Scientists Sequence Black Death Bacteria 265
First time accepted submitter Quince alPillan writes "The bacteria behind the Black Death has a very unusual history. Its ancestor is an unassuming soil bacterium and the current strains of Yersinia pestis still infects thousands of people annually, but no longer causes the suite of horrifying symptoms associated with the medieval plagues. The radical differences, in fact, had led some to suggest that we had been blaming the wrong bacteria. Now, researchers have obtained DNA from some of London's plague victims, and confirmed that Y. pestis appears to be to blame. But the sequences also suggest that the strains of bacteria we see today may be different from the ones that rampaged through Europe."
I have to do it (Score:2, Funny)
The Black Death isn't coming back (Score:5, Informative)
the Black Death was ugly. Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
But, that said, people really should take a more reasoned approach to disease alarmism these days. All this "This latest pandemic is going to kill us ALL!!" Chicken Little shit gets tiresome. The Littles always cite the Black Death and 1918 pandemic [wikipedia.org] as if that's what we could expect from a pandemic today--all without noting the MASSIVE improvements in sanitation, medical science, vaccine research, etc. that make this scale of pandemic highly unlikely in the modern era.
The Black Death could have been stopped in its tracks if those 14th-century peasants had even an inkling of the basic medical/sanitation knowledge that even the biggest idiots among us know today. Basic stuff like "Wash your hands regularly," "Cover your mouth when you cough," and "Don't let your goddamned flea-infested farm animals wander around through your living area, moron" are surprisingly recent bits of common sense that the developed world today takes for granted. Of course, there are still some third-world shitholes where people think that a witch-doctor rubbing feces on an open wound will ward off the evil spirits. But even those places usually have a FEW among them with some basic sense (and soap).
Re:The Black Death isn't coming back (Score:5, Informative)
There is a legitimate point to considering the technological ability to both communicate more rapidly about a highly infectious disease and approach a new and lethal strain with modern decontamination and medical systems. That doesn't rule out the possibility of certain very specialized and nasty toxins such as Bacillus anthracis and other hybrid biological weapons. The real danger is in a strain of bacteria that can infect a host, cause relatively mild and temporary symptoms, then reinfect and spread after a period of time leading to a lethal toxicity in the effected patient and the people they have probably come into contact with. Obviously, the really virulent diseases like Ebola Zaire are so nasty that they burn themselves out fairly rapidly because the infected population dies before they can spread the virus. As our knowledge of DNA sequencing and protein structures increases though, we start to arrive at a set of tools that could lead to truly frightening weapons and bacterial/viral hybrids. Diseases that can switch on and off based on environmental triggers. Or how about a bacteria that multiplies rapidly and uncontrollably under a certain PSI of air pressure in one's lungs?
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The real danger is in a strain of bacteria that can infect a host, cause relatively mild and temporary symptoms, then reinfect and spread after a period of time leading to a lethal toxicity in the effected patient and the people they have probably come into contact with.
You then went on to talk about Ebola, which is a virus - so fair game: The REAL danger is a virus that infects people and shows virtually no symptoms for many years, and then kills them. Oh wait, we already have one, it's called HIV. Do you have HIV? No? How do you know? When was your last series of tests? Better yet, there is no cure, only treatment. Which means you can go on and potentially infect people for the rest of your life-span provided you can afford the treatment. This way you get a mortal diseas
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The transmission method of HIV is also pretty well known, so assuming that you have an ounce of common sense in your head, it's not terribly difficult to remain at least somewhat protected from the disease. No unprotected sex outside of monogamous relationships, hospitals screen blood before performing transfusions, use rubber gloves when potentially coming into contact with bodily fluids, etc. It's not 100% safe (what is?) but it's a far, far cry from your hysteria-inducing "It's only a matte
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Or large amounts of money injected strait into your blood.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonsil_Trouble [wikipedia.org]
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We have had some victories over disease -- the "swine flue" for example was slated to be a pandemic on the order of SARS. However, through quick action, it had less of an effect than the generic flu does each year.
However, we are losing the front in other ways. Take bedbugs for example. After WWII and DDT, they pretty much were removed from our existence until 2-3 years ago. Now they are back with a vengeance, and there are no real effective bedbug treatments. Of course, there is the good old flu which
Re:The Black Death isn't coming back (Score:4, Insightful)
All this "This latest pandemic is going to kill us ALL!!" Chicken Little shit gets tiresome. The Littles always cite the Black Death and 1918 pandemic [wikipedia.org] as if that's what we could expect from a pandemic today--all without noting the MASSIVE improvements in sanitation, medical science, vaccine research, etc. that make this scale of pandemic highly unlikely in the modern era.
I don't think I read the same summary and article as you did.
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Thats because he a) didn't read it and b) doesn't know what he's talking about.
Both points are obvious to those who a) did and b) do.
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Re:The Black Death isn't coming back (Score:4, Funny)
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I think I saw that on an episode of CSI:Miami!
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Shhhhhhhh! People will be on to where Nescafe comes from.
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Come to think of it, I could really go for a cup of Joe.
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*cocking lever action carbine* C'mon she-bitch, let's go!
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All this "This latest pandemic is going to kill us ALL!!" Chicken Little shit gets tiresome.
Yeah, but your favorite news anchor coming on saying, "a few people got sick on the other side of the world and there is absolutely nothing for you to worry about and it is nonsense we are even covering this story anyway" does not translate into a full news program for people to stay glued to and soak up all of those advertising minutes and associated dollars back to the network.
News is about advertising and profit, not news.
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Re:The Black Death isn't coming back (Score:5, Funny)
the Black Death was ugly. Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
But imagine the morning commute. Or finding a parking spot at the mall. Getting a last minute table at your favorite restaurant.
Just saying.
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But imagine the morning commute.
Actually, many historians argue that the Black Death did actually help a lot of former serfs and peasants finally own land and actually advance themselves quite well in the aftermath.
On second thought, everyone stop washing their hands.
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Image if the virus only preyed on people with an IQ less than 100. Or religious nutjobs? Or {insert group here}?
... Slashdot users who don't read the articles?
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I started reading your post, and halfway through the first line, I expected to read an annoying article on chiropractic care, and subluxations. Obviously, didn't look at the author, just the text.
I was pleasantly surprised when no such garbage came up.
*ahem*
Anyway, people do panic a bit much these days. As far as hygiene back then goes - people didn't have a good reason, or their culture, the experiences, needed to provide them with the knowledge that such hygienic behavior is important.
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"But don't worry because a vegan diet and Chiropractic can stop these synthetic microorganisms, where big pharmo will fail."
But what happens when the diease spreads to Vega?
The trees aren't coming back (Score:2)
If humanity is to survive, we must pledge to eliminate all carbon dioxide from our atmosphere by 2030
Isn't that going a bit far?
Trees breathe it in, we breathe it out, we aren't going to get rid of ALL of it, nor do we want to.
Or perhaps you were trying to be funny?
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Or perhaps you were trying to be funny?
Ya think!?
Sherlock Holmes is in awe.
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Or perhaps you were trying to be funny?
Ya think!?
Sherlock Holmes is in awe.
Sherlock Holmes doesn't live on the eastern seaboard. If he did, he wouldn't think your jokes are any funnier than I do.
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I wasn't making a joke.
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Hm, guess you got a point. Sarcasm and straw men are indeed on orthogonal axes.
Which me must grind carefully.
Actually, even that doesn't do it justice (Score:2)
Actually even that description doesn't do it justice. Imagine that up to 80% of your town dies, and within weeks at that. Mortality differed from place to place and outbreak to outbreak, but generally, the tighter packed a place was, the bigger the casualties. At the larger scale of villages mortality was lower -- though even there, many villages were COMPLETELY wiped out -- but in cities, getting casualties between 50% and 75% of the total population in an outbreak wasn't unusual.
Oh, and in excruciating pa
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>>see Connie Willis's Hugo and Nebula winning The Doomsday Book
Yeah, it was an absolutely terrifying book, but very well written.
That said, don't read her 2011 Hugo award-winning Blackout/All Clear. Same cast of characters from the Doomsday Book, but they're written like crap.
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Very well said sir. Never a mod point when you need one.
Re:The Black Death isn't coming back (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, there are still some third-world shitholes where people think that a witch-doctor rubbing feces on an open wound will ward off the evil spirits.
I'm not sure where you got that image of how those sorts of shaman/healer types do their jobs. They'll usually go with attempts at herbal treatment that have a chance of working that is slightly better than a placebo, based on learning from previous generations who figured out that rubbing feces on wounds was a good way to cause the patient to get even sicker and die. They tend to pick their herbs for apparent effectiveness, and often have chosen things with the right chemical compound or physiological effects, just not at as high a concentration or as good a delivery system as Western medicines.
Those healers from isolated tribes today, and our cavemen before us, were the brainy folks in their societies, and there's no reason to think they were any stupider than we are. They are just working with very limited tools, and are quite ignorant.
Actually, shit does play a role in traditional med (Score:3)
While there's some truth to that, it is hardly foolproof and the feces thing is actually still true in some cases. Traditional medicine made (and makes) many errors.
"Tetanus of the newborn occurs through contamination of the umbilical stump (and occasionally as a complication of circumcision). Neonatal tetanus is common in some cultures that have practices that encourage infection. Some tribes in the Loralai district of Pakistan practice 'bundling,' in which the lower abdomen of the newborn is smeared wi
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I think you and him are talking about different people.
You're talking about the people who did figure out new methods of healing through the years, whilst ignoring those who did manage to fuck up and kill more people than they helped.
He's talking about the shit crazy "witch doctors" who still exist in places like Africa who claim they can produce cures, but first they need the limb of an albino African...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/nov/16/tanzania-humanrights [guardian.co.uk]
You're both right- you're right about th
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the Black Death was ugly. Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
While the psychological trauma must have been horriffic, in aggregate economic terms Europe actually went through an upswing in the generation after the Black Death, believe it or not. Daily life improved for peasants in particular, who suddenly found their labor in great demand (both because there were fewer of them and there was a sudden surfeit of unclaimed land).
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all without noting the MASSIVE improvements in sanitation, medical science, vaccine research, etc. that make this scale of pandemic highly unlikely in the modern era.
Except you use antibiotics in your animals over in the US.
I read that around half your meat and poultry Staphylococcus aureus [wikipedia.org] which is quite awesome and well protected as is. But what's worse is that half of those was the Methicillin resistant variant [wikipedia.org].
I'm not educated enough for in fast new vaccines can be made for viruses and if they can for all. Considering how far they have come with HIV I guess it's not always that easy.
I read antibiotics had increased our average life span by decades. But what do you d
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Ha. The Black Death seems to have mutated somewhat or humans have become more resistant in the last thousand years or so. It is clearly much less of a threat than it was in 1350.
However, today we have far less isolation than we did in 1350. It was possible for a community to simply close itself off from the world for a period of time. It was also possible that in some parts of Europe there just weren't any infected visitors coming to call. Not so today.
I recently read a book where there were three outb
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However, today we have far less isolation than we did in 1350. It was possible for a community to simply close itself off from the world for a period of time.
They didn't do a very good job of it. It's estimated that 30-60% of Europe's population was killed.
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I agree, it's only a matter of time before something horrific pops up and gives the modern world something comparable to the Black Death.
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The Black Death could have been stopped in its tracks if those 14th-century peasants had even an inkling of the basic medical/sanitation knowledge that even the biggest idiots among us know today. Basic stuff like "Wash your hands regularly," "Cover your mouth when you cough," and "Don't let your goddamned flea-infested farm animals wander around through your living area, moron" are surprisingly recent bits of common sense that the developed world today takes for granted. Of course, there are still some third-world shitholes where people think that a witch-doctor rubbing feces on an open wound will ward off the evil spirits. But even those places usually have a FEW among them with some basic sense (and soap).
Unfortunately for the peasants and the third-worlders, there are some huge technological prereqisites:
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There are five to six billion people living in parts of the world without the kind of care you are talking about.
And, we have jets.
The reality is, a disease that rapidly kills and spreads easily (like Black Death) could easily wipe out hundreds of millions of people today. BD killed so quickly that infections were self-limiting. Now, it can spread far further than your local village before people even start showing symptoms.
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Imagine half the population of your entire city or town dying off in 1 or 2 years. Nasty business that.
Wouldn't that depend on where you live and if you care about the people? Try, "Imagine half the population of your entire congress dying off in 1 or 2 years". I'll bet you get more than a few cheers.
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The black death as it exists isn't coming back. That won't stop a new strain from popping up due to antibiotic use(including Triclosan and cousins) from dooming us all. And yes, triclosan and other products will doom us all unless you fuckwits stop using it. I've posted the studies before, you can use google on your own time and read the papers showing that products like it, push bacteria to develop a natural immunity to antibiotics.
Though in the black death thing, you're pretty much fucked unless you're
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However.... while they say familiarity breeds contempt, I think it is hardly the case. Familiarity breeds acceptance.
If your city has been ravaged by plague before, maybe you have seen it...maybe your parents just told you the horrors of when it last happened. We got "ring around the rosies" from it... if it seems common, people come to accept it.
It has been noted, for example, that the drop in child mortality rates seems to have also sensitized people to it. Now, if your child dies early and sudden, you ma
Sounds like a Witch to me! (Score:2)
Burn her!
Stupid Peasants! (Score:2)
I know I watched a show that basically was saying that the environment we lived in was so bad back then, that it was the big difference, particularly the water.
In London, everyone just tossed their garbage, piss, and shit in the street, that combined with all the industrial runoff, and animal waste to fester in the river. The river that everyone drank from.
Some study was done with numbers collected from the time, showing that certain areas had far less victims. It was suggested that these areas, which all s
Fun with sigs... (Score:2)
The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist -- Verbal Kint
The greatest trick a god ever pulled was convincing the world that he did exist. -- Tsingi. (aka, the devil)
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I've always wondered about that quote, too. The only people who believe in the Christian version of the devil also believe in the Christian version of God. I find it very hard to believe that there are a lot of Christian-God believers who simultaneously don't believe in the Christian devil. Thus, the devil is not very successful at making Christians believe he doesn't exist, and non-Christians don't get into heaven anyway.
Of course, in this case the quote comes from a stupid movie, so that should be my answ
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Of course, in this case the quote comes from a stupid movie.
Sure, it's a stupid quote, but it's a great movie.
You take that back or Keyser Soze might just appear at your door. THEN you'll be sorry.
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Verbel Kint was just messing with you. Considering the movie's twist ending, it's "in character."
I find it very hard to believe that there are a lot of Christian-God believers who simultaneously don't believe in the Christian devil.
No one said that belief was always going to be easy. Perhaps your faith in the Christian concept of the "Church Universal" is being tested.
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Perhaps your faith in the Christian concept of the "Church Universal" is being tested.
Ahhh, touche!
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Well, the "Christian" devil is a very thin concept, theologically speaking. Quite a lot of the more liberal denominations don't take it that serious - it is, after all, quite illogical, going from the almighty, all-knowing, all-good God premise. An "adversary" doesn't quite fit into that. Then again, not much does, but hell... Anyway, the more liberal theologists take it more allegorical, together with the fall, as a metaphor for the quite observable general fucked-upness of human nature.
The "non-Christians
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Quite a lot of the more liberal denominations don't take it that serious
Ah, so those are the ones that the devil defeated :)
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Hmmm, well let's just say that there seems to be diversity in this opinion. I was told by a minister that I couldn't enter heaven unless I was baptized, but your mileage may vary.
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Wrong. Christians believe that salvation/eternal life/entrance into God's Kingdom/heaven comes through faith in Jesus Christ alone (that's why the word "Christ" is right in "Christian"). Faith that He died for our sins and was resurrected and is Himself God, and that we are set right with God through our acceptance of Christ's sacrifice on our behalf. That is the sole prerequisite.
God does decide who will have faith, but there is debate about that point within Christianity (Calvinism vs. Arminianism)
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"Christians believe that God decides"
Well, yes. But Christians also believe that God made His rules quite clear and that He is not a cheater so as long as you abide to His rules, you are in the safe side.
"there is no absolute prerequisite according to the bible."
There is: you are not baptised, you don't go into Heaven. You die in mortal sin, you don't go into Heaven. You renounce or apostatize of the true faith, you don't go into Heaven.
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"Personally I believe the same, but a lot of "hardcore" Christians like to think that they're the only ones who will get in."
My bet is that there no such a thing as "hardcore Christians" but just Christians and those that pose as one without being so.
After all, it is God Himself the one that stablished the whole lot, both what a mere human thinks important and what he thinks it isn't, so it is not the human being the one in the position to say "this I'll abide to, this I won't" and still expect a good end f
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The greatest trick the devil pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist -- Verbal Kint
The greatest trick a god ever pulled was convincing the world that he did exist. -- Tsingi. (aka, the devil)
God pulling tricks, that puts an odd image in my mind.
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God pulling tricks, that puts an odd image in my mind.
He punked Job pretty good. But then, he would probably say the devil made him do it.
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Fixed it for you. (Score:2)
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Just as a point of interest, we STILL haven't stopped the Black Death. Sure we know how to treat it and how it spreads to help slow it, but there are still cases in New Mexico every year. And that's the US - Not where the Plague was really partying. It's a tough little bug and probably worth studying even if it isn't the huge threat it once was.
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Here's the first hit off google talking about the first human case this year in Santa Fe. A week in the hospital - Could be worse.
http://healthland.time.com/2011/05/10/first-case-of-bubonic-plague-in-2011-appears-in-new-mexico/ [time.com]
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Bubonicon 43 [bubonicon.com] just wrapped up here in Abq.
Land of the Flea; Home of the Plague.
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It's not even that easy (Score:2)
It's not even that easy. The bug was not carried by dung or flies, but by fleas and rats. Even if you had a modern sewage system, rats were and still are not extinct. In fact, their populations seems to have grown with the human population.
What seems to have finally killed the plague in Europe was that the vulnerable and once dominant species of rat was also handicapped enough by it to be replaced with a better rat. (Yeah, sometimes nature makes a better mouse trap, and then makes a better mouse to defeat i
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Would not have been as easy as you say - the livestock had to be in the towns and cities for the simple reason that refrigeration wasn't around, so any meat that wasn't riddled with worms, flies and mold had to be from fresh kills.
Drying, salting, and smoking have been around for millennia, and were well understood during the Middle Ages. Refrigeration is not the only way to safely store food.
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I've heard that one possible reason why the incidence of asthma has soared in the developing world is because children no longer play so much in dirt and get exposed to the bacteria there. Then, their immune systems become hyperactive.
Hmmm. I donno about that. Went thru quite a bit of contaminant analysis when my son had "an allergy" but we couldn't figure out what. (turned out to be wheat, verified via blood test; why they couldn't run the blood test first before analyzing our environment mystifies me) Look at what spews out of a smokestack, or a decrepit diesel bus exhaust, or the literal stench of curing plastic inside a new particle board kitchen, then get back to me on the environment being too clean. The air inside an average
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Venter didn't create life from scratch. His team rebuilt a bacterial genome out of pre-existing parts and threw them into a pre-existing chassis. To provide out an ever-faithful computer analogy, he basically installed Gentoo on some Mycoplasma genitalium. It wasn't that exciting, just more laborious.
Which brings me to the second point: that much DNA synthesis and construct assembly is absurdly expensive. Even to transfer the dangerous parts into another bacterium via a plasmid vector would be unwieldly lab
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Thanks, I'm not a biologist. Probably read too much science fiction though!
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To provide out an ever-faithful computer analogy, he basically installed Gentoo on some Mycoplasma genitalium. It wasn't that exciting
I dunno, even *that* doesn't sound particularly exciting given that someone already managed to
install VuDu Linux on a dead badger [strangehorizons.com] several years ago.
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Craig Venter did NOT "create life from scratch", he put a modified Mycoplasma genitalium genome into a mycoplasma. His team "stripped down" the genome to find a minimal set that would support life, then added some "nonsense" like encoded people's names and a web site address. Then they sythesized that sequence and injected it. To put it another way, just bec
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I'm sorry, it's hypochondria.
There's no known cure, and most patients diagnosed with hypochondria have only about ten to twenty thousand days left to live.
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Keep up the good work. And remember, photosynthesis is overrated.
Painfully obvious? (Score:2)
"...But the sequences also suggest that the strains of bacteria we see today may be different from the ones that rampaged through Europe."
Uh, "may" be different? Is there anyone in academia even remotely questioning this? Bacteria replicate in a matter of hours. How many generations of bacteria have turned over(read mutated) in the last few hundred years? This should not come as a surprise to anyone really.
Not necessarily (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, the actual question is: exactly how different. Yes, it's clear that some mutations are inevitable, but unless there's some clear evolutionary pressure, you may still find a bacterium that works by and large just like its ancestors.
Now it may seem that for a parasitic bacterium, not killing its host would be an advantage. And indeed in some other bacteria we can see a sort of a survival-of-the-sickest kind of selection.
But this is a soil bacterium. If it ends up in some host and kills it, worst that can happen is that it ends up back in the soil. It has nothing to lose by killing its host, and in fact everything to gain, since once the host is dead there's no more immune system killing the bacteria.
This kind of bacteria that have nothing to lose by killing the host are the most deadly and dangerous. Not just this, but see for example cholera too. That's a bacterium that not only has nothing to gain by peacefully staying inside you and not killing you, but is actually trying to get out of your body ASAP. Whether you live or die in the process, meh, it makes no difference for that one.
Additionally, for Y Pestis, the capability of clotting blood and forming colonies that plug blood vessels actually helped it spread too. The same mechanism makes it plug the stomach of fleas. The flea then will literally starve to death no matter how much blood it sucks, and driven by hunger, will go infect another host too.
So we have a bacterium for which the plasmid that kills its host:
1. isn't detrimental to the bacterium, since it can live just as well in a dead host or in soil, and
2. is actually beneficial to the bacterium, since it makes fleas spread it around.
That's one tough combo to evolve out of. There is no real survival benefit in losing those genes.
So while, yes, you would expect that bacteria can and will mutate in time, but it's not clear at all why this one would change in exactly that aspect.
Yet something seems to have changed. What and why? Those are the questions.
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Doomsday Book (Score:2)
odd coincidence (Score:2)
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welcome to the nation's capital?
Just for fun (Score:2)
This latest bit of research may have disproved the theory but it's still a fun song, and how often do you get to hear someone singing about epidemiology?
Little Ice Age disease susceptibility (Score:2)
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