledge that 30% of their mice will develop spontaneous disease at ~550 days but they try to pooh-pooh that fact when they begin to discuss their findings
Then, on page 675
That's probably because Sc237 is the prion protein for sheep scrapie. While Europe was busy killing ever cow in sight, sane scientists were trying to tell them that the chance of a prion crossing the interspecies barrier is minimal. Conveniently, there is no immunoblot of the Sc237 inoculated mice. I wouldn't be surprised if it looks the same as the 9949 and RML lanes.
Does anyone else read these things critically?
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
...are an idiot.
Current research believes that 50% or more of Alzheimers patients are really a form of prion degredation of the brain. It has nothing to do with politics. It is not most common in cattle, it is most seen sheep. And the entire US herd has zero cases of BSE (Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy). Canada has had 1, and one is unconfirmed. This however is trival. BSE is already in the food supply, of this there is no doubt. Current testing ability cannot find BSE in low levels. The only question is - are you at risk? I dunno, but -
Eat all the beef you want to, I only hope that you don't get an infected cow. A Neurosurgeon I heard speak(who has treated CJD personally) said it is the worst way to die he has ever seen - this from a guy that sees brain damage every day.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I knew they could reproduce it sooner or later with all that marvelous technology we've developed...
Some interesting properties if you weaponized artifical prions:
***A slow, horrible death- these have a latency of years and decades. When they do act, you lose mind and body functions.
***Almost impossible to detect- You could continimate food supplies, drinking supplies, etc.
***Very hard to sterilize- you thought anthrax spores were nasty, but doing things like gassing buildings with chlorine neutralizes them. There was an inadvertant empedemic of CJK disease in Denver a decade back. A neurosurgeon dutifully sterilized his surgerical instruments in a super-heated autoclave after operatinfg on CJK patient. However, the prions lingered for months on the instruments and infect another five patients.
***No cure or vaccine- though I heard of posibilities.
***Very small particles- which makes it easy to disperse and evade various bio-filters.
>> You know what? There's a medical name for that. It's called "Paranoia".
;p
There are treatments for paranoia, but I know the world government is keeping the best of them hidden from us...
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
I will assume that he's not a connosieur of brains of any sort? In Kentucky, supposedly the danger comes from eating squirrel brains. I know I've seen sheep's brains on menus before, so I guess that couldn't be so far-fetched.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
PrionBionetics Inc. announced today a line of suppliments for employee food service operations. Fred Burger, Chief Scientist stated that their cafeteria food supplements were designed to survive at least 48 hours on the typical steam table and predicted that company revenue from employee retirement pension fund management operations should improve exponentially in the very near future.
According to the nature article, the researchers were from UC San Francisco, not UC San Diego as the post claims. No one else seems to have noticed, so I had to post.
- UCSD alum
preface: I'm from the US. "the country" / "the government" / etc = "the US [whatever]"
1. There isn't money in a cure. 20 years of drug therapy and pills that cost $800/month = $192,000. Unless you can convince people and insurance companies to shell out $192K per patient cured, you can't sell the cure. Take into consideration again that a good number of the people who have cancer can barely afford their monthly medication, and unless medicare/social security/etc were willing to pay for curing people, the drug companies would not be able to make a buck on it. But the drugs, subsidized monthly with a small stipend from the government, are easily paid for. ISPs know this better than anyone: it's all about residual income. One-time fees, even if quite large, are nowhere near as essential to maintaining a business as is repeat business. So in short, I believe that you're incorrect.
2. As stated in the article, Mad Cow isn't a viral or bacterial infection and therefore it cannot be fought with traditional weapons. Speaking of traditional, a very common treatment for a multitude of illnesses: penicillin comes from a mold. a MOLD. How expensive is it to culture mold? Well it'll cost you one moist loaf of bread. Ensuring that proteins don't become prions (much as normal cells don't become cancerous) is an all together different matter. The amount of money that goes into R&D wouldn't be realised if there was a simple cure like penicillin or some of the other inexpensive cures of the past. The only organization that would be able to back the creation of a cure for these complex and nontraditional ailments would be a financially stable government. Whether ours or theirs or somebody else's, government-backed research and government-backed vaccination regimens have more promise than corporate-backed ones. When the dominant ideal is that of survival and not the bottom line, then we'll see some real progress.
3. no way to really respond to this. If there is a cure it's held close and is only known of by a few people. I bet their families don't get cancer either (ahem), which renders your point somewhat moot.
4. There's only one thing investors like: a return on their investment. If we'll go to war (ie, put human lives at stake) over oil instead of biting the cost bullet and building a decent national electric infrastructure, then it should be made blatantly obvious to you that there ARE those who are willing to choose the almighty buck over the almighty human life. If we had a better power system here in the USA we could more-seriously consider things like, say, electric cars.
Reinvent the wheel only at either a lower cost, greater effectiveness, or your own personal enrichment and satisfaction.
I wouldn't say prions are alive, but it really depends on your definition of life. Is something alive if it can reproduce itself? A prion can do that, but so can fire...
Viruses aren't too much different, however, though some people class them as 'alive'. Viruses reproduce themselves, but they do so by hijacking a cell with some particularly coersive strand(s) of nucleic acid. The virus compels the cell to use its own internal mechanisms to build more virus particles.
So, viruses at least require the presence of something that IS alive (a cell, and all of its protein and nucleic acid creation abilities) whereas a prion can reproduce itself in a simple solution of susceptible proteins. No life needed... just proteins to interact with.
Visit the Game Programming Wiki!
Two questions come to what's left of my brain:
Can we build a cancer-prion to teach cancer cells to fold wrong? What would be the result in the body if we used them?
-- Each tock of the Planck clock is a new world and here we are still life. --
this has nothing to do with prions, but, re: mouse longevity, researchers discovered that mouse lifetimes can be extended ~ 18% by fiddling with insulin levels. This article refers to caloric reduction as well. The first time I heard about this they mentioned the removal of the gonads as a factor.
"A witty saying proves nothing." ~Voltaire
"d'Oh!" ~Homer
There are technical hurdles to using mouse models to study prion diseases. Ideally a researcher would take a completely healthy mouse and induce a prion disease with the administration of a misfolded protein. Unfortunately for researchers most healthy mice don't have a lifespan long enough to develop a prion disease from scratch. The best that the researchers are able to do is take a transgenic strain of mice (Tg196), which are known to have a DNA defect which leads to prion related disease, and administer additional amounts of the prion in order to antagonize the disease state.
/. who can answer it. The authors of the article note that Tg196 mice exhibit spontaneous disease in 30% of their population at ~550 d. The status of the control group is fairly glossed with only a single line which meantions that, as of 670 d, the control mice were still healthy. If that means _all_ the control mice why is there a deviation from the known standard? If that means _some_ of the control mice why did the peer reviewers not ask about it?
/. headline reads "Artificial prion created". That's true. The researchers brewed a batch of MoPrP(89-230) which is a truncated form of the natu
The researchers in this case leave too many questions unanswered that could have been easily addressed.
1>
The Tg196 transgenic mice express a low level of MoPrP(P101L) which is said to cause the CNS dysfunction. The researchers brew E. coli to produce a large amount of MoPrP(89-230) which they will use to spike the mice. To ensure that the additional disease effects are really attributable to the E. coli produced MoPrP(89-230), why do they not use a control group of mice which receive an extract from an E. coli broth which does _not_ produce MoPrP(89-230)?
2>
I keep pointing this out and apparently there aren't enough scientists on
3>
The bottom line worry is that a prion disease in your cow or sheep will end up in your supermarket and cause a mass plague in humans. The researchers in this study did administer Sc237 (sheep scrapie prion) to some of their mice and saw no ill effects. Paranoid people and others with a political agenda need to give up on the hype.
4>
The results are statistically fuzzy. While the authors note that 30% of a population of Tg196 mice are known to be dysfunctional at ~550 days they don't have any expected dysfunctional population % for 670 days. Their own experimental groups have a range of 380-600 and 500-670 d for unseeded and seeded groups, respectively. Additionally, at the 550 d point, both experimental groups were exhibiting about 60% CNS dysfunction in the population. The researchers have shown that administering a prion, for which the mice are known to be susceptible, will hasten their illness. It may be a good bit of lab work but it's not a surprise.
5>
The immunoblots are pretty but don't say much. The control group lacks many of the spots that the test groups have, but even the experimental group which received nothing more than the extraction/folding broth (PBS? PBH? I left the PDF on my desk) shows some of the additional bands present in the animals which received actual prions. Additionally there's the RML group. I couldn't find the definition for RML in the paper but noticed that the RML group exhibited 100% population CNS dysfunction by about 180 days. Is this really a prion effect if "RML" is more effective than the prions? Finally, where are the immunoblots for the Sc237 subjects? Ideally they would look like the control group immunoblots since the Sc237 subjects did not exhibit CNS dysfunction. My better sense tells me that the immunoblots for the Sc237 subjects would look more like the mice that received the blank extraction/folding buffer or even closer to the 9949. This would raise some obvious questions about the specificity of the immunoblot for active, MoPrP and inactive PrP from another species. This ties in with <3>.
6>
The
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
Stem cells.
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
BSE is dangerous, even if it doesn't effect anybody. The fear caused by it can devestate beef-based economies. If you've seen what's happened to Alberta during the recent BSE scare, you'll see what can happen when something is blown out of proportion. What I truly fear is that someone gets a hold of this, infiltrates another country's beef supply, and sticks a couple cows with it. The end result: an economic crash.
The question remains... who first shook cow brains hard enough to create mad cow disease?
Good argument except maybe for #3.
It was my understanding that corporations are designed to profit. Is there any evidence that the personal crises of their managers influence the drugs they bring to market?
Maybe in a family owned business where a family member got sick, but I don't know of any family owned pharmaceutical companies offhand. If they exist, wouldn't they be pretty small.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Here is a description of Kuru, a brain wasting disease in humans transmitted by the traditional eating the brains of the deceased.
I am a biologist and I remember researching this when I was an undergrad:
Studying Kuru is much easier for researchers, because they can simply ask people who were involved in the tradition about symptoms and the spread of the disease. They were able to figure out that there are several different alleles in the wild (sections of DNA that code for proteins; each human has 2 copies of DNA for each protein). They found some of the alleles encoded a protein that was more resistant to corruption by the prions than others. They also found that people who were heterozygous (have 2 different copies of the protein) would take much longer to die of the disease than those who were homozygous (have 2 of the same copies).
Heterozygousity levels were high, as expected for those who had taken part and survived the old-fashioned (and now outlawed) practice of eating your dead relative's brains, because homozygotes were very susceptable to dying from this practice, and their levels would be somewhat lower due to selective pressure (ie death) in the past (but via genetics there would always be some homozygotes in each generation).
This is all well and good, but the real slammer here is this:
heterozygousity levels were also abnormally high in the general population around the world for this protein. This could have several meanings (i'll go into 2):
1. We are the descendents of cannibals.
2. Everyone dies of alzheimer's if they live to be old enough (ie they don't die of something else first).
Cannibalism could explain the abnormally high rate of heterozygousity for this protein. Supposedly, archaeologists and those types have uncovered widespread (ie global) evidence of cannibalism, but also found that is relatively rare at any one time. If people were eating other people on a large enough scale, this could cause selection against homozygotes in the long run.
Because of human family structure, old people (past breeding age) can still positively influence the fitness (reproductive cabability) of younger family members. This theoretically would produce selective pressure against homozygotes, although other factors might render it insignificant.
In any case it is clear that brains are not quite perfect as of the latest release. Some other interesting tidbits are that heavy smokers and drinkers have a slightly lower incidence of alzheimer's. This could be because they die of other health problems earlier, but I believe the study adjusted for details like that. The mechanism for this could be the higher incidence of "shock proteins" and "chaperone proteins" in cells that are more used to being stressed by the nasty destructive chemicals in ciggarettes and booze.
*takes a swig of beer*
These chaperone proteins help to fold newly-made proteins the proper way. Shock proteins help to
keep your proteins from getting messed up from exposure to heat, chemicals, other proteins, etc.
Whew..there is some much to explain, I can't give much more than a brief overview. any questions?
Risks that are taken may not be much of a risk by themselves, but the possibility that something bad will happen to you increases with the risks that you take. Imagine that.
In the end, this is news because it prevents a rather embarassing scandal involving the highest honor a scientist can recieve....
Since you're interchanging the two I should point out that there's a difference between matter and mass.
-
Matter is preserved. Both sides of the equation need the same material components (protons, neutrons, electrons).
-
Mass is not preserved. Mass is an observable quality in that a piece of matter will have different masses when at rest versus moving.
If you can create a way to convert matter into energy, then that's something entirely different from fusion/fission nuclear reactions. My perspective is that altering a nuclear bond is just a step above altering a chemical bond and not something conceptually different (both have tangible items pushed together or pulled away from each other with only the energy bonds being converted from one form to another).Of course, IANANuclear Physicist.
This is not my sig.
but a "vehicle mouse" sounds really freakin' cool.
I can just picture that long-legged guy from "22 Short Films about Springfield" driving his vehicle mouse around and glaring at the people who laugh at him.
---------
Get back to me when my brain starts working.
If it was up to me, all those sheep would have been buried the week he was diagnosed. It turned out that no one else in the family got vCJD (it would be over 10 years before it was admitted that the transmission of the disease was through eating tainted flesh), they (the aunt and 3 daughters) all died of female specific cancers within a few years of his death.
For those of you who are not a molecular biologist, there is a particularly well written and approachable source of background information on prion disease available. Deadly Feasts is an excellent primer on the subject of prion disease and the history of the prion as a medical research mystery. It's very well written, but don't read it if you want to keep eating beef.
There is also an online interview with Richard Rhodes the author of that book, which comes with the same caveat.
The book was written several years ago. More recent information about current research and such is available at New Scientist.
Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler. -- Albert Einstein
OK, then you and I and the next downer cow that we find are going to have a lovely steak dinner. And in 40 years we will see which of us posts to slashdot the results of our dinner and which of us is drooling in pain on a keyboard. If you believe in your position, then a little brain pudding shouldn't phase you at all
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
First off... FOLD http://www.stanford.edu/group/pandegroup/folding/! !! Now that Stanford project is more relevant than ever!!
1. If the structure of a prion can be determined it may be possible to bind them up with another protein until the immune system can remove it from the system
2. From the Halbaked http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Prion_20Poison_20Pr evention#1062618359 site, enzymes might be able to remove them from the system as well, but it would destroy them in-place which may not be desirable
They came for the Communists, and I didn't object - For I wasn't a Communist; They came for the Socialists, and I didn'
this is very cool, but also very scary: that scientists can artificially produce a nasty disease. if the good guys can do it, so can the bad guys, eventually.
So the mice were sick for two years before it could be detected? Did this make anyone else think of what John Titor said about the incubation period in humans for mad cow disease?
It is 'ignorance with opinion' like yours that is helping everything from the Flat Eathers to the RIAA.
Come back when you have a PhD to back up your "opinion"
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
You want details? The article refers to a study published in science. The citation is presented at the end of the article. Here it is:
Legname G., et al. Science, 305. 673 - 676 (2004).
Look for university libraries in your area. You don't need a library card to go to the current journals and photocopy pages. If you are at a university and your university has subscribed to the electronic journal, go to http://www.sciencemag.org and find the link.
It is full of a lot of details that most of us (certainly not me) don't need. Read the abstract, the introduction, and the conclusion. If your interest is piqued, you might read the body and chase some references.
I doubt that anybody will read this. The comment count has exceeded 400 (thanks to the WMD discussion--really people, they INJECTED IT INTO THE BRAINS OF THE MICE). I also like to shout at airplanes.
You just described Mad Culture Disease!
Poor infected cultures -- staggering around, unable to support themselves properly, getting stupider and stupider...tsk, tsk.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Downers != Cattle killed by BSE. There are a lot of things that can kill cattle, most are not transmittable to humans through consumption.
You see, the reason the UK has an outbreak of mad cow was because cattle in the UK were regularly fed cow byproducts (dead cow). That allowed one cow to infect dozens of others which infect others which infect humans. That is not the case in the US where soybean meal is common feed for cattle and where regulations prohibit feeding cattle meal back to cattle. Thus in order for the cow you eat at McDonald's to have BSE, it would have had to have gotten the mutated protein itself. The chance that your cow generated the mutated protein itself and then was slaughtered before showing obvious symptoms make being hit by lightning look like a sure thing. Hence why only one person in the US has ever been found to have acquired the disease (and most likely got it when she lived in Britain earlier in her life).
"You Sir have no idea how prions work do you?"
Yes I do. CJD does not come from cattle. It occurs randomly (and rarely) in the human population. It is in no way preventable but occurs very rarely and almost always kills late in the victim's life.
"oh, and describing the difference between vCJD and CJD is pretentious and ill informed - it's called vCJD for a reason"
They are two very different diseases. They have similar effects and are probably caused by the same basic mechanism (which is why BSE in humans was given the name variant CJD), but they are two very different diseases caused by two very different causes.
By your logic differentiating between Ebola and AIDS is pretentious and ill informed.
"Come back when you have a PhD to back up your "opinion""
Where did you get your PhD microbiology? Las Vegas Mail Order Institute? Please. I do not need a PhD to read articles and books by leading researchers in the field. From that I have plenty to back up what you ignorantly label an "opinion".
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Read all the articles and books you want - you are still a layman. I can read the entire linux kernel, it wont make me informed, a kernel programmer or able to have a real opinion about what it is, or where it needs to go.
My micro lab deals with this on a daily basis. As I said - you eat a downer cow. - or - better, eat a BSE cow, it wont hurt you right?? So I urge you to eat the next one, please, my boss needs more reasearch examples.
v=variant thus vCJD - it is not seperate, but a varient. Wow, what a jump, proving you have no grasp of microbiology, or logic for that matter. We err on the side of caution, as real scientists do. But go ahead, eat all the beef you want, more research money is good for me.
Sera
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
The first Canadian case of BSE came from a cow imported from Britain (in 1987), but the 2003 case was from a Canadian-born animal.
t ml
Extensive investigations suggest that the animal contracted the disease from feed imported from the UK just before a ban went into place in 1997.
Details: http://www.usaha.org/speeches/speech03/s03evans.h
In microbiology, specializing in prions? Ha, that tells me a lot about Minnesota's biology department.
"I can read the entire linux kernel, it wont make me informed, a kernel programmer or able to have a real opinion about what it is, or where it needs to go."
We are talking about science, not opinions. Need me to explain the difference?
"v=variant thus vCJD - it is not seperate, but a varient."
Vocabulary lesson.
" Wow, what a jump..."
Both are caused by the same mechanism. Thats about all you have linking CJD and vCJD.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
Damn, you trolls sure are out in force tonight. Got Karma burning a hole in your pocket?
I still don't see you offering to eat a BSE cow. Somehow you're defending your opinion while refusing to backup your view with action. So were your balls cut off at birth or did you do it yourself later in life?
BTW, I'm not the guy you're arguing with, I just hate seeing some little bitch whine about another's informed opinion because it contradicts what Bush & Co. want you to believe.
I never said I was willing to. I am saying that the chance of any given cow (especially one not showing obvious symptoms of BSE when slaughtered) is astronomically small. If that is a basis for someone not eating meat, they might as well never go outside for fear of getting struck by lightning. The only reason Britain had an outbreak was because of husbandry practices existed in pre-mad cow UK.
"I just hate seeing some little bitch whine about another's informed opinion "
For the last fucking time, science is not about opinions, science is about facts.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
See what happens when those biologists fail to follow directions?
I am a neurologist and a nerd. I have seen and treated several patients with prion disease. Frankly, except for the auto-catalytic mechanism of proteins mentioned above, the majority of you have incorrect conceptions about the disease process. ;).
Unless you know what i mean by paroxysmal bitemporal epileptic discharges, unremitting myoclonus, and dementia you should spare your opinion...because your knowledge of prion disease is limited to textbooks or "Pipetman" experiments.
Many of you have added valid knowledge, but at the same time many of you have wagged sad egos for all to see. I will review all of the above, including the primary literature, and run it by my peers and superiors in the academic medical system and give an opinion. I was a biochemical neuroscientist for years, and when PhD's try to go beyond their realm of expertise, which is certainly vast, but limited realtive to patients, I wince. I will post soon after conferring with mulitple academic researchers above me. I r still nub, but I have teh resources to provide truth
gg Jeremy is ma hero
But since when in this thread were we discussing the disease process? We have been discussing the epidemiology of the disease, such as whether or not BSE is common in the US beef market and whether or not CJD and vCJD are the same thing.
Mathematics is made of 50 percent formulas, 50 percent proofs, and 50 percent imagination.
For packaged vegan cheeses...I'd reccomend not going there. They're all disgusting.
I actually found one that isn't - Vegan Gourmet. It's hard to find (only one independent supermarket in the greater Seattle area carries it as far as I know), but if you melt their "mozzarella" on pizza or make macaroni and "cheese" with their "cheddar," it's really tasty.
The rest are foul, though. VeganRella might as well be a giant chunk of crayon.
"...always new atoms but always doing the same dance, remembering what the dance was yesterday." -Richard Feynman
You are missing the point. The parent is pointing out the unlikelyhood of such a transmission, but is not himself advocating a decrease in health regulation and safety measures. The post that you originally replied to did suggest such a change, and noted the improbability of cow -> human BSE. He was correct in the support of his argument, but I disagree with his conclusion, as might you. If you disagree with the facts, such as the likelihood of transmission, then post data relevent to such a claim. If you concede the facts, then essentially your argument is that the measures taken by the FDA etc. are worthwhile given the risk of infecting someone with a horrible and deadly disease. If that is your argument, then I would agree.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Basically, project get funded on the basis of "chance of success" times "expected reward on success".
If a "cure" has a smaller expected reward than a "supresion of symptons", more money will be directed towards the later. It is not a conspiracy, just business economics.
In any case, there is little money in either a cure or sympton supression for Creutzfeldt-Jakob, and no money on either for BSE, both are extremely rare, and for BSE you would want destroy the cattle in any case.
I seem to recall that people have genes that make them targets for CJD. So I think the ability to cross-infect just might vary even within one species. Using a single strain of mice for such an experiment might severly reduce your chances of finding proof of crossinfection ability. Also mice != humans.
I'm still trying to figure out what people mean by 'social skills' here.
In 1982 some scientist discovered that a large percentage of ulcers were linked to Helicobacter, and found that simple antibiotics would cure it. Of course, most doctors for the next 10-15 years left their patients on expensive acid blockers instead. More money in those than a cheap cure! So much for no conspiracy theory...
How do you explain the current treatment of ulcers with antibiotics if there's a conspiracy theory in play? Was it defeated? How? Maybe there are some lessons to learn here.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
3. Most importantly: there are doctors, pharmacists, managers at pharmaceuticals corporations, etc, who die of Cancer every year. Or have a bad case of diabetes.
Fortunately, you're right, companies are working on a cure for diabetes, or at least very effective treatments, meaning ones that target the problem and don't wreck your liver in the process.
Now, it is the smaller biotechs who tend to do these things, so there is some momentum problem in the larger pharma space.
Gila monsters shut down their pancreas during hybernation, that's how these got started.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Are you bitterr?