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Femtosecond Laser Shatters Viruses
wattrlz writes "In a development reminiscent of nineteenth century pseudo-science, the father-son team of Kong Thon and Shaw Wei Tsen recently demonstrated that the tobacco mosaic virus can be destroyed in vitro by nano-scale mechanical resonant vibrations induced by repeated ultra-short pulses from a laser. The total energy required is reportedly far below the threshold for human tissue damage and the technique should generalize to human pathogens. Cleaning stored blood is one obvious application."
Do not look into the femtosecond laser with your remaining Capsid.
(and you thought I was gonna say eye...)
liqbase
No more alcohol/iodine after a shot or when cleaning a wound.
Err, except for bacteria. How about a dose of this and then a phage solution?
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Considering that viruses are essentially bundles of proteins, and this laser trashes the virus, how would the laser not trash proteins in cells potentially containing the viruses?
You Shook Me All Night Long
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Assuming the technique also leaves shark tissue undamaged, I got the perfect delivery mechanism in mind.
Kong Thon? There's a man waiting for a video game event to be named after him.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
where the hell did that come from? Did 19th century psuedo scientists use 21st century lasers to destroy entities (virus's) that were discovered in the 20th century?
DNA, for example, would be closer to the size of a virus. You could end up with an intact cell wall containing nothing but debris.
human DNA damage? If this can affect a virus, it can affect the host organism. The only question is how much it would affect a human, and over what time period the effect will be seen.
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I must admit, when I first read the headline on this one I was baffled - I had no idea what it was. However, after reading the article, I have come to understand just what this means for the medical community. The article talks about using lasers to destroy harmful, and previously incurable, diseases from stored blood in our blood banks, including HIV. This is a tremendous step forward for the scientific and medical communities. Of course, they still have to test it, since it has only been used in a test-tube environment. In addition, I expect the drug companies to attempt to suppress this, as it takes away from their ability to market drugs to the afflicted.
One can only hope that this discovery is given all the attention it deserves. It is even more impressive that the inventors did not come up with the concept in a laboratory, but outside having a discussion about the need for more effective treatments than vaccines for viruses. Way to go, guys!
.sig
I wonder how effective this could be in preventing the spread of AIDS in discos and Apple Computer expos where lasers are used all the time as pulsating visual cues matched to the throbbing bass beat of heavy house and Hi-NRG techno.
On a more serious note, I remember that it was once mentioned in some Star Trek episode that the transporters performed a full scan for pathogens of all "beamed" people and items. This sounds almost like that, except for the actual transportation of particles from one place to another.
Can this be tuned --or perhaps tuned with the assistance of another chemical marker-- to act as a "hunter killer" for auto-immune activated diseases such as multiple sclerosis, lupus, etc. where the resonant pulses would only kill the erroneously activated white blood cells and not the non-reactive white blood cells?
Because if so this becomes in effect a computerized vaccine against a wide variety of ailments that have no other good medicinal choices. And because computing power is still rising exponentially faster than just about any other form of tech, this could be a whole lot quicker to market.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
What? I don't think even the heaviest chain-smoker gets infected with tobacco mosaic virus. I'm sorry, I just don't see the "obviousness" of this application.
More music, fewer hits
Shattered
Destroyer
The Safety Dance
She Blinded Me With Science
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Next time I get infected with TMV, I'll run right over to the laser lab.
First, This will only work if the resonance breaks the bonds inside the proteins that create the subunits that self-assemble into the viral capsids. If the resonance only separates the weakly-bound subunits, then the resulting fragments will tend to re-self-assemble into whole viruses again. To use a bricks and mortar analogy -- if the device only breaks the mortar, the bricks can reused. The trick is to break the bricks.
Second, this solution requires a specific pulse frequency for each virus. It's not a broad-spectrum disinfectant. That suggests that viruses can easily evolve to defeat the device. Mutants that add a few non-functional amino acids to their capsid protein chains or that decorate the capsid surface with different biochemical groups would change the resonant frequency and allow mutants to escape and breed. One can even imagine evolution selecting for viruses that have inherent damping so that no resonant frequency can build enough energy to disrupt the shell. For example, a virus might become effectively heterozygous so that its shell is randomly constructed of two slightly different subunit sequences. A capsid that is not perfectly crystalline would lack a strong resonant frequency and escape disruption.
Overall, this looks like a very promising weapon in the on-going arms race against viruses.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
it shatters the protein shell, not the actual rna of the virus. and these protein shells resonate at different frequencies than that of a regular cell.
This approach is a really clever way of eliminating specific viruses from a specific tissue or fluid. It's a shame that it would be darn hard to apply to an entire organism (to, for example, cure a viral infection) because you would have to illuminate the whole organism with the laser. It also has limited application in cleaning blood because it has to be tuned for a specific virus (i.e. AIDS) and would have run multiple times to remove others.
This being said, I wonder if there's value in killing off (say) all the copies of a virus in someone's blood (even if some remains in other tissues). Also, it seems that this should be adaptable to bacterial infections because bacterial DNA is pretty different than human DNA. If this is the case, it might be a useful treatment approach for sepsis.
I like my beverages with warning labels!
While the details aren't great in TFA, I can imagine dialysis-like machines getting setup to treat patients. What the article didn't really hit on was the total capacity the laser could handle and if it's even feasible. After all, it's not worth waiting days for blood to get cleaned while the virus has had time to spread/repopulate the body with the other blood.
import system.cool.Sig;
This is (more or less) just some people who do a lot of Raman scattering deciding to try their technique to analyze virus particles and then noticing that some of them were damaged in the process. All of the other stuff (in particular the HIV) is largely BS - a few physicists who know almost nothing about biology going after NIH money by putting the magic "HIV" buzzword into their grant applications.
The slightly cool thing about it is that you can target particles below a certain size (like viruses) without causing much damage to larger particles (like host cells).
In terms of actually engineering this into a system for filtering blood (one of the main applications they envision), there are enough problems that it has no hope of succeeding in practice. Even if you could actually overcome all of those and build a system that could use this technique to destroy all of the virus particles in blood on a practical scale, many viruses that could contaminate whole blood (including HIV) will have uncoated and set up shop in the white cells, which would go on to release new virus after the treatment so this would offer no protection at all.
For the same reason, you couldn't use this as a treatment even if you could somehow expose every cell in a patient to these pulses (which would be impossible unless you cut them into paper-thin slices).
If the Tsens are actually unaware of this, then that alone should raise a huge red flag because anyone with the slightest bit of background in virology would know this.
About the only thing this *might* be good for (other than generating press and bilking naive investors out of their money) is as a laboratory technique for killing all of the free virus in a very small sample without harming the cells.
As a scientist, this kind of thing makes me sick, and it illustrates some of the harm caused by profit-motivated research in university settings (in particular, things Arizona State University's Biodesign Institute).
It's great when science and discovery naturally leads to practical (and profitable) products, but this kind of thing is what happens when people put the goal of making money ahead of actually doing real science.
Wonder if this could be tuned to effect DNA or portions of DNA...
Could this be potentially used to kill?
If this thing eventually leads to cures for HIV and Hepatitis and other nasty viruses, I smell a Nobel Prize for these gentlemen. With corporate sponsorship and help from world governments, AIDS could be eradicated across the globe and improve the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people.
The game.
Being as they are using the resonant frequency to destroy the virus, I imagine the differences in the mechanical structures between viruses and other surrounding material would isolate the applied force to the virus. Disclaimer: This is no where near my field of study.
After reading the article, I'd like to see the actual papers they've written on this. A quick peek at a related link suggests that the viruses are in water, or within cells in the water. I want to know what happens when you get multiple media interfaces involved, such as within the body, and the degree to which these boundaries will cause a loss in wave "volume" (does Wired mean amplitude?).
My guess is that the experiment involved a very shallow field of activity. The technique as it stands now would be nifty for sterilization, but I'd imagine that to be effective for human viral treatments you'd need a laser wavelength capable of penetrating human membranes at least to the depth of bone marrow. Somebody correct me or back me up on this, please: if we're dealing with EM radiation of a low enough energy, aren't these guys in the domain of short bursts of directed radio waves? If so, then I guess that answers a few of my questions.
The list begins and ends with "Safety Dance". Why would you need any other music?! (sings)"Everybody pull up your pants..."
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i'm certain they can tune a laser to the right frequency and shatter a virus like an opera singer and a crystal glass
what i am also certain of is the fact that a lot of other proteins in the cell probably have the same frequency. some of those proteins might not be so important, some might
if that opera singer went into a lamp store and sang to shatter only the particular crystal chandelier in front of her, no one would be surprised if another chandelier towards the back of the store cracked too
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
From listening to Dr. Tsen, it really does seem to work for free virions floating in solution - but once they unpackage themselves and infect a cell, it does nothing.
From the article: Tsen says the technology could provide immediate benefits for clearing viruses in blood stored in blood banks. So they're not going after viruses that have already infected cells.Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
A nice idea. I must be one of the rather few people who have worked with ultrashort pulsed lasers, Raman scattering, and viruses; and I really appreciate the interest of the concept. But I doubt very much that it will ever be a practical tool. Destroying M13 virus in pure water is a far cry from a real application.
If I understand it correctly, the technique exploits the fact that ultrashort laser pulses are not monochromatic but have a significant band width, to excite a vibrational frequency of the virus through resonant Raman excitation. Or, the vibrational mode of the viral capsid is about 8 cm^-1, and the excitation laser contains both 23,529 cm^-1 (i.e. 425 nm) and 23,521 cm^-1 (the Stokes-shifted matching frequency). If you excite the vibrations of the capsid hard enough it will break, as in the old trick of the singer breaking a glass.
But actually, a 100 fs laser pulse has a rather broad spectrum, and therefore is going to excite much more than just that single vibrational mode. Effect on viruses is claimed at a peak power of 50 MW/cm2 -- that is megawatt per square centimeter -- which is rather respectable, even if the average power is low. So I fear that this technique is not going to be very selective. I suppose that in theory you could also excite the virus with two longer-pulse (i.e. picosecond) lasers tuned to have a specific frequency difference, but then the average power required to get a threshold peak power of 50MW/cm2 is likely to be a problem.
Of course, if you are going to use this on a virus like HIV, you will need to target the immature form (which has a shell of gag protein under the envelope) and the mature form (in which gag has been processed into matrix and capsid). You also need to cope with the irregular structure of the virus, which does not have the icosahedral symmetry of many other viruses, its considerable genetic variability, and its variable morphology. HIV capsids occurs in at least two forms, cone-shaped (most of them) and tubular (less frequent). So its Raman frequency spectrum is likely to be complex and a broadband killer may be what you want -- may be.
The reported excitation is a frequency-doubled pulsed beam at 425 nm, which is violet. Blood strongly absorbs light at such wavelengths; hemoglobin even has an absorption peak there. You would have to tune to the red to do anything useful in blood without killing the blood cells, but a standard frequency-doubled titanium-sapphire laser will really struggle to generate red light -- a yellow-tinged green at 550 nm is about the limit. A different laser technology or a much more complex system (with a parametric oscillator) would be required to get there. And even a red laser might be absorbed enough to make blood boil in the focus of the beam.
Last but not least, even if your could destroy all viral particles in a blood sample, that would by no means make that blood safe! The raison d'etre of viruses is inserting their genome into cells to be replicated there. Destroy all viral particles, and there might still be viral genomes in the cells, as RNA or DNA, ready to replicate in the host; even viral proteins ready for assembly into new viruses. It would still be unacceptably dangerous to use that blood.
Frankly, I think this is a misuse of the technology. If it has any applications at all that will be in the study and detection of viruses, not in decontamination. It might be developed into a simpler, cheaper alternative to CARS microscopy.
We of the Giant Purple People Eater Society (GPPES) find cleaning stored humans a much more obvious application.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"This technique will be very useful to disinfect all the viruses, known or unknown," Tsen said. "This will make blood transfusion very safe."
Do you see the BS? They say here: UNKNOWN. Lets suppose, you can calibrate the laser against a known virus without harming human cells/tissue/whatever. How do you calibrate this magic laser to several unknown viruses at the same time?
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Yeah exactly, there are 10000 cells created in the average body per second, even if DNA degradation is only a percent, it's very bad news.
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Be yourself no matter what they say
You know, so we can see how high up the energy level can be dialed before it hurts. And then turn it up a little more.
A way of keeping tobacco crops healthy so they can be used to make more cigarettes. Oh I feel for the tobacco companies when they lose a crop, honestly I do.
There seems to be a lot of people here confused on how this laser can destroy the virus without harming the host cells. Please allow me to explain the natural wonder that is "Natural Harmonic Frequencies".
First, imagine pushing someone on a swing. If you want to make the swing go higher, you have to push it just as it starts to swing forward. That way, the swing's energy is increased by the amount of your push, while still getting the full benefit of it's stored potential energy, and Hey, Presto - the swing goes higher. Because of the way swings (and wave energy functions of most sorts) work, the time between each optimal push remains the same. This is the key.
Imagine a sine wave. If you view the wave at the right frequency - every PI units - you'll see the same value. If you were somehow pushing on the wave at those points, you would be changing the amplitude of the function by the same amount every time. If, however, you view the wave at the wrong frequency - say, every 1 unit - you'll get a different section of the wave each time. Over time your pushes will cancel each other out in this case.
Now, if you push enough kinetic energy into pretty much anything, you create a short-lived wave within it as the energy which has not yet been absorbed or lost in some manner reflects back and forth within the structure. Imagine water sloshing in a tub or a building swaying in an earthquake. The speed at which this wave moves back and forth across the structure is the structure's natural resonant (or harmonic) frequency. This is what is being taken advantage of by this pulsed laser.
By firing this laser at the same frequency that the virus happens to vibrate at, a wave is set up in the virus. Since the laser's pulse comes again at the optimal "pushing" time, the amplitude of the vibration increases. Other cells are being vibrated by the laser as well, but because their natural harmonics are different, the pulses cancel themselves out in those cells and they're fine. The targeted virus however, vibrates harder and harder until it literally shakes itself apart.
In recent years, determining the natural harmonic frequencies of large structures has become an important part of engineering. More than one large structure has been destroyed by seemingly insignificant forces which just happened to be coming at the right frequency!
See this for more mathematical details
Any plan which depends on a fundamental change in human behavior is doomed from the start.
Somebody already did something very similar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Rife and http://www.rifehealth.com/
> The total energy required is reportedly far below the threshold for human tissue damage
But you go first.
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Having read TFA, I still worry.
1. All proteins in your body, and all proteins your body can possibly assemble for a virus capsid (and it must, because that's how virii multiply) are made of the same 20 aminoacids. The result, however, can range from relatively simple enzymes to gigantic mollecules, and they're folded in lots of funny ways too, to work like they're supposed to.
I.e., I wouldn't be _too_ surprised if for _some_ particular frequencies (i.e., some very narrowly defined types of virii), something else in your cells had a resonance on the same frequency. Even if the total power isn't enough to vapourize a cell, it could still be pretty deadly.
2. A capsid isn't a monolythic thing, it's made of several proteins which assemble themselves in that shape. That's how your body produces more capsids for the viruses an infected cell manufactures. It produces the capsid pieces, and those then assemble themselves around the pieces of viral DNA or RNA that were copied too.
So I'm curious exactly in what way are the capsids "shattered" by that resonance. If it shatters the proteins themselves into aminoacids, yeah, that's the end of it. But then, see point 1, I'd worry which other proteins it can destroy like that. If it just shatters the (relatively) weaker bonds between the individual proteins that make the capsid, I would imagine that at least some of them will simply reassemble. Remember they're proteins which are pretty much built to do just that: connect to each other and form a capsid.
3. Their claim that it can shatter HIV virii, while leaving the T cells intact, seems somewhat missing the point. It's the kind of solution that a physicist would imagine, if he doesn't know much about how a virus works.
So let's get a bit into (a very over-simplified summary of) how a cell works, and a virus multiplies. (Warning: it's still a long read.)
Your cells are basically a chemical computer whose function include building more building blocks for itself, or for more copies of itself. Your proteins, for example, are encoded by your DNA, as triplets of nucleotides. One such triplet is a "codon", and it identifies one aminoacid. (With some redundancy. You use 20 aminoacids, but since there are 4 possible nucleotides and there are 3 of them, there are 64 possible combinations. So it's quite usual that 2 or 3 different combinations mean the same aminoacid.)
When a cell needs more of a certain protein, it first copies a segment of DNA to RNA and lets it loose. Each Then a ribosome reads that just like a piece of tape, one codon (group of 3 nucleotids) at a time, and assembles a chain of aminoacids matching that sequence. For each codon, it adds the matching aminoacid to the chain, and moves one position further. One codon means STOP, and when it reached that, it lets go of the newly built protein and stops.
A virus works much the same. It builds more capsids, for example, by just letting loose a chain of RNA in your cell, which contains the information on how to build a capsid piece. (If it's a DNA based virus, it will first have to transcribe it to RNA, same as your cell does.) When enough of those capsid pieces have been built, they assemble themselves in a capsid around such a RNA chain.
At the same time, of course, the virus will also have to get your cell to transcribe the RNA piece. That, however, is just a sub-case of the previous paragraph. One of the proteins encoded by the virus, is the "RNA replicase". It's an enzyme which copies RNA strands. So the virus will let one piece of tape with that information loose inside your cell, the cell transcribes it to RNA replicase, which in turn starts copying RNA strands non-stop. Some will be surrounded by the capsid pieces to form new virii, but some will just keep getting interpreted by your ribosomes, so the cell keeps producing more capsid pieces and more RNA transcriptase.
To sum it up, an infected cell is, essentially, reprogrammed to keep producing viruses until it bursts. It's those pieces of gene
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
... but how you gonna find a shark that small?
Now if only it could shatter the most destructive viruses that infect humans: the Human Mind Viruses such as any thought that is taken to be true without evidence. Yes, ALL beliefs are a form of virulent virus with some being highly toxic to those infected and, more often than not, to others who are the victim of humans infected by a belief - aka a meme, aka a human mind virus.
Destroy all beliefs.
The worst offender is of course the notion of god.
A 9 mm or even 30.06 bullet would be much more effective than this thing to kill someone.
HIV doesn't live long outside the body. Hence, trying to sterilize a disco with lasers would be a bit of a waste.
If you want to get more details as to why, some viruses are composed of just the capsid, some, however, include a viral envelope: a membrane of a double layer of lipids, much like the membrane of your own cells. In fact, it _is_ a piece of the membrane of the infected cell that produced the copies of the virus, plus some viral proteins to help it attach to the next cell it infects.
You'd think that an extra layer would make them more robust, but actually it doesn't. It makes them more sensitive to dessication, so they survive a lot shorter times outside the body.
HIV is one of that kind of viruses with a viral envelope, so...
So, anyway, if you wanted to make sterilize discos against HIV, you'd just need to make sure the air is very dry. I'm sure that can be integrated in the air conditioning, cheaper and more effective than special lasers.
Not that it would make much of a difference, but if you need that warm fuzzy sensation that you've done _something_ against HIV (even if it doesn't actually do anything), it's one way to go.
Of course, neither will do anything for people who've pawed each other at the disco for a few hours and then decide to go have a quick fuck to relieve the horniness. Which is how HIV actually gets transmitted.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nature (if I may anthropomorphize her) has taught us time and time again that she will adapt. Given that this will work, what happens when the virus adapts to 'vibrate' at the same resonance as our cells?
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
As if millions of virus suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
I think it's going around.
But the laser would be soooooo much slower
How do you calibrate this magic laser to several unknown viruses at the same time?
:D
With funding of course!
Even if there is no way to use this method to destroy viruses without damaging other cells couldn't this be used as a way to sterilize objects?
Sharks are too expensive for many HMOs. My doctors insist on treating my high cholesterol using ill tempered bass.
Is this, like, the modern Asian equivalent of divination by scattering bones in a bowl?
If so, I still fail to see how knowledge obtained from Ramen scattering would help them calibrate the laser.
If all the capsids inside cells are shattered and unusable, that will make it harder for the virus to infect other cells, won't it?
If you shattered all those capsids as thoroughly as you can, into the aminoacids they came from, now the cell would have inside:
- all the viral RNA telling it how to make more viruses, _and_
- a lot of aminoacids from which to make those viruses again
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
But I'm not good enough at immunology to know if once killed, the MS causing cells would be gone or if the bone marrow would simply repopulate the count again later.
...Open Source isn't the only answer -- but it's almost always a better value than the alternatives...
IANAL, but I am a biochemist specializing in viral capsid dynamics.
Disruption of covalent bonds isn't the only way to permanently disrupt viral capsids. As other people have noted, there are scenarios in which even a favorable assembly reaction might not happen due to dispersion of the subunits. However, for many capsids the assembly process is highly regulated and must be done in a very specific fashion: interfere with the process even a little and it won't go forward. One example is the presence of ions such as zinc: in the case of the Hepatitis B capsid, if there's a little too much of it the capsid assembly is interrupted and aberrant structures are produced which can effectively tie up the subunits in a non-infective form permanently.
There's also the chance that the resonance approach could alter the structures in a way that they remain intact, but non-infectious. To back things up a step, many viruses have been observed to have a dynamic, fluctuating structure, which moves on a larger scale and slower speed than the molecular vibrations common to all systems. This has been referred to as "breathing" in the field, and it often involves large reversible motions within the subunits, sometimes exposing the interior regions of protein to the outside solution. If you can stop this "breathing", you will change the behavior of the virus capsid. For the human cold virus, doing this with drugs that bind to the capsid itself will neutralize infectivity. Similar results have been seen by quenching this motion with temperature, etc. It wouldn't shock me at all if the severe perturbations of a laser (or ultrasonic, that's been used in the past) pulse could permanently induce a non-functional state by partially unfolding the subunits.
But moving away from my area of expertise, maybe someone knowledgeable about lasers etc could enlighten me on the details of how this resonance system works. As I mentioned, the unique motions of viral capsids tend to be very slow relative to other biological molecules, even up to the second timescale. Wouldn't the pulses need to be very long in duration to excite that type of motion via the wavelengths used? Or are the pulses themselves time-correlated as the exciting resonance, with broad spectrum wavelengths not being critical?
I think the last time I saw the term "femtosecond" it was related to a laser that could "paint" metals the blackest black on earth. I just wondered if there was any cross experimentation with the same laser?
[/war] "All the world's a stage, And all the men and women merely players."
Since all the blood cells are removed from the donated plasma, it'd be much easier to make sure there was zero effect on what is left (normal blood proteins), and there wouldn't be any cells to make new virus.
According to this, the technique works by exciting a Raman-active vibrational mode of the virus' protein coat. However it requires a power density of at least 50 Megawatts per square centimetre - which is quite a lot, even with only 0.5 nanojoules per pulse. It took ten hours to kill the viruses in their sample.
Somebody correct me or back me up on this, please: if we're dealing with EM radiation of a low enough energy, aren't these guys in the domain of short bursts of directed radio waves? It's 425 nm radiation from a titanium:sapphire laser - in other words, indigo-coloured light.Still, 1% might be too much
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Red blood cells and plasma should not contain any DNA parts.
White blood cells can cause rejection and carry viruses this contain DNA.
So on one way if it complete nuked DNA it would not be a problem. As long as it left Red Blood cells operational. This could expand the number of people who could give blood. Or even more scary make pigs blood usable in humans with relative safety.
Robert J Sawyer mentions something very like this (developed by the Neanderthals in their parallel universe) allowing destruction of viruses (virii???) and pathogens in humans. I had no idea it was based on anything even remotely similar in reality. Pretty cool.
It seems to me like they're explicitly planning to use it on something that _does_ have cells left, and more specifically also the infected T cells. (Which would then continue to produce virus copies anyway.)
I also notice that they mention "blood" and "blood banks" -- and they say it was Tsen himself who said that -- but I searched for the word "plasma" and I can't find any mention of it in the article.
So, you know, at the very least I stand by what I've said: having read TFA, I don't find anything there to make me worry less.
Now maybe someone smarter will find a better use on it. Maybe on plasma. Who knows? But TFA doesn't say that.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Some of the worst AIDS epidemics are in relatively poor areas where education and prophylactics are in short supply. Defeating a virus is a noble goal, but before that is possible it will be important to work on the problems of feeding and educating at-risk populations. Dying of a nasty disease is nasty. Sentencing people to die of famine by eradicating a nasty disease and causing rapid population growth is cruel.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
One virus. Two viruses.
The urge to say virii, is hypercorrection. Which is to say... wrong.
But don't take my word for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus
http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/faq/plural-of-virus.html
http://homepages.tesco.net/J.deBoynePollard/FGA/plural-of-virus.html
So unless you are trying to be cute, the plural of virus is viruses.
And know you know!
This is when a stupid person, feeling personally hurt by learning, will whine about language changing over time.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I'd like to start off by saying that I know very little about biology. I'm going to have misconceptions, please correct those that I bring up.
It seems like many people are saying that because this is not a viable working solution now, that it's a terrible thing that these people are even working at it. This seems like a very closed-minded and limited approach to the design of solutions to ANY problem. I think the way things like this work is that someone develops something, and they get excited about the application of their work. They may not actually produce a practical application of their work, but they get the idea out. Probably someone else looks and says "Hey! I know how to solve this problem!" And, by bits and pieces, a working solution gets made. I'm not saying it WILL happen with this technology, but attacking the budding technology because of its lack of immediate practical use seems short-sighted. (For the record, I'm a mathematician... we're not particularly well-known for developing things that get immediately applied to practical use)
It seems like the problems being stated involve the idea that while this could conceivably attack free virii in blood, it would do nothing to infected cells (at best... I guess at worst it could vaporize them with everything around, which I admit is a bad thing). However, do infected cells live forever? If this process is used to prevent viral information from moving through the blood from one cell to another, then hasn't the infection been curbed? The infected cells would eventually die. If I'm wrong, and infected cells can indeed live long enough, then couldn't this be used in conjunction with another technology that might be developed that kills infected cells but, unfortunately, can do nothing to a virus that's floating around in the blood? Even if such a technique doesn't exist now, it might later.
If it works as is stated, then at worst aren't we talking about fewer virii traversing the blood stream and infecting other cells anyway? Even if it's not a cure, slowing down the spread of infection is a desirable consequence of a treatment.
A post had been made indicating that this would simply break up the parts of a virus, which would then potentially re-form from other floating bits around in the blood. However, I thought the body actually had means of cleaning itself. Here's where my very limited knowledge of biology really kicks in. Wouldn't the protection granted by a virus' protein coat be lost if the protein coat were scattered and left to float around? Idly floating proteins are probably on the immune system's target list, no?
Well, tell me where I'm wrong. I'd love to learn a bit about it.
"Nothing is impossible! That's what being a scientist is all about!"