quantamagazine | When the researcher Daniel Kronauer was still a postdoc in 2008, he traveled to Okinawa, Japan, for wild specimens of clonal raider ants (the species Ooceraea biroi).
In the first colony he collected, he noticed two ants with a strange
appearance. They were small like workers, but they also sported small
wing buds, which was striking because usually only ant queens develop
wings. What made this even stranger was that clonal raider ants don’t
even have queens: In keeping with their name, these ants reproduce
asexually, so all the ants in a colony are nearly perfect genetic
clones.
Kronauer was intrigued by the miniature
queens because they seemed so different from the other clonal raider
ants even though he believed them to be the same species. But answers to
his questions weren’t forthcoming, so he took some specimens, shot some
photos for records and then moved on with his work.
A few years later, Kronauer established a
lab at Rockefeller University and set up a colony of clonal raider ants
for study. One day, his then-doctoral student Buck Trible found a few more of the odd miniature queens in that colony and decided to characterize them.
Trible found that the wings weren’t the
ants’ only unusual characteristic. The strange ants also showed
different social behaviors, had larger ovaries and laid twice as many
eggs. Using genetic tools, he traced all of these changes to a
2.25-million-base-pair-long stretch of DNA. In the ordinary ants, the
DNA on each of the two copies of their chromosome 13 was different. But
in the miniature-queen ants, the two copies were identical.
As Trible, Kronauer and their colleagues reported in March in Current Biology,
all of the characteristics of the odd ants — the wings, the social
behaviors and the reproductive traits — were caused by what geneticists
call a supergene, a collection of genes that are inherited as a unit and
are highly resistant to being broken up. At some point in their
evolution, the ants had acquired a second copy of that supergene, and
that chromosomal change had transformed their bodies and behaviors. The
findings suggested a new mechanism for how complex combinations of body
parts and behaviors can sometimes surface all at once in evolution:
through a mutation that duplicates a supergene, toggling on entire
suites of traits like strings of lights controlled by a light switch.
Ant researchers are excited by the work,
and not just because it seems to solve a decades-old mystery about how
at least one form of social parasitism evolves in the insects. The
supergene discoveries may also help them pin down long-sought features
in ants’ genetic architecture that make their colonies develop as
hierarchical castes of queens and workers.
More broadly, the new study also offers
insights into a fundamental evolutionary question about how different
the individuals in a single species can be.
axial | Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and was exiled
from his native home Austria after the nation was annexed by Nazi
Germany. He moved to Ireland after he was invited to set up the Dublin
Institute of Advanced Studies. This follows the past history of Ireland
acting as a storehouse of knowledge during the Dark Ages. After decades
of work, biology was becoming more formalized around the 1940s. Better
tools were emerging to perturb various organisms and samples and the
increasing number of discoveries was building out the framework of life.
With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics, scientists probably
most importantly Thomas Hunt Morgan and his work on fruit flies (Drosophila) set up the rules of heredity - genes located on chromosomes with each cell containing a set of chromosomes. In 1927, a seminal discovery
was made that irradiation by X-rays of fruits flies can induce
mutations. Just the medium was not known where Schrödinger was thinking
through his ideas on biology. At the same type, organic chemistry was
improving and various macromolecules in the cell such as enzymes were
being identified along with the various types of bonds made. For
Schrödinger, there were no tools to characterized these macromolecules
(i.e. proteins, nucleic acids) such as X-ray crystallography. Really the
only tool useful at the time was centrifugation. At the time, many
people expected proteins to be the store and transmitter of genetic
information. Luckily, Oswald Avery published an incredible paper in 1944 that found DNA as probably the store instead of proteins.
With this knowledge base Schrödinger took a beginner’s mind
to biology. In some ways his naivety was incredibly useful. Instead of
being anchored to some widely-accepted premise that proteins transmitted
genetic information (although he had a hunch some protein was
responsible), the book thought from first principles and identified a
few key concepts in biology that were not appreciated but became very
important. Thankfully Schrödinger was curious - he enjoyed writing
poetry and reading philosophy so jumped into biology somewhat
fearlessly. At the beginning of the book, he sets the main question as:
“How
can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial
boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and
chemistry?”
Information
In the first chapter,
Schrödinger argues that because organisms have orderly behavior they
must follow the laws of physics. Because physics relies on statistics,
life was follow the same rules. He then argues that because biological
properties have some level of permanence the material that stores this
information then must be stable. This material must have the ability to
change from one stable state to another (i.e. mutations). Classical
physics is not very useful here, but for Schrödinger his expertise in
quantum mechanics helped determine that these stable states must be held
together through covalent bonds (a quantum phenomena) within a
macromolecule. In the early chapters, the book argues that the gene must
be a stable macromolecule.
Through discussion around the
stability of the gene, the book makes its most important breakthrough -
an analogy between a gene and an aperiodic crystal (DNA is aperiodic but
Schrödinger amazingly didn’t know that at the time): “the germ of a
solid.” Simply, a periodic crystal can store a small amount of
information with an infinite number of atoms and an aperiodic crystal
has the ability to store a near infinite amount of information in a
small number of atoms. The latter was more in line with what the current
data suggested what a gene was. Max Delbrück had similar ideas along
with J.B.S. Haldane, but the book was the first to connect this idea to
heredity. But readers at the time and maybe even still overextended this
framework to believe that genetic code contains all of the information
to build an organism. This isn’t true, development requires an
environment with some level of randomness.
wikipedia | In chapter I, Schrödinger explains that most physical laws on a large
scale are due to chaos on a small scale. He calls this principle
"order-from-disorder." As an example he mentions diffusion,
which can be modeled as a highly ordered process, but which is caused
by random movement of atoms or molecules. If the number of atoms is
reduced, the behaviour of a system becomes more and more random. He
states that life greatly depends on order and that a naïve physicist may
assume that the master code of a living organism has to consist of a
large number of atoms.
In chapter II and III, he summarizes what was known at this time
about the hereditary mechanism. Most importantly, he elaborates the
important role mutations play in evolution.
He concludes that the carrier of hereditary information has to be both
small in size and permanent in time, contradicting the naïve physicist's
expectation. This contradiction cannot be resolved by classical physics.
In chapter IV, Schrödinger presents molecules,
which are indeed stable even if they consist of only a few atoms, as
the solution. Even though molecules were known before, their stability
could not be explained by classical physics, but is due to the discrete
nature of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, mutations are directly linked to quantum leaps.
He continues to explain, in chapter V, that true solids, which are also permanent, are crystals.
The stability of molecules and crystals is due to the same principles
and a molecule might be called "the germ of a solid." On the other hand,
an amorphous solid, without crystalline structure, should be regarded as a liquid with a very high viscosity.
Schrödinger believes the heredity material to be a molecule, which
unlike a crystal does not repeat itself. He calls this an aperiodic
crystal. Its aperiodic nature allows it to encode an almost infinite
number of possibilities with a small number of atoms. He finally
compares this picture with the known facts and finds it in accordance
with them.
In chapter VI Schrödinger states:
...living matter, while not eluding the "laws of
physics" as established up to date, is likely to involve "other laws of
physics" hitherto unknown, which however, once they have been revealed,
will form just as integral a part of science as the former.
He knows that this statement is open to misconception and tries to
clarify it. The main principle involved with "order-from-disorder" is
the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy only increases in a closed system (such as the universe). Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.
In chapter VII, he maintains that "order-from-order" is not
absolutely new to physics; in fact, it is even simpler and more
plausible. But nature follows "order-from-disorder", with some
exceptions as the movement of the celestial bodies
and the behaviour of mechanical devices such as clocks. But even those
are influenced by thermal and frictional forces. The degree to which a
system functions mechanically or statistically depends on the
temperature. If heated, a clock ceases to function, because it melts.
Conversely, if the temperature approaches absolute zero,
any system behaves more and more mechanically. Some systems approach
this mechanical behaviour rather fast with room temperature already
being practically equivalent to absolute zero.
Schrödinger concludes this chapter and the book with philosophical speculations on determinism, free will, and the mystery of human consciousness.
He attempts to "see whether we cannot draw the correct
non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (1) My
body functions as a pure mechanism according to Laws of Nature; and (2)
Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing
its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and
all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for
them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that
I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every
conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' – am the person, if any,
who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature".
Schrödinger then states that this insight is not new and that Upanishads
considered this insight of "ATHMAN = BRAHMAN" to "represent
quintessence of deepest insights into the happenings of the world."
Schrödinger rejects the idea that the source of consciousness should
perish with the body because he finds the idea "distasteful". He also
rejects the idea that there are multiple immortal souls that can exist
without the body because he believes that consciousness is nevertheless
highly dependent on the body. Schrödinger writes that, to reconcile the
two premises,
The only possible alternative is simply
to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of
which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what
seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this
one thing…
Any intuitions that consciousness is plural, he says, are illusions. Schrödinger is sympathetic to the Hindu concept of Brahman, by which each individual's consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe
— which corresponds to the Hindu concept of God. Schrödinger concludes
that "...'I' am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the
atoms' according to the Laws of Nature." However, he also qualifies the
conclusion as "necessarily subjective" in its "philosophical
implications". In the final paragraph, he points out that what is meant
by "I" is not the collection of experienced events but "namely the
canvas upon which they are collected." If a hypnotist succeeds in
blotting out all earlier reminiscences, he writes, there would be no
loss of personal existence — "Nor will there ever be."[8]
thephilosopher | A fuller and fairer assessment
of what is going on with deference and standpoint epistemology would go
beyond technical argument, and contend with the emotional appeals of
this strategy of deference. Those in powerful rooms may be “elites”
relative to the larger group they represent, but this guarantees nothing
about how they are treated in the rooms they are in. After all, a
person privileged in an absolute sense (a person belonging to, say, the
half of the world that has secure access to “basic needs”) may
nevertheless feel themselves to be consistently on the low end of the
power dynamics they actually experience. Deference epistemology responds
to real, morally weighty experiences of being put down, ignored,
sidelined, or silenced. It thus has an important non-epistemic appeal to
members of stigmatized or marginalized groups: it intervenes directly
in morally consequential practices of giving attention and respect.
The social dynamics we
experience have an outsize role in developing and refining our political
subjectivity, and our sense of ourselves. But this very strength of
standpoint epistemology – its recognition of the importance of
perspective – becomes its weakness when combined with deferential
practical norms. Emphasis on the ways we are marginalized often matches
the world as we have experienced it.
But, from a structural perspective, the rooms we never needed to enter
(and the explanations of why we can avoid these rooms) might have more
to teach us about the world and our place in it. If so, the deferential
approach to standpoint epistemology actually prevents “centring” or even
hearing from the most marginalized; it focuses us on the interaction of
the rooms we occupy, rather than calling us to account for the
interactions we don’t experience. This fact about who is in the room,
combined with the fact that speaking for others generates its own set of
important problems (particularly when they are not there to advocate
for themselves), eliminates pressures that might otherwise trouble the
centrality of our own suffering – and of the suffering of the
marginalized people that do happen to make it into rooms with us.
The dangers with this feature
of deference politics are grave, as are the risks for those outside of
the most powerful rooms. For those who are deferred to, it can
supercharge group-undermining norms. In Conflict is Not Abuse,
Sarah Schulman makes a provocative observation about the psychological
effects of both trauma and felt superiority: while these often come
about for different reasons and have very different moral statuses, they
result in similar behavioural patterns. Chief among these are
misrepresenting the stakes of conflict (often by overstating harm) or
representing others’ independence as a hostile threat (such as failures
to “centre” the right topics or people). These behaviours, whatever
their causal history, have corrosive effects on individuals who perform
them as well as the groups around them, especially when a community’s
norms magnify or multiply these behaviours rather than constraining or
metabolizing them.
For those who defer, the habit
can supercharge moral cowardice. The norms provide social cover for the
abdication of responsibility: it displaces onto individual heroes, a
hero class, or a mythicized past the work that is ours to do now in the
present. Their perspective may be clearer on this or that specific
matter, but their overall point of view isn’t any less particular or
constrained by history than ours. More importantly, deference places the
accountability that is all of ours to bear onto select people – and,
more often than not, a hyper-sanitized and thoroughly fictional
caricature of them.
The same tactics of deference
that insulate us from criticism also insulate us from connection and
transformation. They prevent us from engaging empathetically and
authentically with the struggles of other people – prerequisites of
coalitional politics. As identities become more and more fine-grained
and disagreements sharper, we come to realize that “coalitional
politics” (understood as struggle across difference) is, simply,
politics. Thus, the deferential orientation, like that fragmentation of
political collectivity it enables, is ultimately anti-political.
Deference rather than
interdependence may soothe short-term psychological wounds. But it does
so at a steep cost: it can undermine the epistemic goals that motivate
the project, and it entrenches a politics unbefitting of anyone fighting
for freedom rather than for privilege, for collective liberation rather
than mere parochial advantage.
Barrons |Merck
‘s announcement that its antiviral molnupiravir had halved hospitalizations
in a trial of high-risk Covid-19 patients was met with enthusiasm on
Friday, inspiring a vision of a world in which treating a Covid-19
infection could be as trivial as swallowing a few pills.
Some
scientists who have studied the drug warn, however, that the method it
uses to kill the virus that causes Covid-19 carries potential dangers
that could limit the drug’s usefulness.
Molnupiravir works by incorporating itself into the genetic material
of the virus, and then causing a huge number of mutations as the virus
replicates, effectively killing it. In some lab tests, the drug has also
shown the ability to integrate into the genetic material of mammalian
cells, causing mutations as those cells replicate.
If that were
to happen in the cells of a patient being treated with molnupiravir, it
could theoretically lead to cancer or birth defects.
Merck
(ticker: MRK) says it has run extensive tests in animals that show that
this isn’t an issue. “The totality of the data from these studies
indicates that molnupiravir is not mutagenic or genotoxic in in-vivo
mammalian systems,” a Merck spokesperson said.
Scientists who have studied NHC, the compound that molnupiravir
creates in the body after it is ingested, however, say that Merck needs
to be careful.
“Proceed with caution and at your own peril,”
wrote Raymond Schinazi, a professor of pediatrics and the director of
the division of biochemical pharmacology at the Emory University School
of Medicine, who has studied NHC for decades, in an email to Barron’s.
Scientists
are split on how serious a risk this is, and in the absence of detailed
data on Merck’s animal tests, and long-term human safety data, it’s
difficult to know for sure.
The safety concerns suggest that the
stock market’s reaction to the positive molnupiravir data on Friday
might have been overblown. Shares of Merck jumped 8.4% Friday, while
shares of Covid-19 vaccine maker
Moderna
(MNRA) fell 11.4%, and shares of
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
(REGN), which developed one of the leading monoclonal antibodies for Covid-19, fell 5.7%.
Vir Biotechnology
(VIR), which developed another of the monoclonal antibodies in partnership with
GlaxoSmithKline
(GSK), was down 21.1%.
“It was sort of, in effect, wishful thinking,” says SVB Leerink analyst Dr. Geoffrey Porges of investors’ reactions on Friday.
axial | Schrödinger won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1933 and was exiled
from his native home Austria after the nation was annexed by Nazi
Germany. He moved to Ireland after he was invited to set up the Dublin
Institute of Advanced Studies. This follows the past history of Ireland
acting as a storehouse of knowledge during the Dark Ages. After decades
of work, biology was becoming more formalized around the 1940s. Better
tools were emerging to perturb various organisms and samples and the
increasing number of discoveries was building out the framework of life.
With the rediscovery of Mendel’s work on genetics, scientists probably
most importantly Thomas Hunt Morgan and his work on fruit flies (Drosophila) set up the rules of heredity - genes located on chromosomes with each cell containing a set of chromosomes. In 1927, a seminal discovery
was made that irradiation by X-rays of fruits flies can induce
mutations. Just the medium was not known where Schrödinger was thinking
through his ideas on biology. At the same type, organic chemistry was
improving and various macromolecules in the cell such as enzymes were
being identified along with the various types of bonds made. For
Schrödinger, there were no tools to characterized these macromolecules
(i.e. proteins, nucleic acids) such as X-ray crystallography. Really the
only tool useful at the time was centrifugation. At the time, many
people expected proteins to be the store and transmitter of genetic
information. Luckily, Oswald Avery published an incredible paper in 1944 that found DNA as probably the store instead of proteins.
With this knowledge base Schrödinger took a beginner’s mind
to biology. In some ways his naivety was incredibly useful. Instead of
being anchored to some widely-accepted premise that proteins transmitted
genetic information (although he had a hunch some protein was
responsible), the book thought from first principles and identified a
few key concepts in biology that were not appreciated but became very
important. Thankfully Schrödinger was curious - he enjoyed writing
poetry and reading philosophy so jumped into biology somewhat
fearlessly. At the beginning of the book, he sets the main question as:
“How
can the events in space and time which take place within the spatial
boundary of a living organism be accounted for by physics and
chemistry?”
Information
In the first chapter,
Schrödinger argues that because organisms have orderly behavior they
must follow the laws of physics. Because physics relies on statistics,
life was follow the same rules. He then argues that because biological
properties have some level of permanence the material that stores this
information then must be stable. This material must have the ability to
change from one stable state to another (i.e. mutations). Classical
physics is not very useful here, but for Schrödinger his expertise in
quantum mechanics helped determine that these stable states must be held
together through covalent bonds (a quantum phenomena) within a
macromolecule. In the early chapters, the book argues that the gene must
be a stable macromolecule.
Through discussion around the
stability of the gene, the book makes its most important breakthrough -
an analogy between a gene and an aperiodic crystal (DNA is aperiodic but
Schrödinger amazingly didn’t know that at the time): “the germ of a
solid.” Simply, a periodic crystal can store a small amount of
information with an infinite number of atoms and an aperiodic crystal
has the ability to store a near infinite amount of information in a
small number of atoms. The latter was more in line with what the current
data suggested what a gene was. Max Delbrück had similar ideas along
with J.B.S. Haldane, but the book was the first to connect this idea to
heredity. But readers at the time and maybe even still overextended this
framework to believe that genetic code contains all of the information
to build an organism. This isn’t true, development requires an
environment with some level of randomness.
wikipedia | In chapter I, Schrödinger explains that most physical laws on a large
scale are due to chaos on a small scale. He calls this principle
"order-from-disorder." As an example he mentions diffusion,
which can be modeled as a highly ordered process, but which is caused
by random movement of atoms or molecules. If the number of atoms is
reduced, the behaviour of a system becomes more and more random. He
states that life greatly depends on order and that a naïve physicist may
assume that the master code of a living organism has to consist of a
large number of atoms.
In chapter II and III, he summarizes what was known at this time
about the hereditary mechanism. Most importantly, he elaborates the
important role mutations play in evolution.
He concludes that the carrier of hereditary information has to be both
small in size and permanent in time, contradicting the naïve physicist's
expectation. This contradiction cannot be resolved by classical physics.
In chapter IV, Schrödinger presents molecules,
which are indeed stable even if they consist of only a few atoms, as
the solution. Even though molecules were known before, their stability
could not be explained by classical physics, but is due to the discrete
nature of quantum mechanics. Furthermore, mutations are directly linked to quantum leaps.
He continues to explain, in chapter V, that true solids, which are also permanent, are crystals.
The stability of molecules and crystals is due to the same principles
and a molecule might be called "the germ of a solid." On the other hand,
an amorphous solid, without crystalline structure, should be regarded as a liquid with a very high viscosity.
Schrödinger believes the heredity material to be a molecule, which
unlike a crystal does not repeat itself. He calls this an aperiodic
crystal. Its aperiodic nature allows it to encode an almost infinite
number of possibilities with a small number of atoms. He finally
compares this picture with the known facts and finds it in accordance
with them.
In chapter VI Schrödinger states:
...living matter, while not eluding the "laws of
physics" as established up to date, is likely to involve "other laws of
physics" hitherto unknown, which however, once they have been revealed,
will form just as integral a part of science as the former.
He knows that this statement is open to misconception and tries to
clarify it. The main principle involved with "order-from-disorder" is
the second law of thermodynamics, according to which entropy only increases in a closed system (such as the universe). Schrödinger explains that living matter evades the decay to thermodynamical equilibrium by homeostatically maintaining negative entropy in an open system.
In chapter VII, he maintains that "order-from-order" is not
absolutely new to physics; in fact, it is even simpler and more
plausible. But nature follows "order-from-disorder", with some
exceptions as the movement of the celestial bodies
and the behaviour of mechanical devices such as clocks. But even those
are influenced by thermal and frictional forces. The degree to which a
system functions mechanically or statistically depends on the
temperature. If heated, a clock ceases to function, because it melts.
Conversely, if the temperature approaches absolute zero,
any system behaves more and more mechanically. Some systems approach
this mechanical behaviour rather fast with room temperature already
being practically equivalent to absolute zero.
Schrödinger concludes this chapter and the book with philosophical speculations on determinism, free will, and the mystery of human consciousness.
He attempts to "see whether we cannot draw the correct
non-contradictory conclusion from the following two premises: (1) My
body functions as a pure mechanism according to Laws of Nature; and (2)
Yet I know, by incontrovertible direct experience, that I am directing
its motions, of which I foresee the effects, that may be fateful and
all-important, in which case I feel and take full responsibility for
them. The only possible inference from these two facts is, I think, that
I – I in the widest meaning of the word, that is to say, every
conscious mind that has ever said or felt 'I' – am the person, if any,
who controls the 'motion of the atoms' according to the Laws of Nature".
Schrödinger then states that this insight is not new and that Upanishads
considered this insight of "ATHMAN = BRAHMAN" to "represent
quintessence of deepest insights into the happenings of the world."
Schrödinger rejects the idea that the source of consciousness should
perish with the body because he finds the idea "distasteful". He also
rejects the idea that there are multiple immortal souls that can exist
without the body because he believes that consciousness is nevertheless
highly dependent on the body. Schrödinger writes that, to reconcile the
two premises,
The only possible alternative is simply
to keep to the immediate experience that consciousness is a singular of
which the plural is unknown; that there is only one thing and that what
seems to be a plurality is merely a series of different aspects of this
one thing…
Any intuitions that consciousness is plural, he says, are illusions. Schrödinger is sympathetic to the Hindu concept of Brahman, by which each individual's consciousness is only a manifestation of a unitary consciousness pervading the universe
— which corresponds to the Hindu concept of God. Schrödinger concludes
that "...'I' am the person, if any, who controls the 'motion of the
atoms' according to the Laws of Nature." However, he also qualifies the
conclusion as "necessarily subjective" in its "philosophical
implications". In the final paragraph, he points out that what is meant
by "I" is not the collection of experienced events but "namely the
canvas upon which they are collected." If a hypnotist succeeds in
blotting out all earlier reminiscences, he writes, there would be no
loss of personal existence — "Nor will there ever be."[8]
mises | In an op-ed for the Washington Post last week,
Marty Makary of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine argues that the
medical profession has hurt its credibility in pretending that natural
immunity is virtually irrelevant to the covid equation. Moreover,
the dogmatic "get vaccinated" position constitutes a lack of honesty
about the data. Rather, Makary concludes:
[W]e can encourage all Americans to get vaccinated while
still being honest about the data. In my clinical experience, I have
found patients to be extremely forgiving with evolving data if you are
honest and transparent with them. Yet, when asked the common question,
“I’ve recovered from covid, is it absolutely essential that I get
vaccinated?” many public health officials have put aside the data and
responded with a synchronized “yes,” even as studies have shown that
reinfections are rare and often asymptomatic or mild when they do occur.
And what are these studies? Makary continues:
More than 15 studies have demonstrated the power of immunity acquired by previously having the virus. A 700,000-person study from
Israel two weeks ago found that those who had experienced prior
infections were 27 times less likely to get a second symptomatic covid
infection than those who were vaccinated. This affirmed a June Cleveland
Clinic study of
health-care workers (who are often exposed to the virus), in which none
who had previously tested positive for the coronavirus got reinfected.
The study authors concluded that “individuals who have had SARS-CoV-2
infection are unlikely to benefit from covid-19 vaccination.” And in
May, a Washington University study found that even a mild covid infection resulted in long-lasting immunity.
The policy bias in favor of vaccines ignores many other facts as
well, such as the relative risks of vaccines, especially for the young:
The current Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
position about vaccinating children also dismisses the benefits of
natural immunity. The Los Angeles County School District recently mandated vaccines for students ages 12 and up who want to learn in person. But young people are less likely to suffer severe or long-lasting symptoms from
covid-19 than adults, and have experienced rare heart complications
from the vaccines. In Israel, heart inflammation has been observed in
between 1 in 3,000 and 1 in 6,000 males age 16 to 24; the CDC has
confirmed 854 reports nationally in people age 30 and younger who got
the vaccine.
A second dose of the two-shot mRNA vaccine like that produced by
Pfizer and Moderna may not even be necessary in children who had covid.
Since February, Israel’s Health Ministry has been recommending that
anyone, adult or adolescent, who has recovered from covid-19 receive a
only single mRNA vaccine dose, instead of two. Even though the risk of
severe illness during a reinfection is exceedingly low, some data has
demonstrated a slight benefit to one dose in this situation. Other
countries use a similar approach. The United States could adopt this
strategy now as a reasonable next step in transitioning from an overly
rigid to a more flexible vaccine requirement policy. For comparison, the
CDC has long recommended that kids do not get the chickenpox vaccine if
they had chickenpox infection in the past.
The nonscientific, ideology-induced blind spot for natural immunity also prompted The BMJ (the journal of the British Medical Association) to note
that "[w]hen the vaccine rollout began in mid-December 2020, more than
one quarter of Americans—91 million—had been infected with SARS-CoV-2….
As of this May, that proportion had risen to more than a third of the
population, including 44% of adults aged 18–59."
And yet, the authors note this fact doesn't appear to be a part of any policy discussion at all:
The substantial number of infections, coupled with the
increasing scientific evidence that natural immunity was durable, led
some medical observers to ask why natural immunity didn’t seem to be
factored into decisions about prioritising vaccination.
This problem is reflected in the Biden administration’s drive for
booster shots—announced in mid-August—even before there was any clinical
research on booster shots at all. Even by mid-September, as one
hospital’s chief medical officer put it, “the data is not compelling one way or another.”
But those sorts of details don’t trouble federal “public health”
officials, and the Biden administration quickly moved toward pushing
booster shots for everyone.
FT | Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow. The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol. But he is worried that it could be against the law given that it involves manipulating genetic material.
“This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab,” he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish.
For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.
In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr. This has led to an explosion of unchecked experimentation in self-constructed labs or community facilities focused on biological self-improvement.
Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.
Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”
At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.
These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.
In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as “dual use”, meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
phys.org | Researchers at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research have
discovered a bacterial enzyme that they say could expand scientists'
CRISPR toolkit, making it easy to cut and edit RNA with the kind of
precision that, until now, has only been available for DNA editing. The
enzyme, called Cas7-11, modifies RNA targets without harming cells,
suggesting that in addition to being a valuable research tool, it
provides a fertile platform for therapeutic applications.
"This new enzyme
is like the Cas9 of RNA," says McGovern Fellow Omar Abudayyeh,
referring to the DNA-cutting CRISPR enzyme that has revolutionized
modern biology by making DNA editing fast, inexpensive, and exact. "It
creates two precise cuts and doesn't destroy the cell in the process,
like other enzymes," he adds.
Up until now, only one other family of RNA-targeting enzymes, Cas13,
has extensively been developed for RNA targeting applications. However,
when Cas13 recognizes its target, it shreds any RNAs in the cell,
destroying the cell along the way. Like Cas9, Cas7-11 is part of a
programmable system; it can be directed at specific RNA targets using a
CRISPR guide. Abudayyeh, McGovern Fellow Jonathan Gootenberg, and their
colleagues discovered Cas7-11 through a deep exploration of the CRISPR
systems found in the microbial world. Their findings were recently
reported in the journal Nature.
Exploring natural diversity
Like other CRISPR proteins, Cas7-11 is used by bacteria as a defense
mechanism against viruses. After encountering a new virus, bacteria that
employ the CRISPR system keep a record of the infection in the form of a
small snippet of the pathogen's genetic material.
Should that virus reappear, the CRISPR system is activated, guided by a
small piece of RNA to destroy the viral genome and eliminate the
infection.
These ancient immune systems are widespread and diverse, with
different bacteria deploying different proteins to counter their viral
invaders.
"Some target DNA, some target RNA. Some are very efficient in
cleaving the target but have some toxicity, and others do not. They
introduce different types of cuts, they can differ in specificity—and so
on," says Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the National
Center for Biotechnology Information.
Abudayyeh, Gootenberg, and Koonin have been scouring genome sequences
to learn about the natural diversity of CRISPR systems—and to mine them
for potential tools. The idea, Abudayyeh says, is to take advantage of
the work that evolution has already done in engineering protein machines.
"We don't know what we'll find," Abudayyeh says, "but let's just explore and see what's out there."
newyorker | Last summer, an anonymous intermediary proposed to
Harris and Harden that they address their unresolved issues. Harden
appeared on Harris’s podcast, and patiently explained why Murray’s
speculation was dangerously out in front of the science. At the moment,
technical and methodological challenges, as well as the persistent
effects of an unequal environment, would make it impossible to conduct
an experiment to test Murray’s idly incendiary hypotheses. She refused
to grant that his provocations were innocent: “I don’t disagree with you
about insisting on intellectual honesty, but I think of it as
‘both/and’—I think that that value is very important, but I also find it
very important to listen to people when they say, ‘I’m worried about
how this idea might be used to harm me or my family or my neighborhood
or my group.’ ” (Harris declined to comment on the record for this
piece.) As she once put it in an essay, “There is a middle ground
between ‘let’s never talk about genes and pretend cognitive ability
doesn’t exist’ and ‘let’s just ask some questions that pander to a
virulent on-line community populated by racists with swastikas in their
Twitter bios.’ ”
Harden
is not alone in her drive to fulfill Turkheimer’s dream of a
“psychometric left.” Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher’s book, “The
Genome Factor,” from 2017, outlines similar arguments, as does the
sociologist Jeremy Freese. Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult
of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been
trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views
associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by
the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter
Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I
have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that
contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more
difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” He added,
“There’s a politically correct left that’s still not open to these
things.” Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher, told me he thinks
that Harden’s book might create its own audience: “There’s so much
toxicity in this debate that it’ll take a long time to change people’s
minds on it, if at all, but I think Paige’s book is just so clear in its
explanation of the science.”
The nomenclature has
given Harden pause, depending on the definition of “hereditarian,”
which can connote more biodeterminist views, and the definition of
“left”—deBoer is a communist, Alexander leans libertarian, and Harden
described herself to me as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” (“The King will
reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these
brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ ”). The political
sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic economists,
psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of
academia. As the population geneticist I spoke to put it to me,
“Geneticists know how to talk about this stuff to each other, in part
because we understand terms like ‘heritability,’ which we use in
technical ways that don’t always fully overlap with their colloquial
meanings, and in part because we’re charitable with each other, assume
each other’s good faith—we know that our colleagues aren’t eugenicists.
But we have no idea how to talk about it in public, and, while I don’t
agree with everything she said, sometimes it feels like we’ve all been
sitting around waiting for a book like Paige’s.”
Harden’s
outspokenness has generated significant blowback from the left. On
Twitter, she has been caricatured as a kind of ditzy bourgeois
dilettante who gives succor to the viciousness of the alt-right. This
March, after she expressed support for standardized testing—which she
argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help
increase low-income and minority representation—a parody account
appeared under the handle @EugenicInc, with the name “Dr. Harden, Social
Justice Through Eugenics!” and the bio “Not a determinist, but yes,
genes cause everything. I just want to breed more Hilary Clinton’s for
higher quality future people.” One tweet read, “In This House We
Believe, Science is Real, Womens Rights are Human Rights, Black Lives
Matter, News Isnt Fake, Some Kids Have Dumb-Dumb Genes!!!”
In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times,
arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to
inform education policy. Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology,
and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, strongly
disagreed: “There’s just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to
a restructuring of society in a just way in the future—we have a
hundred years of evidence for what happens when social outcomes are
attributed to genetic differences, and it is always to stigmatize,
control, and punish the people predicted to have socially devalued
traits.” Darity, the economist, told me that he doesn’t see how Harden
can insist that differences within groups are genetic but that
differences between them are not: “It’s a feint and a dodge for her to
say, ‘Well, I’m only looking at variations across individuals.’ ”
There
is a good precedent for this kind of concern. In “Blueprint,” Robert
Plomin wrote that polygenic scores should be understood as “fortune
tellers” that can “foretell our futures from birth.” Jared Taylor, a
white-supremacist leader, argued that Plomin’s book should “destroy the
basis for the entire egalitarian enterprise of the last 60 or so years.”
He seized on Plomin’s claim that, for many outcomes, “environmental
levers for change are not within our grasp.” Taylor wrote, “This is a
devastating finding for the armies of academics and uplift artists who
think every difference in outcome is society’s fault.” He continued,
“And, although Blueprint includes nothing about race, the implications
for ‘racial justice’ are just as colossal.” Harden has been merciless in
her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary
salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right.
In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA
matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing
that matters is scientifically outlandish.” (Plomin told me that Harden
misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing
people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s
suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and
arguing with them.”)
With the first review of
Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a
conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity”
movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was
put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his
once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly
thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this
work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the
non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at
times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from
expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his
Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t
be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden
sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks.
It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity
on the other.”
medium | One
of the clear indicators of non-equilibrium processes that scientists
have studied in single celled organisms is a loss of what is called
detailed balance. Detailed balance is simply the sense that time is
neither running forwards or backwards. In other words, a process is just
as likely to move from one state in phase space to another as back
again.
Thus,
the trajectories through phase space that exemplify non-equilibria are
those that are distinctly future oriented. They have a memory of past,
and they are irreversible or nearly so. And these are also what life
depends upon.
Life
is able to keep non-equilibrium processes in check however. When it
gets out of control, you get cancer, unconstrained growth and out of
control metabolic properties. It is as if life is trying to ride a bike
down a steep path and cancer is when the bike starts to careen out of
control down the slope. Because an out of control process will lead to
complete disorder eventually, a tangled mess at the bottom where
equilibrium, i.e., death, occurs, life must maintain itself at the brink
between chaos and order, between a fast decent to one equilibrium and a
stand still at another.
Despite
all its vast array, perhaps this definition of life as non-equilibrium
processes that maintain high probability trajectories in phase space
while maintaining order for a long time will provide, if not a
definition, at least a measure of how alive something is. Certainly
passing on genetic encoding might be included for it is another measure
of persistence.
Such
an achievement might also have applications. It could provide us
insight into how to build technology that is more “alive” and thus able
to repair itself and stop from degrading in hostile environments. This
could be useful for biotechnology including medical implants. It could
also have applications for space based technologies, especially those
that are designed to visit distant planets and act autonomously in
unknown environments. The future may not be one of steel and glass and
obviously artificial machines but one where biology meets technology and
technology borrows the best of what it means to be alive in order to
sustain itself. What a fascinating world that would be.
gov.uk | The ability to enhance one’s physical, psychological or social capability has been a source of power throughout history, and warfare is the epitome of this dynamic. The paradox of war is that humans are central to its conduct but are also the weakest link. We want ‘war fighters’ – whether they be cyber specialists, drone pilots or infantry soldiers – to be stronger, faster, more intelligent, more resilient and more mobile to overcome the environment and the adversary. We have designed increasingly complex technologies to enhance lethality, survivability and mobility. As technology has become more sophisticated our thinking has become more focused on the machine rather than the person, but this needs to change if we are going to be effective in the future.
Recent advances in the life sciences and related technologies have led to the emergence of the interdisciplinary field known as human augmentation which has the potential to disrupt every aspect of our lives. The interdependencies and potential implications of human augmentation are so vast and complex that it is difficult to make sense of what it means for the future of society and Defence. The aim of this strategic implications project is to take the first step in making sense of these potential changes to human capabilities. It offers a conceptual model for thinking about human augmentation, its future direction and identifies key implications for Defence and its stakeholders.
Human augmentation will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behaviour and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines. Future wars will be won, not by those with the most advanced technology, but by those who can most effectively integrate the unique capabilities of both people and machines. The importance of human-machine teaming is widely acknowledged but it has been viewed from a techno-centric perspective. Human augmentation is the missing part of this puzzle.
Thinking of the person as a platform and understanding our people at an individual level is fundamental to successful human augmentation. Industrial Age warfare saw people as interchangeable components of military units or the material with which to operate the platforms – vehicles, aircraft and ships. These platforms are routinely monitored and analysed but it is remarkable that our ability to understand our most critical capability – the human – is so under-researched. Successful application of human augmentation demands a more sophisticated approach to understanding our people and their capabilities. Defining the key elements of the ‘human platform’ – physical, psychological and social – provides a conceptual baseline to enable a multidisciplinary conversation.
Physical performance is the capability to affect the physical environment and move within it. Strength, dexterity, speed and endurance are key components and there is often a trade-off between them.
Psychological performance comprises cognition, emotion and motivation. Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses. It includes processes such as attention, the formation of knowledge, long-term and working memory, reasoning, problem solving and decision-making. Emotion describes the subjective human experience and is closely linked with motivation, which is the force that energises, activates and directs behaviour.
Social performance is the ability to perceive oneself as part of a group and the readiness to act as part of the team. It is founded on self-awareness and the ability to understand the behaviour of others. It is tightly linked to communication skills, collaboration and trust. The core tenet of social performance is group cohesion.
Human augmentation is not a shortcut – getting the basics of human physiology, biochemistry and psychology right is a prerequisite to human augmentation and will become more important in the future. Research into human augmentation has shone a stark light on how little we know about how to do the basics well. We need to do more to understand the precise effects of nutrition, sleep and hydration, and their relationship with other areas of the body to realise significant, yet untapped potential. Technology that improves monitoring will make it possible to individually optimise sleep, nutrition and other factors to deliver transformational gains across an organisation at relatively low cost and limited ethical risk.
Human augmentation is not just tomorrow’s business, there are short-term and long-term opportunities that require engagement today. The following matrix illustrates the technical maturity and the magnitude of policy considerations of human augmentation technologies. It shows that there are technologies that could be integrated today with manageable policy considerations. The most transformative technologies (for example, genetics and brain interfaces) currently sit at a low level of technological maturity but we must be prepared for this to change quickly. Bioinformatics and collection and analytics (encompassing sensors, artificial intelligence-enabled processing) are particularly important enablers for other human augmentation technologies and warrant focused research and development attention.
nature | By the late 2000s, several big pharmaceutical companies were entering
the mRNA field. In 2008, for example, both Novartis and Shire
established mRNA research units — the former (led by Geall) focused on
vaccines, the latter (led by Heartlein) on therapeutics. BioNTech
launched that year, and other start-ups soon entered the fray, bolstered
by a 2012 decision by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency
to start funding industry researchers to study RNA vaccines and drugs.
Moderna was one of the companies that built on this work and, by 2015, it had raised more than $1 billion on
the promise of harnessing mRNA to induce cells in the body to make
their own medicines — thereby fixing diseases caused by missing or
defective proteins. When that plan faltered, Moderna, led by chief
executive Stéphane Bancel, chose to prioritize a less ambitious target:
making vaccines.
That initially disappointed many investors and onlookers, because a
vaccine platform seemed to be less transformative and lucrative. By the
beginning of 2020, Moderna had advanced nine mRNA vaccine candidates for
infectious diseases into people for testing. None was a slam-dunk
success. Just one had progressed to a larger-phase trial.
But when COVID-19 struck, Moderna was quick off the mark, creating a prototype vaccine within days of the virus’s genome sequence becoming available online.
The company then collaborated with the US National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to conduct mouse studies and launch
human trials, all within less than ten weeks.
BioNTech, too, took
an all-hands-on-deck approach. In March 2020, it partnered with New
York-based drug company Pfizer, and clinical trials then moved at a
record pace, going from first-in-human testing to emergency approval in
less than eight months.
Both authorized vaccines use modified mRNA
formulated in LNPs. Both also contain sequences that encode a form of
the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that adopts a shape more amenable to
inducing protective immunity. Many experts say that the protein tweak,
devised by NIAID vaccinologist Barney Graham and structural biologists
Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin and Andrew Ward at
Scripps, is also a prize-worthy contribution, albeit one that is
specific to coronavirus vaccines, not mRNA vaccination as a general
platform.
Some of the furore in discussions of credit for mRNA discoveries
relates to who holds lucrative patents. But much of the foundational
intellectual property dates back to claims made in 1989 by Felgner,
Malone and their colleagues at Vical (and in 1990 by Liljeström). These
had only a 17-year term from the date of issue and so are now in the
public domain.
Even the Karikó–Weissman patents, licensed to
Cellscript and filed in 2006, will expire in the next five years.
Industry insiders say this means that it will soon become very hard to
patent broad claims about delivering mRNAs in lipid nanoparticles,
although companies can reasonably patent particular sequences of mRNA — a
form of the spike protein, say — or proprietary lipid formulations.
Firms
are trying. Moderna, the dominant player in the mRNA vaccine field,
which has experimental shots in clinical testing for influenza,
cytomegalovirus and a range of other infectious diseases, got two patents last year covering the broad use of mRNA to produce secreted proteins. But multiple industry insiders told Nature they think these could be challengeable.
“We don’t feel there’s a lot that is patentable, and certainly not
enforceable,” says Eric Marcusson, chief scientific officer of
Providence Therapeutics, an mRNA vaccines company in Calgary, Canada.
The
plan isn't to re-create true woolly mammoths, but rather to bring their
cold-adapted genetic traits, which include small ears and more body
fat, to their elephant cousins, creating a hybrid that can wander the
tundra where mammoths haven't been seen for 10,000 years. Colossal's
co-founders are Chief Executive Ben Lamm, who started five companies before this, and George Church, a Harvard Medical School professor with deep CRISPR expertise.
"Our
true North Star is a successful restoration of the woolly mammoth, but
also its successful rewilding into interbreeding herds in the Arctic,"
Lamm said. "We're now focusing on having our first calves in the next
four to six years."
It's an interesting illustration of an imperative sweeping the tech
world: Don't just make money, help the planet, too. Tesla's mission is
to electrify transport to get rid of fossil fuels that hurt Earth. Bolt Threads
wants to replace leather with a fungal fiber-based equivalent that's
easier on the environment than animal agriculture. Colossal hopes its
work will draw attention to biodiversity problems and ultimately help
fix them.
Colossal has raised $15 million so far, led by investment firm Tulco.
The startup's 19 employees work at its Dallas headquarters and in
offices in Boston and Austin, Texas, and it's using its funds to hire
more.
Artificial wombs and other technology spinoffs
Church said he expects spinoffs from the company's biotechnology and genetics work.
"The
pipeline of large scale genome engineering techniques can be applied to
many other applications beyond de-extinction, and therefore [are] most
promising for commercialization," he said.
One technology ripe for commercialization is multiplex genome engineering, a technique Church helped develop that speeds genetic editing by making multiple changes to DNA at once.
Colossal
also hopes to develop artificial wombs to grow its mammoth embryos.
Just growing 10 woolly mammoths with surrogate elephant mothers isn't
enough to get to the large-scale herds the company envisions.
At
the foundation of Colossal's work is CRISPR. This technology, adapted
from a method bacteria evolved to identify attacking viruses and chop up
their DNA, is now a mainstay of genetic engineering, and Church has
been involved since CRISPR's earliest days.
There are other ways
Colossal hopes to help. Its gene editing technology could artificially
add genetic diversity to species with only small surviving populations,
Lamm said.
theorganicprepper |The most frustrating thing to me, the past year and a half, has been the constantly changing narrative
and the dismissal of formerly well-understood scientific truths.
Natural immunity is one of those concepts from freshman biology that
many seem to completely disregard these days.
I think this is a natural effect
of the “cult of expertise” we have in the United States. Seemingly,
anyone with specific credentials is automatically deferred to,
regardless of how competent they are… or more insidiously, where their
financial interests lie.
I’ve gotten into some discussions
with medical professionals about whether people who have recovered from
the disease need to be vaccinated. These conversations would have been
seen as utterly ridiculous three years ago. However, now, it seems, we
all need to relearn freshman biology. So I’d like to review the concept
of natural immunity to help organize my thoughts and maybe help others
that feel like their heads are in a whirl.
I’ve got my old college biology textbook-Life: The Science of Biology,
by Purves, Sadava, Orians, and Heller. I’ve got the sixth edition,
published in 2001, so it’s about 20 years old. I also have a newer
college biology textbook because I’m a big nerd. It’s Campbell Biology,
by Reece, Urry, Cain, Wasserman, Minorsky, and Jackson, published in
2014. Both textbooks detail how our immune systems work, and both say
pretty much the same thing.
Our bodies have two major ways of defending against disease.
Our innate defenses are things like our skin and mucus. We’re
born with these, and they make it difficult for various pathogens such
as bacteria, viruses, and multicellular parasites to enter our bodies.
Our bodies also have an immune system that recognizes and attacks any
infectious agents that make it past our innate defenses.
Our immune system is really
sophisticated, and in healthy individuals, it works pretty well. Suppose
some kind of pathogen makes it past the body’s innate defenses and
begins infecting cells within the host. In that case, the host’s body
will, in turn, start producing antibodies that will specifically attack
the invading pathogen. The host body will continue producing antibodies
until either the host dies or the invading cells die, and the patient’s
body can return to normal.
The best part is, even after the
active infection is over, the host’s body will retain the memory of the
antibodies it produced during the infection. So if the formerly infected
person reencounters the pathogen, the body will immediately have the
antibodies to kill the pathogen. They rarely get sick gain, and if they
do, it’s generally very mild.
Even the incredibly pro-vaccine Wall Street Journal had an article on this recently.
Usually, the WSJ leaves their articles up on the Opinion Page for about a week. However, within twenty-four hours, WSJ buried this article on natural immunity. Jeff had a great article about alternative media just the other day. This definitely feeds into his narrative about how much good info is getting buried right now.
Anyway, the WSJ article discusses mucosal immunity vs. internal immunity.
The author (a neurologist) states that while vaccines stimulate
internal immunity, they do nothing to address mucosal immunity. The
viruses don’t penetrate the host’s organs, which is why most vaccinated
people don’t get really sick. But, the viruses still live and reproduce
in mucus-lined mouths and nasal passages. That is why vaccinated people
with no symptoms are still spreading Covid like crazy. However, those of
us that have recovered have both mucosal and internal immunity.
In case you needed further proof of the efficacy of natural immunity.
An Israeli study showed recently
that vaccinated people were 13 times as likely to become infected and
27 times as likely to have symptomatic infections as people with natural
immunity.
Alex Berenson posted this information on Twitter on August 25, and the platform permanently banned him on August 28. However, medical professionals are starting to make noise about it, such as Martin Kulldorff, a Harvard epidemiologist. Hopefully, more people begin to listen.
nature | Antibodies that turn against elements of our own immune defences are a
key driver of severe illness and death following SARS-CoV-2 infection
in some people, according to a large international study. These rogue
antibodies, known as autoantibodies, are also present in a small
proportion of healthy, uninfected individuals — and their prevalence
increases with age, which may help to explain why elderly people are at
higher risk of severe COVID-19.
The findings, published on 19 August in Science Immunology1,
provide robust evidence to support an observation made by the same
research team last October. Led by immunologist Jean-Laurent Casanova at
the Rockefeller University in New York City, the researchers found that
around 10% of people with severe COVID-19 had autoantibodies that
attack and block type 1 interferons, protein molecules in the blood that
have a critical role in fighting off viral infections2.
“The
initial report from last year was probably one of the most important
papers in the pandemic,” says Aaron Ring, an immunologist at the Yale
School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, who was not involved in
this work. “What they’ve done in this new study is really dig down to
see just how common these antibodies are across the general population —
and it turns out they’re astonishingly prevalent.”
The international research team focused on detecting autoantibodies
that could neutralize lower, more physiologically relevant
concentrations of interferons. They studied 3,595 patients from 38
countries with critical COVID-19, meaning that the individuals were ill
enough to be admitted to an intensive-care unit. Overall, 13.6% of these
patients possessed autoantibodies, with the proportion ranging from
9.6% of those below the age of 40, up to 21% of those over 80.
Autoantibodies were also present in 18% of people who had died of the
disease.
Casanova and his colleagues suspected that these devious
antibodies were a cause, rather than a consequence, of critical
COVID-19. There were hints that this might be the case — the group had
previously found that autoantibodies were present in around 4 in 1,000
healthy people whose samples had been collected before the pandemic2.
The team also found that individuals with genetic mutations that
disrupt the activity of type 1 interferons are at higher risk of
life-threatening disease3,4.
To
examine this link further, the researchers hunted for autoantibodies in
a massive collection of blood samples taken from almost 35,000 healthy
people before the pandemic. They found that 0.18% of those between 18
and 69 had existing autoantibodies against type 1 interferon, and that
this proportion increased with age: autoantibodies were present in
around 1.1% of 70- to 79-year-olds, and 3.4% of those over the age of
80.
“There is a massive increase in prevalence” with age, Casanova
says. “This largely explains the high risk of severe COVID in people in
the elderly population.” He adds that these findings have clear
clinical implications, and suggests that hospitals should be checking
patients for these autoantibodies, as well as mutations implicated in
blocking type 1 interferons. This could identify people who are more
likely to become critically ill from COVID-19, helping physicians to
tailor their treatment appropriately.
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for pro...
Return of the Magi
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Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
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Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...
