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When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

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Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#111

Post by antisthenes »

oh_sigh wrote: post #57
metasean wrote: post #12

I first heard about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting a letter saying I may have been exposed. I had surgery after someone with CJD, but before that person died, was autopsied, and diagnosed. That was over a decade ago. So far no signs of it. I did make peace with the fact that I have a much higher probability of dying from it than the average American. The only substantivu changes in my life are: (a…

Shouldn't autoclaves destroy all proteins, prion or otherwise? What exactly is the exposure vector? edit: Unsourced statement from wikipedia[1]: "However, prions, such as those associated with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, may not be destroyed by autoclaving at the typical 134 °C for three minutes or 121 °C for 15 minutes.[citation needed]" [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclave

In an autoclave, prions can be deactivated by using a temperature of 270 F at 21 psi for 90 minutes. [1]

[1] http://www.bseinfo.org/priondefinition.aspx

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#112

Post by WaxProlix »

maxerickson wrote: post #78
grzm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, I was thinking of foie gras. Thank you for the correction. Given that I've twice expressed quite explicitly the point I was making, I fear we're talking past each other. I wish you a good day.

I understand full well that you are expressing that there is some difference between eating and other uses. You've done little to argue why this difference is substantial (hence my just restating the position I started with, where they are conflated).

"A [real or imagined] respect for animals that led to a reduction in waste product."

is not the same as

"Maximizing profit by turning undesirable or inaccessible meat into nuggets in a potentially dangerous process."

I don't think you're wrong to mention them in the same sentence, but it's definitely disingenuous/uncharitable to compare peoples' sentiments on the two apples-to-apples.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#113

Post by arwhatever »

dnautics wrote: post #4
Blueskytech wrote: post #2

Many of you have probably heard about Prions and Papua New Guinea but the end of the article discusses new prion diseases showing up in deer within North America. The idea that human's could get a prion disease from deer meat, coupled with a potentially long incubation period, is frightening. Living in a hunting community I may avoid eating deer for the foreseeable future.

it's highly unlikely... There's a (probably directed, weighted) graph of species-species transmission potential, and it does seem to obey some rough distance rule, which does NOT correlate necessarily with species distance rule. We think that cows can transmit to humans; cows and sheep can co-transmit. (if you have a sheep with scrapie sharing a pasture with cow, the cow can get mad cow disease). deer though do not s…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5hTF2pw-4s

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#114

Post by igivanov »

thinkmassive wrote: post #33
touchofevil wrote: post #23

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…

A workaround for people who would like to eat ground meat but avoid this issue is to grind it yourself, or to buy steak and have the butcher grind it for you.

Probably - if you are sure about how he processes his meat, the provenance of his cattle etc.

But the probability of getting the disease is so small that I would rather pay more attention to safely crossing streets than worrying about it.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#115

Post by aoner »

Razengan wrote: post #67
snowwrestler wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While we have thousands of years of cultural belief that mind and body are distinct, I'm not aware of any scientific evidence for that. And there is a lot of evidence that the mind is directly dependent on the state of the body--change the body (drugs, injury, etc) and inevitably the state of mind changes too. So I don't know of any reason to think that it's even possible to separate a mind from a body, let alone mov…

Just copy everything then. There's no reason to roll over and just accept death from aging, accident or violence, any more than we accept death by flu or any other curable disease. Things which would've outright killed people 200 years ago merely cause a few days of a runny nose to us, so to speak. You cannot deny that medicine is, after all, basically the quest for immortality, and that is where it's going to end up…

Let's do a though experiment, and say that it is possible to 'copy' a person.

We live in the future where we all use fancy teleporters. You happily live in Amsterdam and commute to the Bay Area every morning. The way the teleporter actually works is by making a quick copy, deconstructing the object and the recreating the exact copy some place else. One day you go to the teleporter and realize it's broken. You contact customer service and are totally missing that 9 o clock meeting. Customer support says: "We're sorry but there has been a malfunctioning. You were teleported but not deconstructed properly. Could you please step back in the teleporter so we can deconstruct you?".

Body and self are intertwined in ways we don't yet fully understand. But it will be verry difficult to transfer consciousness. In the case of copying, you are for sure just dying and a new copy of you will be born.

A scarier thought even: Perhaps this is the case when we go to sleep and your consciousness dies and a new one wakes up every morning. Sure would explains why I always have a hard time falling asleep ;)

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#116

Post by jfroma »

thinkmassive wrote: post #33
touchofevil wrote: post #23

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was o…

A workaround for people who would like to eat ground meat but avoid this issue is to grind it yourself, or to buy steak and have the butcher grind it for you.

In Argentina the meat should be grind in front of the customer by law and every butchery exposes a sign explaining this.

Big chains are not exempt.

But you can still buy frozen burguers for instance.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#118

Post by aoner »

MayeulC wrote: post #108
pound wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you consider your copy to be you?

OK, that's a bit off-topic, but an interesting question regardless, and I've been thinking about this lately. I've finally decided on something some time ago, though my opinion on the matter could still change. I think that we are in perpetual evolution. Our memories are perpetually updated, and we make our choices based on our experience (and probably some biochemical mechanisms that affect the decision making proce…

This thought has crossed my minds many times! Great to see it here. I don't know if there is an experiment that could prove or disprove this theory. How does one differentiate between two 'different' selves? And should there be a difference?

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#119

Post by Razengan »

scythe wrote: post #96
Razengan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just copy everything then. There's no reason to roll over and just accept death from aging, accident or violence, any more than we accept death by flu or any other curable disease. Things which would've outright killed people 200 years ago merely cause a few days of a runny nose to us, so to speak. You cannot deny that medicine is, after all, basically the quest for immortality, and that is where it's going to end up…

You cannot copy "all" of the information stored in the human body. Briefly, this happens because the physical limitations of information storage require cooling (Landauer's principle) which requires kT×log(2) energy per bit, or about 2.5 zJ at room temperature. The brain's memory capacity is about 2.5 * 10^15 bytes ( https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memor... ), but the amount of information whic…

Copying a disk does in no way require simulating each atom of the disk, though?

• We can already clone mammalian bodies.

• I'll assume that "growing" an adult human body, with a "blank" or "default" brain, isn't too inconceivable.

• Your real, natural brain can access the information within itself.

• At the moment of "copying", we figure some way to biologically link the two brains together, and write some biological software to pull data from the source brain to the destination brain.

Re: When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

#120

Post by Razengan »

aoner wrote: post #115
Razengan wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just copy everything then. There's no reason to roll over and just accept death from aging, accident or violence, any more than we accept death by flu or any other curable disease. Things which would've outright killed people 200 years ago merely cause a few days of a runny nose to us, so to speak. You cannot deny that medicine is, after all, basically the quest for immortality, and that is where it's going to end up…

Let's do a though experiment, and say that it is possible to 'copy' a person. We live in the future where we all use fancy teleporters. You happily live in Amsterdam and commute to the Bay Area every morning. The way the teleporter actually works is by making a quick copy, deconstructing the object and the recreating the exact copy some place else. One day you go to the teleporter and realize it's broken. You contact…

Other commenters brought this up too. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082961

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082866

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