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How the Coronavirus Hacks the Immune System
- jostmey 6y agoMany paragraphs into the article and I still don’t know what important discovery or observation has been made
- ane 6y agoThis kind of reporting interleaved with storytelling in a really weird voice is frustrating. Why do journalists write like this? What purpose does this word salad serve? I can do this myself! "On a bald September day, a man walks into a barber shop, languishes at the occupied seats, and voilà, while sensing upcoming bowel movements, he discovers the next great theory of economics."
- Tomte 6y ago> Why do journalists write like this? The New Yorker is known for that style, it may even be the prime example of it. People who don't like that style are not the audience. And there are many people who like it. It's like asking why Linux Weekly News never runs poetry. Because it's not that kind of publication.
- dTal 6y agoAnd what a shallow, frenetic dystopia it would be if nobody even attempted to write compelling longform anymore. Remember, 90% of everything is crap. Imagine reading 3 disappointing novels and concluding that novels, as a format, were a waste of time! (Or worse - being unable to appreciate a good novel because you're too impatient for it to get to the exciting bits!)
- projektfu 6y agoCompelling means that the reader doesn’t give up after a few paragraphs. I like long form, like I have subscribed to Harper’s since forever, but sometimes an article is just extended and not more interesting.
- SN76477 6y agoI find NPR guilty of the same. I want to hear a story about how fear affects the lives of primates. And it begins on a cool October day with thoughts of coffee.
- clairity 6y ago...and a partisan obsession for relating every participant’s mask usage (or lack thereof).
- FooHentai 6y agoThis is 'Long Form Journalism'. The 'dip in, dip out' paragraph structure is a dead giveaway. Not always what you're looking for but it can be a good way of cracking into a subject you're unfamiliar with, or a good way of merging the human element with something that would otherwise be quite dry. By no means a substitute for regular news, but a good complement to it.
- eplanit 6y ago"but a good complement to it" Clearly a matter of opinion whether it's good.
- TwoBit 6y ago> it can be a good way of cracking into a subject You mean it can be a good way of stretching an article to fit more ads and increase monetization.
- dougmwne 6y agoI think it is actually optimized for print magazines where someone can be expected to dip in and out when they have a few minutes on the couch and the publisher has a set number of pages to fill. It's not as well suited to the internet where 25 words surrounded by 10 ads seems to be the norm and 5 minutes is an eternity.
- FooHentai 6y agoI don't disagree but national geographic, time, and now the same formats transposed into the online world all have their place. They can act as fantastic springboards into underlying news, scientific research, and other further reading in a way that's similar to but far more engaging than a dry wikipedia article.
- ReptileMan 6y agoThe problem is not the long form per se, but its misuse. Since usually journalists try to implant human interest stories etc where they don't fit. Long form is good if you have something long to say. Trying to construct a story where there isn't one frustrates the reader. I enjoy in depth exposes, but I don't need the alice, bob and malory viewpoint anchoring. This is my general attitude towards this style of writing, not this specific piece.
- AnimalMuppet 6y agoI suspect that it's a holdover from the past. There once was a time when many people had more time to read than they had stuff to read. This kind of writing was fine. Better than right-to-the-point writing, in fact, because it expanded the amount to be read without actually needing to have more to say. Alternately, it's a way of expanding readership. If you don't know anything about molecular biology, they have to write an article at a layperson's level to explain what they mean. But if you, the reader, don't want to go through the effort of trying to understand even that, then there's this human-interest stuff that may still cause you to decide to buy their magazine.
- mssundaram 6y ago> Why do journalists write like this? It's journalists writing for other journalists.
- rq1 6y agoLogorrhoea. In French, “logorrhée”, means literally “verbal diarrhoea”. It’s symptomatic of people who have not much to say.
- BenGosub 6y agoThe real question is who buys this BS? George Orwell is turning in his grave...
- aeyes 6y agoYou can condense the facts into 3 paragraphs but why don't we just go all in and present them as bullet points instead of full sentences? When I see a five page article, I know that I'll get background information and I might discover something I didn't expect from the title. While you might only be looking for the study results, I like spending my Sunday afternoon reading long articles teaching me all kinds of interesting information I wouldn't have looked up on my own.
- dTal 6y agoCosmos was written in a similar style. Try reading it in Carl Sagan's voice and see if it's any more interesting to you. The purpose of longform writing is to provide flavour and context, which are important parts of an information diet. Not everything has to be about the freshest facts delivered to your brain as urgently as possible. Just because you've happened across this in a frenzied binge of clicking HN headlines, doesn't mean it was designed to be consumed that way. If you don't feel you have time to sit through a New Yorker article, save it for later.
- jonas21 6y agoBe kind! The author is a long-time HN user and is probably reading this.
- usrusr 6y agoI'd wholeheartedly agree with your critique if the text was published as a tweet storm. The thing is, this isn't news reporting at all. It's a popsci writeup of the history of the immune system, the history of the discovery of the immune system and a glimpse into its complexity that uses Covid news as the textual equivalent of a cover image. If you have a print of 20000 Leagues under the Sea and the cover shows the kraken attack, would you complain about the number of chapters that don't contain a kraken at all?
- nineparts 6y agoIt's because students are being admitted to universities (including ivy league ones) based on informal political quotas. Once inside they don't learn per se but are indoctrinated with the virtues of diversity and tolerance. Nobody should be amazed that when they graduate, they write like a 12 year old: that was the whole point.
- random023987 6y agoIf you're looking for the summary, it's about 1/4 the way in. > Usually, the viruses that humans care about are successful because they shut down both of these signalling programs. The coronavirus is different. “It seems to block only one of those two arms,” tenOever told me. It inhibits the interferon response but does nothing about the cytokines; it evades the local defenses but allows the cells it infects to call for reinforcements. White blood cells are powerful weapons: they arrive on an inflammatory tide, destroying cells on every side, clogging up passages with the wreckage. They are meant to be used selectively, on invaders that have been contained in a small area. With the coronavirus, they are deployed too widely—a carpet bombing, rather than a surgical strike. As they do their work, inflammation distends the lungs, and debris fills them like a fog.
- rurban 6y agoThis would be the proper description for the spanish flu. But with Covid-19 it's different. No cykotine, but BK overreaction. Healthy immune systems are not triggered to kill the body, only weak and old are in danger. Besides the neurological damage in some.
- hanklazard 6y agoAnd this is why steroids like decadron are helpful in the second phase (now being called the inflammatory phase by many in the ID community) of the infection. Steroids decrease inflammation / immune response.
- AstralStorm 6y agoThat's not exactly why it's steroids. If this was the main mechanism we'd use more effective immunosuppressants. As is, stronger immunosuppressants show worse survival rates. You want to keep some immune system activity to not get a secondary infection and fight the virus. Corticosteroids also kickstart healing process (not really in COVID) and regrowth - you also race against tissue destruction. Most importantly they barely reduce scar formation. And they actually improve breathing via action on alveoli as well as reduce swelling. The specific two to use are hydrocortisone and dexamethasone based on studies thus far, in critical patients - ones put on respirators. (Prednisolone could also work.)
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- BenGosub 6y agoIndeed, lately I have lost my interest in reading long-reads, I just want to get to the point.
- quibbler 6y agoI think they made the discovery that infectious diseases exist.
- Entaroadun87 6y agoReally like this analogy: It is a somewhat astonishing fact of life that the exact same DNA is shared by every cell in your body, from the skin to the brain; those cells differ in appearance and function because, in each of them, a molecular gizmo “transcribes” some DNA segments rather than others into molecules of single-stranded RNA. These bits of RNA are in turn used as the blueprints for proteins, the molecular machines that do most of a cell’s work. If DNA is your phone’s home screen, then transcription is like tapping an icon. By sampling the RNA present in a group of cells, researchers can see which programs those cells are running at that moment; by sampling it after the cells have been infected with a virus, they can see how that virus substitutes its own software.
- jcims 6y ago'Molecular machines' is not an overstatement. Here's an example of some of them working in harmony to maintain an essential electrochemical gradient across the lipid bilayer that encapsulates the mitochondria: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LQmTKxI4Wn4 It's a 7 minute video, if you only have a little time, skip around, but make sure you listen to the part starting at 6:17. DNA isn't just the blueprint for the machine or the blueprint for the factory that makes the machine, it's the blueprint for the entire supply chain required to build and operate an entire chemical industry of mind-bending complexity. Like doubling grains of rice on each square of a checkerboard, if you wanted to create a complete catalog of all possible combinations of a string of DNA that's 150 base pairs long, you would have to marshal all of the estimated matter in the observable universe and you'd still end up short. Most of the genes that create these proteins are tens of thousands of base pairs in length and the entire human genome is ~3 billion.
- im3w1l 6y agoThanks for posting this. Looked further into atp synthase. Absolutely amazing. A little turbine, driven by the flow of protons, spinning in 120 degree discrete clicks, around catalyst pockets, where each click changes the shape of the pocket to a new one. And after the pocket has gone through a complete cycle, adp and phosphate have been fused. Never seen the chemical (proton concentration), converted into something mechanical (spinning), and back into chemical (adp + phosphate -> atp) in such a way before.
- hikerclimb 6y agoI hope coronavirus causes 40 million deaths worldwide over 8 years. 10 million of those for rich people in the us
- covid19expert 6y agoOff topic news: https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Supermarkets-in-France-banned-from-selling-non-essentials-to-bring-them-in-line-with-smaller-shops https://www.connexionfrance.com/French-news/Supermarkets-in-... "A row broke out in France over the weekend, after smaller shops selling “non-essential” items - such as books and clothes" So now clothes and books are not essential. Its something we almost dont use. Who needs clothes ? Or books ? nobody of course Thing is, everything is essential... if my water glasses break, it will be essential for me because i will need new ones. I think its not fair to judge something is not essential just because me (or you) already have. For example if somebody needs to move to a new house, the new house might be empty and at that moment everything is essential.. it will need water glasses, plates, etc.. The only essential thing it seems is to transmit the covid drama over television. And accept gov orders (or that "science") about what is considered essential or not. With that, its essential to punish the entreprenour. Entreprenour is that guy that built a company where me, you, your family work and feed from. When the entreprenour is screwed, the employees get screwed also because they will not be able to work... that will affect their families also because somebody lost a job and income. And not least important are the clients who might need something essential from that entreprenour store that was forced to close.
- dTal 6y agoI am blown away by this casually dropped metaphor: >As the virus spreads unchecked through the body, it drags a destructive immune reaction behind it. Individuals with COVID-19 face the same challenge as nations during the pandemic: if they can’t contain small sites of infection early—so that a targeted response can root them out—they end up mounting interventions so large that the shock inflicts its own damage.
- refurb 6y agoIt should also be added that an out of control infection is not the only reason why you end up with an immune response that harms the host. It's quite possible to get a severe immune response to an infection that's quite limited. Kind of similar to anaphylaxis to bee stings. The venom was never any threat to a human, but the immune response sure can be.
- vmception 6y agoMakes me imagine little cells arguing about whether it was worth shutting down the system lol “Those cells die everyday!”
- aetherspawn 6y agoIt would be interesting to see a heat map for reading an article like this. It’s so long.. after 10 minutes I wanted to know the point of it, so I skipped aggressively to the middle, found a few points, then skipped to the end. I wonder if there’s any value to so many words in this day and age with so many other things to read on the internet.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- forrestthewoods 6y agoAgree 100%. I utterly despise modern “long-form” structure which mandates that the first 1/3 of the article have nothing to do with the headline.
- titzer 6y agoLong-form has nothing to do with this problem. It just sounds like poor organization/bad writing.
- serf 6y ago>I wonder if there’s any value to so many words in this day and age with so many other things to read on the internet. There are many books being written every year, yet the classics remain so -- they aren't pushed away into non-existence. If you have trouble finding the value in the literature blame the author, not the word-count. If the question is 'Does short content generate more hits on the internet?', then undeniably yes.
- ncmncm 6y agoEvery time a New Yorker article shows up, people crawl out of the woodwork to complain that it's a New Yorker article. If New Yorker articles are not for you, then do not try to read New Yorker articles. Really! Read other things you will actually like. If you want a quick rundown of the topic, Wikipedia is only a click away, and gets right to the point. Those of us who like New Yorker articles appreciate them when they appear. We know there will be an investment of time, and we know that a board of Editors has ensured that, for those of us who like the format, our time will not be wasted. Those who don't, know in advance that they will just be frustrated and bored, and can skip past instead. You are not even obliged to "upvote" the post. Really, nobody is keeping track. Nobody will think ill of you for skipping past the moment you notice "New Yorker" in the URL. If you ever become ready for New Yorker articles, New Yorker articles will be there for you.
- nahuel0x 6y agoThis is mind blowing: > For the first half of the twentieth century, the going theory was that the invading element—the “antigen”—served as a template around which a corresponding antibody was molded. Only in 1955 did scientists discover the much stranger truth. It turned out that the cells that produce antibodies—called B cells, because they were first discovered in the bursa of Fabricius, an organ that does for birds what bone marrow does for humans—can produce only one kind each. Its structure is random, and nearly every B cell is discarded unused. If, however, an antibody created by a B cell happens to match some part of an antigen, that B cell will not just survive but clone itself. The clone incorporates many mutations, which offer the possibility of an even better match. After a few generations, an antibody with the best fit is “constructed” through a process of mini-evolution that occurs continuously in our lymph nodes and spleen. (Our ancestors the bony fish adapted the machinery of the B-cell system from an even more ancient parasite.) So, natural selection discovered a way to run an embedded natural selection search process in an individual. Talk about meta.
- divbzero 6y agoIt’s mind blowing not only how our body mimics natural selection with B cells, but also how it generates the genetically diverse B cells in the first place. [1] [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination "V(D)J recombination"
- nextos 6y agoYes, and if you have different versions of the HLA gene, you get different distributions as a result of V(D)J recombination. So, in a way, different individuals have different immune strategies. For example, super-responders to HIV tend to be HLA-B57. This HLA "version" trades better response to virus that mutate quickly for more chances of autoimmunity as thymic selection is less stringent (because HLA-B57 presents less selfpeptides in the thymus).
- DrAwdeOccarim 6y agoWoah. Thanks for sharing that. I did not know that. What a fine balance!
- flobosg 6y agoAnother related mechanism is antibody-dependent enhancement (ADE)[1], where suboptimal antibodies bind to the virus and cell receptors, promoting the former's entry into the latter. It has been proposed that ADE increases the severity of SARS-CoV-2 infections[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antibody-dependent_enhancement [2]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41564-020-00789-5
- BlueTemplar 6y agoThankfully, we do have a (now scientifically proven !) working "cure" – though it mostly works at the onset of the first symptoms, when the virus is only starting to get a foothold in the body : https://hcqmeta.com/ https://hcqmeta.com/ https://hcqtrial.com/ https://hcqtrial.com/
- BlueTemplar 6y agoHmm, finally managed to find some criticism of the 2nd link : https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/hcqtrial-com-astroturf-and-disinformation-about-hydroxychloroquine-and-covid-19-on-steroids/ https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/hcqtrial-com-astroturf-and-... Ok, that doesn't look good… (Still, I would have preferred that doctors would be free to decide by themselves which drug to prescribe for a new disease. After all, they have skin in the game !)
- sarasasa28 6y agocan we please stop using the word hack everywhere?