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How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

newyorker.com

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Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#81

Post by jcims »

DrAwdeOccarim wrote: post #72
im3w1l wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting this. Looked further into atp synthase. Absolutely amazing. A little turbine, driven by the flow of protons, spinning in 120 degree discrete clicks, around catalyst pockets, where each click changes the shape of the pocket to a new one. And after the pocket has gone through a complete cycle, adp and phosphate have been fused. Never seen the chemical (proton concentration), converted into something…

It can also run backward when ATP concentrations are too high.

Whoa.

Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#83

Post by ncmncm »

BlackFly wrote: post #65
ncmncm wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time a New Yorker article shows up, people crawl out of the woodwork to complain that it's a New Yorker article . If New Yorker articles are not for you, then do not try to read New Yorker articles. Really! Read other things you will actually like. If you want a quick rundown of the topic, Wikipedia is only a click away , and gets right to the point. Those of us who like New Yorker articles appreciate them when…

When you post an article, what sort of discussion are you hoping people will hold? If you are hoping that people will discuss the novel aspects of the coronavirus's impact on the immune system then you might choose an article that focuses on that. Instead, if you choose an article that spends a large amount of time discussing tangential points, creating lengthy analogies for the workings of the immune system and disc…

I can tell you what we don't hope to read: complaints about New Yorker editorial policy, or about long form journalism in general. Again: it has what it says on the tin. We get that you don't care for it. You are absolutely not obliged to post anything at all.

Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#84

Post by longtom »

nahuel0x wrote: post #80
longtom wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Culture, intelligence, memes, innovation etc. are also evolutionary subprocesses of our species. Evolution is gradient descent, so is learning. It's all the same. Entropy minimization or competitive negentropy consumption, if you want.

yes, but this process is running inside a single individual. As above, so below.

Our brain also produces hypotheses, tests them and repurposes the most successful ones as program fragments stored in synaptic weights. Trial and error, exploration, mutation, survival of the best hypotheses etc.

Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#85

Post by usrusr »

refurb wrote: post #55
Entaroadun87 wrote: post #3

Really like this analogy: It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body, from the skin to the brain; those cells differ in appearance and function because, in each of them, a molecular gizmo “transcribes” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA. These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins, the molecular m…

The really mind blowing thing is not just that DNA encodes everything for a living organism, but that it also has all the necessary elements to control expression so the right thing gets made at the right time in the right place. The fun part is that it's not like DNA is just expressed, it needs to be "unwound" from it's natural state as a highly dense structure. Elements within the cell actually regulate the unwindi…

Conjures up a mental image of a computer where the only mutable state is instruction pointers for parallel threads. Not quite accurate, but a rough ballpark to how crazy those "programs" must be.

(If for some reason we had to work with that kind of computer we'd probably enforce a conventional, graspable approach on it by finding a way to simulate a conventional computer once and then conveniently forget about the underlying madness, clearly that wouldn't be the path taken by evolution)

Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#86

Post by AstralStorm »

Engineering-MD wrote: post #79
AstralStorm wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also the replication machinery being easy to trigger is why it's the second most common cancer after skin cancers. (Which shares some of those features in addition to being even more exposed to insults and less controlled.)

Where do you get that figure from? All the figures I have state lung and bowel cancers are the most common, along with prostrate and breast for sex specific cancers (although looking at their rates they would be the higher even though their rates in the other sex are exceedingly low).

That's because melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer are split, as other lymphoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma etc. in data despite affecting same cell lines.

If you sum these two up they end on top respectively in that order. Albeit prostate cancer is really close.

It's an artifact of grouping used. For colorectal for example, adenomas and carcinomas are lumped for a change.

Prostate is the second most common worldwide, or skin cancer, depending on year. The big 5 are over 1.5 million. (WCRF data. They lump all lung cancers but split immune system and skin cancers. For reasons? Bladder and lung cancer incidence is highly dependent on factors such as smoking and specific chemicals used in manufacturing. Potentially the same with colorectal and diet. Rates for breast and prostate are high because they're easy to spot and well tested. So per country data varies a lot.)

Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#87

Post by usrusr »

ane wrote: post #4
jostmey wrote: post #2

Many paragraphs into the article and I still don’t know what important discovery or observation has been made

This kind of reporting interleaved with storytelling in a really weird voice is frustrating. Why do journalists write like this? What purpose does this word salad serve? I can do this myself! "On a bald September day, a man walks into a barber shop, languishes at the occupied seats, and voilà, while sensing upcoming bowel movements, he discovers the next great theory of economics."

I'd wholeheartedly agree with your critique if the text was published as a tweet storm.

The thing is, this isn't news reporting at all. It's a popsci writeup of the history of the immune system, the history of the discovery of the immune system and a glimpse into its complexity that uses Covid news as the textual equivalent of a cover image. If you have a print of 20000 Leagues under the Sea and the cover shows the kraken attack, would you complain about the number of chapters that don't contain a kraken at all?

Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#88

Post by ggghhhfff »

andromeduck wrote: post #67
cma wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are already examples of alternatives, like it could have some kind of brain and communication apparatus to work with others of its species and put together things like GPU simulations of protein modeling to generate optimized artificial antibodies.

How are you going to run a GPU sim on a bunch of meat?

I believe what is meant here is that the alternative is to have a highly developed capacity for abstract thought that you then use to collaborate with your species to develop antibodies in a laboratory (humans are an example of this, although we don’t rely upon this mechanism)

Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#89

Post by AstralStorm »

hanklazard wrote: post #28
random023987 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for the summary, it's about 1/4 the way in. > Usually, the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs. The coronavirus is different. “It seems to block only one of those two arms,” tenOever told me. It inhibits the interferon response but does nothing about the cytokines; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call…

And this is why steroids like decadron are helpful in the second phase (now being called the inflammatory phase by many in the ID community) of the infection. Steroids decrease inflammation / immune response.

That's not exactly why it's steroids. If this was the main mechanism we'd use more effective immunosuppressants. As is, stronger immunosuppressants show worse survival rates. You want to keep some immune system activity to not get a secondary infection and fight the virus.

Corticosteroids also kickstart healing process (not really in COVID) and regrowth - you also race against tissue destruction. Most importantly they barely reduce scar formation. And they actually improve breathing via action on alveoli as well as reduce swelling.

The specific two to use are hydrocortisone and dexamethasone based on studies thus far, in critical patients - ones put on respirators. (Prednisolone could also work.)

Re: How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System

#90

Post by flobosg »

AstralStorm wrote: post #86
Engineering-MD wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get that figure from? All the figures I have state lung and bowel cancers are the most common, along with prostrate and breast for sex specific cancers (although looking at their rates they would be the higher even though their rates in the other sex are exceedingly low).

That's because melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer are split, as other lymphoma and non-Hodgkin lymphoma, multiple myeloma etc. in data despite affecting same cell lines. If you sum these two up they end on top respectively in that order. Albeit prostate cancer is really close. It's an artifact of grouping used. For colorectal for example, adenomas and carcinomas are lumped for a change. Prostate is the second most…

Non-melanoma skin cancer is usually excluded from registries due to differences across the world in data recording practices: https://www.ncri.ie/faqs/interpret-use-our-data/why-are-data...
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