14 ms·

The Insanity Virus

170 points by leonardodw 16y ago

die_sekte 16y ago
Wow. It's remarkable how failure-tolerant the human body is. I guess that this is truly a sign of 'the future'. Forget hoverboards, we're one step closer to being able to reshape ourselves, one step closer to fixing diseases at the source.
adammichaelc 16y ago
I wonder what would happen to creativity and innovation if you got rid of schizophrenia and bipolar by killing this virus as it attacks an infant. Two of the people mentioned, John Nash and Jack Kerouac, were brilliant I think in part because of their illness. I don't know the answer to the question, but it's an interesting thing to consider.
- hugh3 16y ago
  I don't know much about Kerouac, but from reading his biography I don't get the impression that Nash was brilliant because of his illness. He was brilliant in spite of his illness, or more accurately I think he was brilliant before his illness really started hitting him and he was never really the same again afterwards. Schizophrenia has destroyed a lot of promising young minds, and I'm not convinced that it has created any.
  - adammichaelc 16y ago
    That doesn't sound right. From what I've read, people with mental illness and those who are highly creative may get the trait (creativity on the one hand and mental illness on the other) from the same source.[1] From a study on the subject: Daniel Nettle, a psychologist at Newcastle University, and Helen Clegg, at the Open University in Milton Keynes, carried out the survey. On analysing 425 responses, the psychologists found that artists and schizophrenics scored equally high on unusual cognition, a trait which gives rise to a greater tendency to feel in between reality and a dream state, or to feel overwhelmed by one’s own thoughts. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/30/psychology.highereducation http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/30/psychology.hig...
    - hugh3 16y ago
      the psychologists found that artists and schizophrenics scored equally high on unusual cognition, a trait which gives rise to a greater tendency to feel in between reality and a dream state, or to feel overwhelmed by one’s own thoughts. I don't think it follows. Just because both schizophrenia and artistic temperament are characterised by "unusual cognition" doesn't mean that they're related. Being drunk is like being a lemur in that they both prohibit you from driving a car, but it doesn't follow that drunkenness and lemurness are related.
      - yters 16y ago
        Right, you can respond that way to pretty much any correlation. But, if there's a plausible explanation for an actual connection, such a dismissal is too trite.
- jerf 16y ago
  That's another way of expressing a desire for people to go insane when medicine could have cured them because you have enjoyed the output of the insanity. I realize you may not have thought about it that way, but I hope that once you do you realize that that is an awfully impolite thing to ask of others. We've got enough brilliance around that doesn't destroy the hosts after shredding the best years of their lives to keep you satisfied, I think.
AnthonBerg 16y ago
I have the feeling that these things we never can pin down the cause for - like schizophrenia, MS, and psoriasis - I don't think they are caused by any one thing. Perhaps we have been fooled by the almost one-to-one mapping of reason-to-illness that we have seen so far. Schizophrenia, MS, and also psoriasis, are complex systems that manifest from accumlated weaknesses in incredibly complex systems.
- devinj 16y ago
  Schizophrenia is, to my understanding, sort of a catch-all phrase for several different problems with similar symptoms but different effective treatments. Even in the study, they found only 49% of people with schizophrenia were infected.
  - Groxx 16y ago
    There are a depressing number of such umbrella-terms. The (likely) grand-daddy of them all being "chronic fatigue", which you'll almost certainly get applied to you if you have an undiagnosed cause of "fatigue" for more than 6 months. The depressing part is that such umbrella terms prevent study of the causes, because they likely come from many sources, and muddle any research.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    That's why that 49% figure is so exciting. Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind. And not only could there be different diseases that have very similar symptoms but it's possible that a single disease could be reached via a different set of initial/contributing causes, or at least a slightly different causal pathway. For example, take some hypothetical disease that is found to be "caused by" a lack of vitamin D. Well, it may be possible that a particular person gets plenty of vitamin D intake, but that they have a gene variant that makes their body not utilize vitamin D normally. Or perhaps their genes are fine, but they have some other gross bodily malfunction (organ failure?) that is causing the vitamin D utilization process to be disrupted or minimized. Regardless of the specific chain of causation, they could all result in the same unhealthy symptoms expressed.
Groxx 16y ago
>Beyond that, the insanity virus (if such it proves) may challenge our basic views of human evolution, blurring the line between “us” and “them,” between pathogen and host. Oh, I think we're already there. Given that there are ~10x more microorganisms in your gut than cells in your body[1], and the more you learn about the lymphatic / immune system the more it seems like a symbiote rather than a part of our body, and that mitochondria share many characteristics of symbiotic bacteria[2]. It's another wrinkle, and a very interesting one at that, but that's far from a revolutionary concept. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Origin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Origin
- die_sekte 16y ago
  Jeff McMahan has some very interesting arguments about what we are. Simply put, he argues that we are not our cells. Our cells, our organisms are simply part of ourselves. Based on that I think that we are entities made out of e.g. our cells, immune systems and the bacteria which our organisms carry. Sure, we can make a distinction between 'us' and 'them'; it's just that 'us' actually includes 'them', and that it's just a distinction made by ourselves because we like simple models and hate the feeling of being not autonomous. Humans like to compartmentalize: we see that all the time especially when dealing which psychiatric diseases.
  - gintas 16y ago
    Indeed, humans like to "compartmentalize"; the problem is that by definition you have to compartmentalize to define concepts. Without that, everybody would be talking horribly vaguely.
  - ugh 16y ago
    I don’t think I’m my cells or the bacteria living in my gut. Well, that’s not entirely true, I clearly perceive the cells in my hand and the bacteria in my gut as part of myself in some way but not the same way as other things. Maybe this question is helpful: What do I care about? Clearly not my cells or microorganisms. I would be more than happy to dispose of my hip joint and replace it with titanium should that ever be necessary. I essentially think the same about every other part of my body. I also don’t care about my DNA at all. If you cloned me after my death I wouldn’t suddenly spring to life, I wouldn’t be reborn as a baby, my clone would be a different person. What do I care about, then? That, which says this sentence in my brain right now as I type it, whatever it is. It’s probably rooted in structures in my brain somewhere. Which doesn’t mean that I care about the cells in my brain, not at all. If there is a way to preserve that structure and run it I would be just fine. That’s what I care about. That, to me, is the most important, probably the only really important part of me. The body matters but only in the sense of being a sort of tool.
defen 16y ago
This article reminds of something Gregory Cochran has been saying for years - "Your genes didn't evolve to kill you". He has a hypothesis that many of the illnesses and chronic conditions that do not have a clear genetic or environmental toxin basis are actually caused by germs - bacteria or viruses. This would include things like heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, some mental illnesses, etc. The problem is that many of these things do not satisfy Koch's postulates for infectious disease, making it very difficult to test. Or the disease progression takes 40+ years. Unfortunately I'm on my phone at the moment so I can't look anything up, else I would post some links.
- run4yourlives 16y ago
  That thesis would assume that we all live in some sort of bubble were the environment we live in and the foods we consume don't impact our bodies... Heart Disease is mainly caused by a lifetime of poor behaviour in this regard, for example.
  - defen 16y ago
    Yep. But as an example, there is currently research looking into the connection between dental hygiene and heart disease. It's all hypothesis at this point, but a lifetime of eating sugary/starchy foods and poor dental hygiene can lead to gums the inflame/bleed easily, which can lead to bacteria more easily getting into your bloodstream, which may contribute to atherosclerosis. http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/features/periodontal-disease-heart-health http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/features/periodontal-dise...
    - carbocation 16y ago
      From that article: "And one study found that the presence of common problems in the mouth, including gum disease (gingivitis), cavities, and missing teeth, were as good at predicting heart disease as cholesterol levels." From the cardiovascular perspective, it's far simpler to conclude that poor vascular perfusion of the mouth can amplify oral disease than it is to postulate an entirely new paradigm upending decades of established research. Vascular disease predisposes you to infections of the limbs; why would we not expect the same in the mouth? If offered the ability to bet on one vs the other, this is the situation where I'd use my assets as collateral so I could put the maximum possible wager on the line in favor of vascular disease being the causal entity here, not periodontal disease.
mkramlich 16y ago
Due to the breakthroughs discussed in the OA, and some other things, I'd bet they'll have a "cure" of some sort for schizophrenia within the next 10 years, tops. Feels like they're hot on the trail. Also cancer and diabetes.
- araneae 16y ago
  I would say much the opposite. Given the fact that schizophrenics seem to have different brain morphology, it seems that whatever causes it has organizational, not activational effects. That is to say, the brain is permanently damaged during a critical period in a child's life, which leads to these effects later on. If it is a virus, perhaps it could be prevented, but almost certainly not cured.
  - jonhendry 16y ago
    Unless neurogenesis can be triggered in such a way that new neurons develop and migrate along the normal routes, once the disruption is removed. Therapy to encourage new synapse development could also help, once any morphology-disrupting factor is removed.
    - araneae 16y ago
      Migration of neurons occurs primarily in utero and very early childhood, and as you might notice, during this time very few memories are formed. That's because memories are built on those very synaptic connection you would need to rewire. Any cure that deals with reorganizing the brain could very well wipe out who they are. If it's even possible. And for that kind of technology we're talking at minimum centuries, not decades.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  don't downvote my comment to zero because you may disagree with me. downvote if i said something rude, offensive or off-topic.
po 16y ago
We lug around 100,000 retro virus sequences inside us; all told, genetic parasites related to viruses account for more than 40 percent of all human DNA. Our body works hard to silence its viral stowaways by tying up those stretches of DNA in tight stacks of proteins, but sometimes they slip out. Now and then endogenous retroviruses switch on and start manufacturing proteins. They assemble themselves like Lego blocks into bulbous retroviral particles, which ooze from the cells producing them. Sounds like technical debt. Anyone up for a refactoring code sprint?
- janzer 16y ago
  http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/ http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/ By Cory Doctorow
  - GFischer 16y ago
    That is one long article/piece of fiction, but I'm enjoying it so far. I guess somewhere it gets to the point you're making :)
- elai 16y ago
  From my childhood experience of computing of deleting things I thought were useless and then finding out soon after I really borked my system, i'd be a bit more careful.
  - eru 16y ago
    That's why we use version control.
- moss 16y ago
  Tempting, but the system's only covered by end-to-end tests that take years to run. I'm afraid to change it!
car 16y ago
The last paragraph says it all: Even after all that, many medical experts still question how much human disease can be traced to viral invasions that took place millions of years ago. If the upcoming human trials work as well as the animal experiments, the questions may be silenced—and so may the voices of schizophrenia.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
I have a very close family member who has suffered from schizophrenia. It is troubling to think that the months of ear infections (or infections that caused said infections) when she was a newborn could have been the trigger. On the flip-side, it is very heartening to think they may be moving closer to understanding the disease. Looking at my family history, I believe there is a strong predilection in my family for it, so having some hope that my children and/or grandchildren could possibly be spared would be fantastic.
lasonrisa 16y ago
A honest question, is Discover magazine usually this good?

170 points by leonardodw 16y ago

Wow. It's remarkable how failure-tolerant the human body is. I guess that this is truly a sign of 'the future'. Forget hoverboards, we're one step closer to being able to reshape ourselves, one step closer to fixing diseases at the source.

adammichaelc 16y ago

I wonder what would happen to creativity and innovation if you got rid of schizophrenia and bipolar by killing this virus as it attacks an infant. Two of the people mentioned, John Nash and Jack Kerouac, were brilliant I think in part because of their illness. I don't know the answer to the question, but it's an interesting thing to consider.

hugh3 16y ago
I don't know much about Kerouac, but from reading his biography I don't get the impression that Nash was brilliant because of his illness. He was brilliant in spite of his illness, or more accurately I think he was brilliant before his illness really started hitting him and he was never really the same again afterwards. Schizophrenia has destroyed a lot of promising young minds, and I'm not convinced that it has created any.
- adammichaelc 16y ago
  That doesn't sound right. From what I've read, people with mental illness and those who are highly creative may get the trait (creativity on the one hand and mental illness on the other) from the same source.[1] From a study on the subject: Daniel Nettle, a psychologist at Newcastle University, and Helen Clegg, at the Open University in Milton Keynes, carried out the survey. On analysing 425 responses, the psychologists found that artists and schizophrenics scored equally high on unusual cognition, a trait which gives rise to a greater tendency to feel in between reality and a dream state, or to feel overwhelmed by one’s own thoughts. [1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/30/psychology.highereducation http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/30/psychology.hig...
  - hugh3 16y ago
    the psychologists found that artists and schizophrenics scored equally high on unusual cognition, a trait which gives rise to a greater tendency to feel in between reality and a dream state, or to feel overwhelmed by one’s own thoughts. I don't think it follows. Just because both schizophrenia and artistic temperament are characterised by "unusual cognition" doesn't mean that they're related. Being drunk is like being a lemur in that they both prohibit you from driving a car, but it doesn't follow that drunkenness and lemurness are related.
    - yters 16y ago
      Right, you can respond that way to pretty much any correlation. But, if there's a plausible explanation for an actual connection, such a dismissal is too trite.
jerf 16y ago
That's another way of expressing a desire for people to go insane when medicine could have cured them because you have enjoyed the output of the insanity. I realize you may not have thought about it that way, but I hope that once you do you realize that that is an awfully impolite thing to ask of others. We've got enough brilliance around that doesn't destroy the hosts after shredding the best years of their lives to keep you satisfied, I think.

AnthonBerg 16y ago

I have the feeling that these things we never can pin down the cause for - like schizophrenia, MS, and psoriasis - I don't think they are caused by any one thing. Perhaps we have been fooled by the almost one-to-one mapping of reason-to-illness that we have seen so far. Schizophrenia, MS, and also psoriasis, are complex systems that manifest from accumlated weaknesses in incredibly complex systems.

devinj 16y ago
Schizophrenia is, to my understanding, sort of a catch-all phrase for several different problems with similar symptoms but different effective treatments. Even in the study, they found only 49% of people with schizophrenia were infected.
- Groxx 16y ago
  There are a depressing number of such umbrella-terms. The (likely) grand-daddy of them all being "chronic fatigue", which you'll almost certainly get applied to you if you have an undiagnosed cause of "fatigue" for more than 6 months. The depressing part is that such umbrella terms prevent study of the causes, because they likely come from many sources, and muddle any research.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  That's why that 49% figure is so exciting. Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind. And not only could there be different diseases that have very similar symptoms but it's possible that a single disease could be reached via a different set of initial/contributing causes, or at least a slightly different causal pathway. For example, take some hypothetical disease that is found to be "caused by" a lack of vitamin D. Well, it may be possible that a particular person gets plenty of vitamin D intake, but that they have a gene variant that makes their body not utilize vitamin D normally. Or perhaps their genes are fine, but they have some other gross bodily malfunction (organ failure?) that is causing the vitamin D utilization process to be disrupted or minimized. Regardless of the specific chain of causation, they could all result in the same unhealthy symptoms expressed.

Groxx 16y ago

>Beyond that, the insanity virus (if such it proves) may challenge our basic views of human evolution, blurring the line between “us” and “them,” between pathogen and host. Oh, I think we're already there. Given that there are ~10x more microorganisms in your gut than cells in your body[1], and the more you learn about the lymphatic / immune system the more it seems like a symbiote rather than a part of our body, and that mitochondria share many characteristics of symbiotic bacteria[2]. It's another wrinkle, and a very interesting one at that, but that's far from a revolutionary concept. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Origin http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Origin

die_sekte 16y ago
Jeff McMahan has some very interesting arguments about what we are. Simply put, he argues that we are not our cells. Our cells, our organisms are simply part of ourselves. Based on that I think that we are entities made out of e.g. our cells, immune systems and the bacteria which our organisms carry. Sure, we can make a distinction between 'us' and 'them'; it's just that 'us' actually includes 'them', and that it's just a distinction made by ourselves because we like simple models and hate the feeling of being not autonomous. Humans like to compartmentalize: we see that all the time especially when dealing which psychiatric diseases.
- gintas 16y ago
  Indeed, humans like to "compartmentalize"; the problem is that by definition you have to compartmentalize to define concepts. Without that, everybody would be talking horribly vaguely.
- ugh 16y ago
  I don’t think I’m my cells or the bacteria living in my gut. Well, that’s not entirely true, I clearly perceive the cells in my hand and the bacteria in my gut as part of myself in some way but not the same way as other things. Maybe this question is helpful: What do I care about? Clearly not my cells or microorganisms. I would be more than happy to dispose of my hip joint and replace it with titanium should that ever be necessary. I essentially think the same about every other part of my body. I also don’t care about my DNA at all. If you cloned me after my death I wouldn’t suddenly spring to life, I wouldn’t be reborn as a baby, my clone would be a different person. What do I care about, then? That, which says this sentence in my brain right now as I type it, whatever it is. It’s probably rooted in structures in my brain somewhere. Which doesn’t mean that I care about the cells in my brain, not at all. If there is a way to preserve that structure and run it I would be just fine. That’s what I care about. That, to me, is the most important, probably the only really important part of me. The body matters but only in the sense of being a sort of tool.

defen 16y ago

This article reminds of something Gregory Cochran has been saying for years - "Your genes didn't evolve to kill you". He has a hypothesis that many of the illnesses and chronic conditions that do not have a clear genetic or environmental toxin basis are actually caused by germs - bacteria or viruses. This would include things like heart disease, diabetes, some cancers, some mental illnesses, etc. The problem is that many of these things do not satisfy Koch's postulates for infectious disease, making it very difficult to test. Or the disease progression takes 40+ years. Unfortunately I'm on my phone at the moment so I can't look anything up, else I would post some links.

run4yourlives 16y ago
That thesis would assume that we all live in some sort of bubble were the environment we live in and the foods we consume don't impact our bodies... Heart Disease is mainly caused by a lifetime of poor behaviour in this regard, for example.
- defen 16y ago
  Yep. But as an example, there is currently research looking into the connection between dental hygiene and heart disease. It's all hypothesis at this point, but a lifetime of eating sugary/starchy foods and poor dental hygiene can lead to gums the inflame/bleed easily, which can lead to bacteria more easily getting into your bloodstream, which may contribute to atherosclerosis. http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/features/periodontal-disease-heart-health http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/features/periodontal-dise...
  - carbocation 16y ago
    From that article: "And one study found that the presence of common problems in the mouth, including gum disease (gingivitis), cavities, and missing teeth, were as good at predicting heart disease as cholesterol levels." From the cardiovascular perspective, it's far simpler to conclude that poor vascular perfusion of the mouth can amplify oral disease than it is to postulate an entirely new paradigm upending decades of established research. Vascular disease predisposes you to infections of the limbs; why would we not expect the same in the mouth? If offered the ability to bet on one vs the other, this is the situation where I'd use my assets as collateral so I could put the maximum possible wager on the line in favor of vascular disease being the causal entity here, not periodontal disease.

mkramlich 16y ago

Due to the breakthroughs discussed in the OA, and some other things, I'd bet they'll have a "cure" of some sort for schizophrenia within the next 10 years, tops. Feels like they're hot on the trail. Also cancer and diabetes.

araneae 16y ago
I would say much the opposite. Given the fact that schizophrenics seem to have different brain morphology, it seems that whatever causes it has organizational, not activational effects. That is to say, the brain is permanently damaged during a critical period in a child's life, which leads to these effects later on. If it is a virus, perhaps it could be prevented, but almost certainly not cured.
- jonhendry 16y ago
  Unless neurogenesis can be triggered in such a way that new neurons develop and migrate along the normal routes, once the disruption is removed. Therapy to encourage new synapse development could also help, once any morphology-disrupting factor is removed.
  - araneae 16y ago
    Migration of neurons occurs primarily in utero and very early childhood, and as you might notice, during this time very few memories are formed. That's because memories are built on those very synaptic connection you would need to rewire. Any cure that deals with reorganizing the brain could very well wipe out who they are. If it's even possible. And for that kind of technology we're talking at minimum centuries, not decades.
mkramlich 16y ago
don't downvote my comment to zero because you may disagree with me. downvote if i said something rude, offensive or off-topic.

po 16y ago

We lug around 100,000 retro virus sequences inside us; all told, genetic parasites related to viruses account for more than 40 percent of all human DNA. Our body works hard to silence its viral stowaways by tying up those stretches of DNA in tight stacks of proteins, but sometimes they slip out. Now and then endogenous retroviruses switch on and start manufacturing proteins. They assemble themselves like Lego blocks into bulbous retroviral particles, which ooze from the cells producing them. Sounds like technical debt. Anyone up for a refactoring code sprint?

janzer 16y ago
http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/ http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/ By Cory Doctorow
- GFischer 16y ago
  That is one long article/piece of fiction, but I'm enjoying it so far. I guess somewhere it gets to the point you're making :)
elai 16y ago
From my childhood experience of computing of deleting things I thought were useless and then finding out soon after I really borked my system, i'd be a bit more careful.
- eru 16y ago
  That's why we use version control.
moss 16y ago
Tempting, but the system's only covered by end-to-end tests that take years to run. I'm afraid to change it!

car 16y ago

The last paragraph says it all: Even after all that, many medical experts still question how much human disease can be traced to viral invasions that took place millions of years ago. If the upcoming human trials work as well as the animal experiments, the questions may be silenced—and so may the voices of schizophrenia.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago

I have a very close family member who has suffered from schizophrenia. It is troubling to think that the months of ear infections (or infections that caused said infections) when she was a newborn could have been the trigger. On the flip-side, it is very heartening to think they may be moving closer to understanding the disease. Looking at my family history, I believe there is a strong predilection in my family for it, so having some hope that my children and/or grandchildren could possibly be spared would be fantastic.

lasonrisa 16y ago

A honest question, is Discover magazine usually this good?