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France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

sciencemag.org

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Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#121

Post by dnautics »

da_big_ghey wrote: post #116
dnautics wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

living with knowing that i probably have 10 yrs before die in a gruesom neurodegeneration, knowing that if i interact much with our world that maybe i spread this to others, seriously terrifying, depressing, would induce misery.

I'm not disputing that. (also, prions aren't really human-to-human contagious, unless you're into eating your friends' brains or swapping syringes)

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#122

Post by dnautics »

medstrom wrote: post #114
dnautics wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

you'd still have to wait a decade after the first attack to make threats on the second city.

I think reading about prions is the scary part, no need to wait for the deaths.

feel free to experiment with terrorism establishing credibility using a different psychological model. I, personally, won't.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#123

Post by chrbarrol »

dnautics wrote: post #55
overlordalex wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is true that hiding it for many years would make it less attractive for terrorists, however one could imagine another strategy where you wait 12 months before anonymously telling the authorities you did it, without telling them how. (While threatening to do it again)

Having some unknown person(s) spreading Prion diseases around that cannot be detected until way after it happens would be close to the perfect terrorist attack imo. You could probably keep the attack going for at least a year before authorities get their act together, all the while people would be scared shitless as it would be very hard to know how the original group got infected a year earlier if you choose the right product to contaminate. (Not even mentioning the difficulty finding who did the contamination even if the specific product is found)

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#124

Post by dekhn »

XorNot wrote: post #120
dekhn wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Yes you should: because all you have otherwise is a death rate that could be caused by any number of things. Biological organisms die all the time for all sorts of reasons: there's a difference between showing a series of factors lead to an death rate, and proposing the specific mechanism by which that happens and it's important . That light behaves like a wave did not summarily prove there was an aether through whic…

Not only did they know the death rate, they had an infectious agent in a tube they knew was protein. If you identify a reproducible agent you can study in the lab, you don't need any plausible mechanism.

Note that aether was the plausible mechanism, and it mislead people for a long time. The experiment that "disproved" aether just showed that the mechanistic proposal was simple, and wrong.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#126

Post by myWindoonn »

tyingq wrote: post #34
Omavel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bio-terrorism is not effective.

What's "effective" mean in this context? The anthrax letters in the US in 2001 certainly dominated news cycles.

The most effective bioterror attack in the USA was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Rajneeshee_bioterror_atta... and it killed zero people, affecting 751 people in total. Bioterror is expensive and difficult.

For prions specifically, the main "problem" (which is a good thing overall for us) is that they're naked proteins, and they denature relatively quickly when outside of a protective environment. Spray them onto crops? Crops and soil are covered in small bugs and microbes which break down anything too long, including proteins and carbohydrate chains. No, in order to have prions in the food supply, you need something like cannabalistic cow-raising practices or other ways of recycling prions in a wet+hot safe environment.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#127

Post by XorNot »

harles wrote: post #88
AbrahamParangi wrote: post #9

The study of rare, contagious diseases seems likely enough to result in an eventual outbreak that it should be treated like enriching uranium. Which is to say, with great caution- and not like regular science but rather like the kind of science with potentially very negative externalities.

Known prions can’t cause an outbreak without extraordinary methods of spread, such as cannibalism.

Also no terrorist is interested in a weapon which takes 10 years to kill their target population, maybe.

The threat of WMD terror hasn't materialized in a meaningful way: intact, state-manufactured nuclear weapons are the only plausible weapons non-state actors can realistically handle without killing themselves with them, and even that's pretty questionable: it's not easy to detonate a nuclear bomb.

Chemicals are even worse: it's pretty easy for a chemistry student to accidentally make organophosphates, but terror groups don't try in any substantial way - you're as likely to poison yourself as anyone else.

Biologicals are the worst: screw up and they infect you and then the rest of your organisation - or you have a power cut and everything dies in the test tube.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#128

Post by XorNot »

chrbarrol wrote: post #123
dnautics wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is true that hiding it for many years would make it less attractive for terrorists, however one could imagine another strategy where you wait 12 months before anonymously telling the authorities you did it, without telling them how. (While threatening to do it again) Having some unknown person(s) spreading Prion diseases around that cannot be detected until way after it happens would be close to the perfect terror…

Authorities are really good at de-anonymizing anonymous messengers. Who have no incentive to spread an unverified rumor they can't prove.

Re: France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes

#129

Post by contravariant »

jtbayly wrote: post #93
dekhn wrote: post #56

Prions are weird. I was at UCSF during the time they went from a fringe theory to an established fact and a nobel prize. The professor who studied them (Prusiner) had to overcome tons of resistance and the experiments were heroic (often waiting months for mice to die). It's really funny that everybody resisted it until somebody mentioned that there was a plausible physical mechanism of refolding catalysis.

Makes complete sense that there was resistance until a viable mechanism was proposed. Otherwise it just sounds like voodoo.

It's not exactly that rare for a phase transition out of a metastable state to happen spontaneously when given an appropriate nucleation seed.
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