Earlier quoted context omitted.
To someone with minimal background in biology, prions are a fascinating and terrifying phenomenon right out of speculative fiction. Absolutely amazing and scary.
Prions remind me of ice-nine.
Need to read this!
Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
101–108 of 108 posts
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
We rely on a million appeals to authority every day of our lives. Try some new food, trusting that it won’t kill you because somebody says it won’t, and nobody bats an eye. Say you give more weight to a study performed by an expert, when that has no immediate bearing on your life, and everybody loses their mind.
Well said. Myself specifically, I'd like to think science is supposed to be better than that -- neutral, dispassionate. It probably isn't because it's done be humans, but I want it to be.
The people studying this stuff definitely need to be better than that. They can maybe take hints from authorities but they need to check facts for themselves.
But for the rest of us, we have no choice but to trust authorities in some way when deciding how to interpret some new result.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it could have been published in Science , then it wouldn't have been submitted to Science Translational Medicine , a completely different journal with much less visibility (and a much lower impact factor). For some of these Nobel guys you could argue they want to avoid supporting the flashy magazines and don't care about getting into the high impact journals because they are already established, but in this case h…
You claim is entirely speculative. There may be good reasons why it didn't show in Science (page space is extremely limited)
> There may be good reasons why it didn't show in Science (page space is extremely limited)
Um, exactly? Science is the most visible journal after Nature, so it's the most competitive. "Insufficient page space" is exactly the same as "not impressive enough to be accepted".
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#104Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies . They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to…
The worst part is that while articles about a disease like this are a mere annoyance to us, for people with loved ones with the disease or suffering from the disease itself it becomes a cruel joke. These are people who scour the internet looking for any information they can find and carefully read articles like this looking for a bit of hope that there may be a solution. But it’s bullshit. Don’t share these articles,…
I'm the OP.
I do not have, but I am personally affected, by this disease.
I appreciate your point, but this is one of the more interesting alternative hypotheses I've seen in the past ~8 years as an unwillingly-interested layperson.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that's an argument from authority rather than one of science though. No. An appeal to authority would be "this must be true because someone authoritative said it". Saying "I am willing to treat this claim more credibly than other claims because the source is credible" is not a logical fallacy.
Assigning any credibility to a statement based on the identity of its source is indeed the logical fallacy known as "appeal to authority". Whether you say "it must be true", or "it is likely to be true" does not matter. Credibility must only come from the statement itself and the evidence to support it. However, while it is a logical fallacy, it is reasonable to temporarily hold beliefs for or against the truthfulnes…
> Assigning any credibility to a statement based on the identity of its source is indeed the logical fallacy known as "appeal to authority"
I think you are confusing deductive and inductive reasoning.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
You know what they say, when you’ve got a hammer everything looks like a nail. I’m an armchair physician at best, and I’d say that this doesn’t disprove the viral infection thesis at all. That amyloid and tau act as prions isn’t really relevant if they’re in fact produced initially in response to an infectious agent in an attempt to stop its spread. I’d suggest this is particularly likely to be true as attempts to cl…
plaques are proxies of disease, not disease-causing or necessarily harmful in themselves.
Pardon me if I misread, it seemed that the thesis here was Amyloid and Tau 'prion' self-propagation was being identified as a cause of Alzheimers.
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#107Y'all, please never post university press releases about single scientific studies . They are the worst thing. Every major human problem has been declared solved by one of them. They are even worse than posting single scientific study papers themselves at the time of publication, and that's still pretty bad, because of the overwhelming incentive to create exciting studies that are wrong, and our current inability to…
> Y'all Instant throwback to 1997's Redneck Rampage game about US hillbillys..
Can you please not post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News?
Re: Proteins central to the pathology of Alzheimer’s disease act as prions – study
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thermodynamics. Certain proteins have a propensity to Misfold, this is driven by the folding conformations as well as by Heat Shock Proteins. The underlying genetics that drive amino acid sequence are the basis for this. In the best known prion disease, Mad Cow, one misfolded protein drives other similar proteins it runs into to induce the same conformation. Due to the thermodynamics of folding, it is now in a very s…
So the first misfolded protein is just a random occurrence? With mad cow, will uninfected cow populations spontaneously develop mad cow on their own? Or was the first mad cow protein a rare misfortune not likely to happen again? Or did the first mad cow protein come from something other than a cow?
Look up the sheep prion disease scrapie.
It’s been around a lot longer than mad cow (1700s) and likely continues to arise spontaneously.
The protein structure needs to have a mutation which gives it a propensity to occasionally misfold. That creates a chain reaction. If this happens at a low enough rate then the underlying protein may become widely distributed in the population, and then it may only take a chance mutation or misfold to cause the cascade
The reality is we don’t know what the prime mover in any of these conditions are. Likely some combination of random occurance and possibly some other mechanism as well. For example, CJD comes from mad cow - so mad cow is transmissible, but scrapie seems to both arise spontaneously in flocks and be transmissible between sheep