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As generous and useful on a human-scale an announcement as that was, my first thought was how it could be abused. So too prion research.
Who'd've thunk that muscle bulk could be so scary? (!)
Kinda a morbid question but could you just sever the finger moments after the prick? Or would the blood pump so fast that the prion(s) is already in your body.
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In this case I guess the message targets people in other cities than the doomed one. "This could happen to your city too".
you'd still have to wait a decade after the first attack to make threats on the second city.
I remember hearing people arguing that the Covid lab leak hypothesis was implausible because of stringent safety measures.
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I've always thought a _very_ effective strategy would be to get a crop-duster and spray a prion-contaminated mist over a major city, basically contaminating every public surface in a large area I'm also not sure how you would begin to clean up afterwards - do you remove the surface of everything in your city? To those saying bio-terrorism is ineffective or would not kill a lot of people in any appreciable time-scale,…
It's not really effective because it takes years to manifest symptoms of prion disease. Terrorism usually has a message attached to it, and "you're gonna start dying in 10 years" is not conducive to messaging.
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"Terror" is the point of "terrorism". It's in the word.
Terror only propagates through mass media. Mass media is the issue.
Scary. I think and airborne human transmissible prion disease that kill in a few years is the kind of event that can bring our society back to prehistoric living in just a few decades. Hope it never happens.
I find prions unbelievably scary too. What reassures me is that they've had about 3 billion years to wipe out life on earth and haven't done it yet. Which means there must be some natural limits on their spread we don't know about yet.
From Wikipedia [1]: « Prions are misfolded proteins with the ability to transmit their misfolded shape onto normal variants of the same protein. They characterize several atal and transmissible neuro degenerative diseases in humans and many other animals. It is not known what causes the normal protein to misfold, but the abnormal three-dimensional structure is suspected of conferring infectious properties, collapsing…
> Basically, you get infected, you die. Avoid cannibalism and you should be fine. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/09/06/482952588/wh...
The sad thing is there’s a recombinant version that would be safe, but it also costs thousands of dollars.
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Makes complete sense that there was resistance until a viable mechanism was proposed. Otherwise it just sounds like voodoo.
No, because the underlying data demonstrated that there was a statistically significant death effect occurring, with a wide range of evidence implicating prions, before there was a mechanism. You shouldn't require a plausible mechanism to trust your experiments (seen this a hundred times, like in RNA enzymes, heart of the ribosome, various dna-is-the-heritable-agent experimetns).
That light behaves like a wave did not summarily prove there was an aether through which it propagated, and not finding it up-ended physics.