France issues moratorium on prion research after fatal brain disease strikes • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by alach11 » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:02 PM UTC

myWindoonn wrote: post #133

briantakita wrote: post #85

These mad scientists need to be stopped. How about all research into gain of function, genetic engineering viruses, prions, etc. need to have a moratorium. There is too much risk & not enough transparency on all levels. We don't hear about all of the problems. I wonder what else is wrong and what happened. Whistleblowers need protection, not punishment.

Look up how fluorine, the "devil's chemical", was found and isolated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluorine#Isolation They blew themselves up, or worse, in pursuit of scientific knowledge. Without their work, semiconductors and electronics wouldn't be possible, and we wouldn't be here on this forum. You don't have to sacrifice yourself, but don't infringe on those brave folks who are advancing our scientific knowled…

There's a difference between research on explosives (where the scientist risks their own health) and contagious diseases (where the scientist risks everyone's health).

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

#262

Post by sudosysgen » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:09 PM UTC

quenix wrote: post #177

COGlory wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A 5-minute soak in a 40% solution of household bleach decontaminated stainless steel wires coated with chronic wasting disease (CWD) prions, according to a new study by National Institutes of Health scientists. https://www.nih.gov/news-events/news-releases/household-blea...

Holy shit, 5 minutes soaked ? That's intense

Well, that is 40% household bleach. We could probably make a solution that disinfects faster.

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

#263

Post by sudosysgen » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:11 PM UTC

Tsarbomb wrote: post #16

circlefavshape wrote: post #13

prions sounds very much like ice-nine

That is an excellent way of thinking about them. For anyone unfamiliar, OP is referring to the Kurt Vonnegut novel which has a fictional state of water (ice-nine) that immediately freezes all other water it comes into contact with into more ice-nine. Edit: I committed a sin and didn't mention the title: Cat's Cradle.

Similar to that is the concept of false vacuum.

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

#264

Post by Enginerrrd » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

Asraelite wrote: post #249

nkmnz wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Viruses are nothing like bacteria, so it doesn’t make any sense to restrict the term of “infection” to those two.

It is interesting though that we don't consider things like lead and radiation to be "infections". Is the difference between an infection and poisoning replication?

I'd say so.

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

#265

Post by andrekandre » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:14 PM UTC

raincom wrote: post #238

varispeed wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it because many researchers put their ego first over the science? It's so many times that they ridicule ideas, that often amounts to bullying and then they rarely even say sorry when it turns out they were wrong. Why won't academia flush out these types of people? The toxic atmosphere with no way of getting rid of bad apples is what put me off from studying.

This phenomenon is studied in the history and philosophy of sciences; it is called "paradigm change" ala Thomas Kuhn. Yes, researchers who work in the dominant 'paradigm' tie their psychological identities with the paradigm they are working on. So, this resistance is expected. 'How to overcome resistance' is studied in Sociology of Science.

  Yes, researchers who work in the dominant 'paradigm' tie their psychological identities with the paradigm they are working on.

programmers can be like this as well!

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

#266

Post by LatteLazy » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:20 PM UTC

gostsamo wrote: post #68

LatteLazy wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't prions reproduce by re-folding other proteins to match themselves?

Infection means contamination / spoilage. https://www.etymonline.com/word/infection

I'm just saying it does reproduce (or replicate to use the exact same word op used). Whether it's correct to use any of the other terms I will leave to others

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

#267

Post by cstross » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:29 PM UTC

bondarchuk wrote: post #260

cstross wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bear in mind that eating muscle tissue from infected animals is a much lower risk than innoculating yourself directly with brain matter from an infected animal. The prion protein is expressed in the central nervous system, which isn't legal for human consumption. Also, ingestion of meat exposes it to stomach acid and digestive enzymes before it gets into the consumer's circulation -- enzymes that break down foreign p…

> the central nervous system, which isn't legal for human consumption. Source? I've seen calf brain on the menu plenty of times.

It was banned in the UK almost as soon as BSE was identified as a prion disease. Even before they culled the entire beef herd.

(Source: I live here, I'm old enough to remember it dominating the news cycle for months.)

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

#268

Post by jhgb » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:34 PM UTC

himinlomax wrote: post #241

jhgb wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Covid lab leak hypothesis is primarily implausible because of Occam's razor.

That is not an argument. It is extremely plausible because the epidemic started next to the lab. Look at the size of China. Take a map of the country and throw a dart at it. Now consider the probability of it landing within 1 mm of Wuhan. Let's call this dart Occam's fléchette.

> It is extremely plausible because the epidemic started next to the lab. Look at the size of China. Take a map of the country and throw a dart at it.

First of all, that seems to completely ignore the uneven distribution of population. Your fléchette assumes a uniform distribution. Yes, China is large, but Wuhan has a population of...what, ten million people? It's China's ninth largest city as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_China_by_pop... .

The last time something like this happened was in Foshan, thirteenth largest city as per the same page. This does not seem to be a coincidence according to https://health.ucsd.edu/news/releases/Pages/2021-03-18-novel... , where it is argued that in large cities, you have a much greater chance of getting a pandemics from a small number of cases. So if the possibility of emergence of a pandemics of SARS-CoV viruses is heavily weighed in favor of the largest Chinese cities, perhaps your "Occam's fléchette" has actually a ~5% chance of hitting Wuhan or something like that -- maybe more depending on geography and population movement patterns and wildlife trade patterns, who knows? I haven't seen any models of this yet that would predict the most likely locations for the next pandemics. Maybe someone will make those this time.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "next to the lab". Like right outside of it? I doubt that.

Furthermore, some people seem to be clinging for dear life to the first epidemic cluster described and completely ignoring the fact that in general, existence of such clusters means that the disease had already been circulating at that time, perhaps for months. You simply have no idea where the original Wuhan cluster caught the disease from.

Hell, we had no idea where the first SARS came from until over a decade later. Then they found some bats in a cave over 1000 km from the first cluster in Foshan, bats with coronavirus strains the most similar to the original disease than anything else they'd found so far. Surely you're not arguing that those bats were released from a lab?

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

#269

Post by jhgb » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:36 PM UTC

programmarchy wrote: post #204

jhgb wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Covid lab leak hypothesis is primarily implausible because of Occam's razor.

The lab leak hypothesis is less plausible than the natural leak hypothesis only if you exclude the fact that gain-of-function research on Coronavirus was being done in the Wuhan Lab. When you include that necessary fact, it becomes the most parsimonious. If this researcher becomes ill with CJD, we'll know it's because, beyond a reasonable doubt, she was mishandling prions in a laboratory setting, and not because she…

> When you include that necessary fact, it becomes the most parsimonious.

That's just wishful thinking on your part. That's still not enough evidence in that direction at all. You have large, dense cities in China and people trading wildlife food. There's millions of them in a cramped space. That's a breeding ground for infection, with millions of opportunities for mutations.

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

#270

Post by jhgb » Wed, Jul 28, 2021, 9:43 PM UTC

subroutine wrote: post #222

jhgb wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems to me that in an adult, it may already be too late. How would you remove the existing protein?

Proteins have a half life of ~24 hours. CJD has an incubation period of roughly 10 years. If de novo PrP synthesis was somehow halted, the likelihood of developing CJD would drop to zero. On the other hand whatever job PrP was doing will also cease getting done, and its downstream pathways will be disrupted. So there are likely consequences. Now if you could totally shut down PrP synthesis for like a week, then turn…

> Proteins have a half life of ~24 hours.

All of them? I admit that I'm not a biologist, so that's new to me, but this would seem to put our bodies under immense stress if we had to replace half of all our proteins every day. If the average human body has 10 kg of proteins, this would mean the necessity of synthesizing 5 kg per day to prevent your death. Or is this specifically about PrP? If it's true that it doesn't last long, then perhaps stopping its synthesis would be a viable option.

Does the misfolded PrP have a different half-life?