When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged | Hacker News Reader

When People Ate People, a Strange Disease Emerged

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343 pointslentil_soup210 comments

I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England. I thought it was pretty terrifying and I wanted to know what the hell was going on. I read about Kuru all the way back then and the take away was that people shouldn't eat the brain and nervous tissue of other people or Kuru could result. But also it seemed that mad cow disease was occurring because cows were being fed the ground up remains of other cows and that included cow brain and cow nervous tissue. So basically what was happening with cows was the same as what was happening with people getting Kuru.

I also recall learning that in order to get mad cow disease you would need to eat cow brain or cow nervous tissue. Of course, you would probably assume, as I did, that you are safe because you don't eat cow brains or nervous tissue. Well, you could be wrong about that. There is something called AMR (advanced meat recovery). As I understand it, when the meat processing plant removes the spine and skull from the cow there is still some meat stuck to the spine and skull. The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat. But the result is that some nervous tissue from the cow can get mixed up in ground meat created with the AMR technique and that is one way that you could end up eating cow nervous tissue. After I did that research, I swore off ground meat.

No-meat diet is not 100% prion-proof according to Wikipedia:

> When researchers fed hamsters grass that grew on ground where a deer that died with chronic wasting disease (CWD) was buried, the hamsters became ill with CWD, suggesting that prions can bind to plants, which then take them up into the leaf and stem structure, where they can be eaten by herbivores, thus completing the cycle. It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion

True, but one might argue that it's at least a step in the right direction if you're really worried about transmissible prions.

Prions are nature's grey goo.

I would put bacteria in that role and call them green goo.

One thing I find interesting is that gray goo would have to compete with bacteria for resources. I'm not sure that it would necessarily be easy.

Prions are not alive and therefore do not need to compete for resources to further their existence.

If "not alive" => "doesn't need resources", then "needs resources" => "alive". That doesn't seem right to me.

That's a deductive fallacy. Alive things need resources, but things that need resources are not necessarily alive.

It's not a fallacy. The truth table for implication and its contrapositive are the same.

    A | B | A => B | ¬B => ¬A
    T | T |   T    |    T
    T | F |   F    |    F
    F | T |   T    |    T
    F | F |   T    |    T

My original point was that my parent was implicitly claiming that only living things need resources. That seemed absurd to me because of things like viruses, companies, governments, etc.

computerphage wasn't using deduction but rather contraposition. (A -> B) => (!B -> !A). The absurdity of (!B -> !A) shows that (A -> B) is not true for all cases.

"All cats die. Socrates is dead. Therefore Socrates is a cat."

No. Mirroring the parent would be : "All cats die. Socrates is immortal. Therefore Socrates is not a cat." Which is perfectly valid logic.

More like: "Non-living things don't move. The bus moves. Therefore, the bus is alive."

This is false because there exist things that are non-living but move.

Similarly, the original "not alive" => "doesn't need resources" argument is false because there exist things that are not alive that do need resources (such as buses), and so needing resources does not imply being alive.

I'll let Eugène Ionesco know.

That's... not how logic works.

I think that might be how logic works. The fallacy seems to be with its parent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition

You don't need to hedge. That's exactly how logic works.

"Alive implies needs-resources" is not the same as "needs-resources implies alive"

Of course not. And if he'd said "alive implies needs resources", the argument would not be valid.

ianterrelwt posted the article explaining this.

Yes... it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contraposition

That's exactly how logic works.

I said, "do not need to compete for resources to further their existence." This is not the same as "do not need resources."

They absolutely compete for resources, in the form of peptides that can fold into more prion aggregates or other proteins

Now that the giant logic thread has played out below I feel I have to point out that I was saying that technological gray goo would have to compete with green goo, I wasn't talking about prions competing for resources.

I have read on Wikipedia that lichens degrade prions, so I disagree with that analogy

of course, you can still get CJD/kuru genetically, sporadically, from bone marrow transplants, etc.

Also: fatal familial insomnia, but that is a dramatically different pathology and we don't know why it's different from CJD.

The Wikipedia article on Kuru mentions some people developing immunity to it in the most affected areas. Very interesting.

In 2009, researchers at the Medical Research Council discovered a naturally occurring variant of a prion protein in a population from Papua New Guinea that confers strong resistance to kuru. In the study, which began in 1996,[21] researchers assessed over 3,000 people from the affected and surrounding Eastern Highland populations, and identified a variation in the prion protein G127.[22] G127 polymorphism is the result of a missense mutation, and is highly geographically restricted to regions where the kuru epidemic was the most widespread. Researchers believe that the PrnP variant occurred very recently, estimating that the most recent common ancestor lived 10 generations ago.[22][23]

Of the discovery, Professor John Collinge, director of the MRC’s Prion Unit at University College London, has stated that:

It's absolutely fascinating to see Darwinian principles at work here. This community of people has developed their own biologically unique response to a truly terrible epidemic. The fact that this genetic evolution has happened in a matter of decades is remarkable.

— John Collinge, Medical Research Council The findings of the study could help researchers better understand and develop treatments for other related prion diseases, such as Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease[21] and Alzheimer’s disease.[24]

A workaround for people who would like to eat ground meat but avoid this issue is to grind it yourself, or to buy steak and have the butcher grind it for you.

In Argentina the meat should be grind in front of the customer by law and every butchery exposes a sign explaining this.

Big chains are not exempt.

But you can still buy frozen burguers for instance.

Plus, your meat will be more freshly ground this way. More freshly ground meat is superior in almost every way: http://aht.seriouseats.com/archives/2011/04/the-burger-lab-w...

Or purchase directly from a local farmer, where you can have an open dialogue about their meat raising and processing techniques. Farmers markets can be great for finding these relationships.

Probably - if you are sure about how he processes his meat, the provenance of his cattle etc.

But the probability of getting the disease is so small that I would rather pay more attention to safely crossing streets than worrying about it.

"Beef brains and veal (juvenile beef) or calf's brains are used in the cuisines of France; Italy; Spain; El Salvador; Mexico, etc. where they are called sesos in Spanish and are eaten in tacos and quesadillas; Pakistan, where they are known in Urdu as Maghaz; Portugal; Indonesia; and in the United States, especially in St. Louis, Missouri, and the Ohio River valley."

People do eat cow brains...I have at regular ol' restaurants in the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beef_brain

As I understand it the biggest thing with mad-cow was not so much eating cow brains itself, but that these cows were also fed meal containing beef nervous tissue..

So, from an uninformed opinion, it could be that the disease develops or builds more rapidly in cases of 'cannibalism' (e.g. humans eating human as here, cow eating cow as in UK, etc), and then once developed can spread more easily across species..

side note:

Having lived >6mo in the UK during a certain period of time, I'm ineligible to be a blood donor in the USA to this day due to the mad-cow outbreak.

Pork as well (unless I am misunderstanding the entry). My mom said that her grandmother would often make them Head Cheese[0] (before she learned what it was). I am happy to never have had that experience.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_cheese

This is true in France, but the practice of doing so is decreasing and considered "old fashioned" especially after CWD.

Yup, it's called "tête de veau" ("veal head"), https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%AAte_de_veau

When I was a kid my great-grandmother used to occasionally make and eat calf's brains.

I was never willing to even consider trying it.

> I did a bunch of research (googling) back in the late 90's or 2000s when the mad cow disease outbreak first happened mainly in England.

This is not directly related to the main thrust of your comment, but I thought it was interesting that more than 80% of the BCE cases in England occurred in the years 1990--1995, when Google did not exist in any form. Only 6--7% of the BCE cases in England occurred after google.com was registered.

> The AMR process entails blasting off that meat stuck to the spine and skull with some kind of high pressure for use in ground meat.

This is true. A while back, I read stories of how (Mostly low-wage Mexican) Workers at Meat Plants were getting a strange neurological disease that confounded their doctors. The cause was then traced to them inhaling the aerosol of the Animals' brains being blown out, mostly Pigs.

Related News / Source:

- The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret => http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/06/hormel-spam-pig-...

- Vaporized Pig Brains Are Torturing Austin's Migrant Meatpackers => http://www.citypages.com/news/book-vaporized-pig-brains-are-...

Here I am teetering on the edge of vegetarianism, and people are talking about blowing meat chunks off spines to extract that last bit of cash, and workers inhaling aerosolized pig brains.

Might be the push I needed!

It's easy for conversations like this to unintentionally turn elitist, but that "last bit of cash" is also more accurately depicted as just not throwing away protein.

Pro/Anti-meat aside, there is a huge segment of the population for whom "just eat steaks" is not actionable advice. They've already killed the animal. Why not be efficient?

Yes fair enough, maximizing what we do with the carcass once the animal is dead is only fair. I guess I was leaning more towards the lengths we've gone to, for something that doesn't make a whole lot of sense in the first place (i.e. we waste more on the animals' inputs than we get out).

Although in this case getting parts of the spinal cord/fluid/brain in with sausages also sounds like a hazard.

part of that optimization is also disease prevetion, if we maximize "product" but produce more expenses in the form of diseases, we'd be losing money, not making any.

the meat industry is a horror show, tbh, and they don't maximize product extraction because they want to save every last piece of protien, they do it for the cash.

This is a good point, and is probably related to our general tendency to let industry externalize consequences

Well, scale tends to even things out. These companies won't disappear, but climate and anti meat movements will force them to transform, probably soon.

By soon I mean not I our life time, but Certainly the few coming generations. We've been eating meat for millenia. I give till the end of the century.

> we waste more on the animals' inputs than we get out

Is this true? Plenty of humans are reaping the benefits of this industry existing. While beef, dairy et al may be disturbing from multiple points of view, few industries are as subsidized as the corn industry in the united states.

If there was a single vulnerability to be used as an entry point to tear apart the elaborate farming empires and thoroughly tackle waste with respect to output, it'd be corn. It just doesn't make sense, irrespective of animals.

That's a different kind of waste. It's indisputable that meat production is a waste of land, crops, and resources, if your main metric is producing as much food as possible.

If you're talking about money waste instead, it works pretty well. But while corn may be over-subsidized, I'd rather eat it than starve.

That metric only applies under the assumption that all land can be used equally to feed livestock or for crops. However, humans don't eat grass, and some land cannot be used to grow vegetables on. There, grazing livestock is one of the few methods available to generate food for humans.

Grazing is also better for biodiversity than planting crops.

Please cite how grazing is better for biodiversity than agriculture! Also, hardly any of the meet produced in the US now is grazed. The cows are fed corn in a cage.

Once you've killed the animal, don't you owe it to eat as much as possible of it? Isn't it a bigger sin to throw away edible meat for aesthetic reasons?

Yes - and given that's the situation with meat consumption, it's no wonder some of us decide on throwing out the whole premise and going vegetarian :)

Have you carefully examined how the dairy industry works?

I'm not convinced that a vegetarian diet that includes factory farmed dairy involves much less cruelty than an omnivorous diet. Maybe more, if the omnivore were to avoid factory farmed meat and dairy.

That said, I'm not a vegetarian myself, because I don't believe it's in my rational self-interest.

There are plenty of forms of vegatarian: lacto-vegetarians that eat dairy, ovo-vegetarians that eat eggs, lacto-ovo-vegetarians that eat both, vegans that eat neither (don't eat any animal products), raw-vegan that only eat raw foods, etc

If you believe that factory farmed dairy is just as cruel, then don't consume factory farmed dairy.

I don't believe its in my rational self-interest

Unless you count the environmental impact, it shouldn't be about your self-interest, but rather doing something that some see as cruel and unethical treatment of other living creatures.

(PS: I'm not vegetarian either, so I'm not attempting to change your opinion)

> Unless you count the environmental impact, it shouldn't be about your self-interest, but rather doing something that some see as cruel and unethical treatment of other living creatures.

This might clarify my position a bit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_egoism

> ...because I don't believe it's in my rational self-interest.

Can I politely suggest you uncurl from the solipsistic ball you've tucked yourself into? It's nice out here...

Can I politely suggest you look up the definition of solipsism? :)

Seriously, there is nothing about adopting a philosophy of rational self interest that implies solipsism. In fact, solipsism can clearly be shown not to be in one's own rational self interest :)

This is exactly why (well, just one reason) I'm vegan

It's not aesthetic reasons though, is it? This whole concern is about neural tissue being actually harmful.

The question is then one of how you separate the edible part from the inedible part. Given that you can never do this precisely, you're going to end up either playing it too safe and leaving edible meat behind, or going too far and extracting inedible cowbits. Then the question is: is it a bigger sin to run the risk of harming humans, or to leave behind a fraction of a percent of the cow as a safety margin? Thought about in those terms, the edible meat left behind would be used, just not as food.

well yeah, but getting sprayed with spinal column aerosol in your mouth isn't exactly appetising, was the point.

That's not something you have to do to eat meat. Just something to consider if you want to sell it.

Me too. But then I think about beef fajitas.

I've been vegetarian for a bit over a decade (no fish, but dairy and eggs okay) - If you live in the right area, and have the right tastes, it's downright easy. In other areas, it's quite difficult.

My personal tips & notes:

* If you otherwise enjoy meat, there are a lot of meat-substitutes out there and more being developed. These tend to do a great job of mimicking processed meats and a terrible job of mimicking "real" meat. They also vary greatly. Quorn, Morningstar, and Boca (for example) all have very different tastes and textures, so if you don't like one try a different one. (I personally prefer Quorn for chicken-substitutes and Morningstar for beef-substitutes). OTOH, some vegetarians never had a big attachment to meat, and this is not an issue. (I am very jealous of these people).

* Eating out is by far the hardest. In areas with many vegetarians (say, Seattle), you tend to have multiple options, things tend to be clearly labeled, and waitstaff is used to getting questions. In other areas (say, Georgia), you have fewer options, no labels, and people act like you've accused them of something evil if you have questions. Either way, though, the majority of the menu becomes inaccessible to you.

* If you are trying to be mostly strict, be cautious when dealing with regional/cultural boundaries. While Indian food tends to follow the same vegetarian definition as I do (Jainian food is even more strict than I am), others don't (Chinese and Japanese tend to not consider fish or other seafood as animals, thus you'll find oyster sauce on the "vegetarian" menu, or dishes that have oyster sauce or some sort of animal-based broth that isn't called out as such (oyster sauce, fish sauce, pork, beef, or chicken broth, and/or shrimp paste in some curries). In the American South, pork isn't just a meat, it's also a seasoning. Most purely vegetable dishes (such as "green beans" or "corn") aren't vegetarian there :(

* How strict you want to be impacts how easy life is. Avoiding tangible animal-based meat = easy. Avoiding broths and lard = not as easy. Avoiding animal byproducts, such as most gelatin, use of bones in filtering, animal-based rennet in cheese , insect-based dyes and glaze = quite a bit more effort. Find a level you are comfortable with, because for most reasons, it is still far better to be a not-entirely strict vegetarian than a failed attempt at a strict vegetarian. I myself avoid gelatin and known insect products (no more Junior Mints :( ), and when cooking at home I get animal-friendly cheese and sugar, but when I'm out I don't worry about where they got their cheese, but will ask about broths and seafood-sauces.

* If you are a picky eater such as myself, be warned that many places decide to make vegetarian dishes more "exciting" by putting in every form of vegetable/grain they can think of. Like a supreme pizza, some people are glad for the variety, but most have something in there they don't like. (I myself can't stand green bell peppers, which is in, like, 90% of commonly available vegetarian fare :( )

* I first went vegetarian cold-turkey (ha!) in college...but after 6 months I stopped because I was seeing stars constantly. (It's actually pretty easy to get all your nutrients as a vegetarian, unless you're living on a diet of rice and mac&cheese like I was) I had, however, lost the taste for red meat (suddenly felt oily and flavorless), and noticed that certain salads I had disliked I now enjoyed. A few years later I tried again, but this time I did it slow. I dropped a category of meat each year, giving myself time to adjust my diet and make sure I had a variety of options. I believe I dropped beef (from the first stint), then pork, then poultry, then all forms of seafood. The next year I dropped leather products as an ethical choice, and I've been this way for over a decade without too much effort. Some extra food costs, a limited range of foods, and limited eating out options, but not so much that it's hard. Dieting, for example, is much harder.

* You will learn to hate the preachy, judgmental vegetarian-types that make life hard for us. Most vegetarians (in my experience) do what they do for reasons they consider good, and think it'd be great if others did the same, but feel no need to look down on others that don't, nor to inform them of their "evil ways". I mean, most of us ate meat for a long time and didn't switch the first time the thought occurred to us, so why judge others for being the same? Still though, people get very defensive and often assume you're one of the preachy types until you prove otherwise.

* ...You will also learn to hate how defensive people are in general. This is not restricted to vegetarianism. If you say you're on a diet, people will talk about how awesome their chocolate cake is. Mention you have diabetes, and they'll list the sugary foods they adore. Say you're vegetarian, and they'll talk about how animals just taste so good, or how happy they are to shoot Bambi. I've collected a few vegetarian jokes to help break the ice and show I'm not a jerk about it. (My favorite: 'Vegetarian' is actually based on an old (insert culture here - I tend to say 'Native American') word, meaning "lousy hunter")

* Oddly enough, holidays tend to be the EASIEST times. Everyone talks about the turkey, but a traditional big feast (at least in America) actually involves lots of non-meat dishes. I found this a good way to relax my family and friends - I provide a big meal that doesn't contain "weird stuff". Some of the more skeptical people still bring meat dishes, but even then they end up seeing that as a part of the whole, as opposed to be a contrast between "weird food" and "normal food".

If you decide to take the leap, I hope this helps!

As a, for lack of a better term, total vegetarian, do you have any moral thoughts on different types of animals? Was the herbavore vs omnivore vs carnivore thing a consideration? Did you debate mammal protein vs fish?

Curious how people arrive at "their" vegetarianism.

Speaking for myself on a very subjective issue:

I do. My gradual elimination of meats was done on a roughly sliding scale of animal awareness - pigs seem more aware than turkeys seem more aware than chickens, and most fish come in below that. I based this mainly on my understanding of there general awareness of the world, which is hardly a strict scientific method, but I was trying to acknowledge the concept you're describing, figuring that while it was all bad, if I wasn't going to immediately do totally right, I should choose to do it in the least bad manner.

Insects are actually a point of confusion for me. My general rule of thumb for whether I think I should kill something to eat it (or have someone else kill it for me to eat) is based on my instinctive empathy: If I saw the animal injured, would I feel bad for it? land-based animals - Yes. Fish - Yes. Eggs? No. (lots of issues in the egg industry, but the base concept didn't bother me). Bacteria? No. But this leaves insects in a weird place. I will kill an insect that is a pest to me without much concern. Mosquitos are dead if I get a chance, houseflies are welcome to leave, but if they don't, I can swat them without guilt. Ants, while an absolutely favorite creature of mine, also fall prey to my self-centeredness. BUT - the idea of hundreds/thousands of insects getting ground up DOES bother me. I _think_ that's because I don't empathize with the bugs the way I do with animals, but I don't like what it says about us to kill in such numbers even if I don't empathize directly, Regardless, while I don't have a solid answer, it was easy enough to give up the few foods involved. (Pretty much Junior Mints, in my case)

Flirted with stints of vegetarianism. Still eat far less meat than "average" and can go many days without meat.

I am okay eating animals, they are tasty. They think, they die, they go to my tummy. I try to eat grass fed and "humane" local stuff these days precisely to avoid issues that occur at mass produced meat factories (antibiotic needs, etc.). This makes meat cost more, which makes me eat less.

The central reason for me comes down to sustainability. Eggs and milk are still not the most humane things to me, but they are sustainable and quite a bit better than killing the animals they come from. They cost way less to produce and eggs/cheese/dairy make a lot of tasty stuff I am less willing to give up than meat.

We can probably sustain the planet if everyone eats a light to moderate amount of dairy/eggs, but based on what I have read we really can't do that with the amount of meat consumption in America (and other places that are meat heavy in their culture.)

Not only that but Americans are used to cheap meats and are very very slowly becoming used to paying for meat at prices where it can be raised more healthily (legitimate free range, zero antibiotics due to much lower animal density, etc.)

tl;dr save the planet, and maybe because I occasionally feel bad animals die for me to live a more convenient life.

edit: also, regarding the fish only "vegans"...honestly... it is hard enough to safely define one thinking meat from another. I think people do a lot of mental twists and turns and narrative building to convince themselves that something like say, fish, are "lesser" thinking meats. Insects? Fungi? Bacteria? How do you define your thinking meat? The philosophy of this is actually fiendishly difficult if you take it seriously and don't just stop when your brain has convinced you that you have it figured out. I also don't think it is even subjective, even though it is a very passionate subject. At some level if you eat animals you have to accept the consequence and can't just rationalize away you are eating the muscles and fats of an animal that had its own thing going on. I just never felt strongly convinced by the whole strict vegan argument given the amount of energy required to live that way (it is actually hard and difficult to be a really strict Vegan, in my opinion that time can be better spent reducing misery of actual humans in a lot of cases)

> I also don't think it is even subjective, even though it is a very passionate subject.

I'll agree to that. If you have a definition of "thinking/self-aware/conscious/sapient/concept of choice", any given creature either IS or ISN'T. But we can't agree on a definition, and we have no real means to test. So it's a non-subjective fact that we (currently) have only subjective means to determine, and subjective arguments over what we're even talking about.

On the topic of sustainability, I recently learned just how much of the global corn crop goes to feed animals: so much that when people talk about the industry of growing corn, they just talk about animal feed. Corn for human consumption is such a tiny slice of the market it only comes up if you zoom in on certain parts.

I think the scale slides the other way too. So just because plants looks different than us, it seems kind of arbitrary to relegate them as "not thinking" and subject to whatever we want to do with them. I mean, I'm sure grass isn't thrilled about having its new growth trimmed repeatedly.

Not making an argument one way or the other, just have been thinking about it for myself. So I suppose my only point to the above would be that "there's always a subjective line that needs to be drawn somewhere, rather than an objective one."

Agreed. Main thing is, I like being alive and have to eat, at least, plants to stay alive. So it does bring you to an interesting point of, so... if I can't safely say that even plants aren't really thinking food... I should just not try to formulate an argument about which things are "thinking", but not everything is relative. Using the facts we have now I will only go so far on the whole whole relativism angle. Cows are way more like me than a black bean, for example. So it is pretty easy to at least roughly group things. Anyway, we agree here, but ultimately we shaped the world in a certain way (our ancestors) so we just have to accept that we can't change certain things easily or at all (what we eat, that we have to cut grass, etc). So that line of thinking about "should I eat thing X?" just seems trickier because I have so many biases rattling around in my brain and we always construct our internal narrative to fit facts.

What isn't hard is the sustainability argument. That is super simple arithmetic. And that is the one that pretty much seals it for me.

I think a lot of people start from the sustainability angle and then convince themselves of a lot of things that are murky or they themselves didn't really personally decide this, it is just something a lot of other people are doing / have decided and it fits their narrative of "meat is not sustainable". That said I do think there are well reasoned actors out there that have "done the work" to decide eating meat is not for them, but don't dress it up as a philosophical choice until you /have/ done the work and thought it through. It starts and ends with a lot of Why? :)

* Americans are used to cheap meats and are very very slowly becoming used to paying for meat at prices where it can be raised more healthily*

This may be true, but I wonder how much of the cost of meat is the inability to buy direct.

My family buys all our beef (and considering pork this year) from a local farmer by pre-ordering a quarter steer. The total price I pay is far less than the supermarket price for beef and the only explanation I can come up with is that we're cutting out the middlemen.

Likewise, the bison farmers around here are advertising prices well below the cost of bison at the few stores that carry it.

The term you're looking for is lacto-ovo vegetarian.

That's the term, but most people that don't deal with vegetarians don't know it. (I've also seen a number of vegetarians & pescatarians that don't know it, which is somewhat surprising to me). But yes, I'm an ovo-lacto vegetarian.

Thanks for the information, I'll have a closer read later. I think I'll take it in steps, losing beef/chicken/etc stock will be a blow to my recipes. Cheese will be hard if it comes to it.

It's interesting the defensiveness aspect, I've been guilty of that in the past, although sometimes just for reasons of wanting to debate it... generally a topic I'll let someone else raise first though. I guess people get very passionate about it one way or the other and that complicates having a rational discussion about it.

FWIW, I like Knorr Vegetarian Vegetable bouillon cubes. (Other premade Veggie bouillons have NOT impressed me).

When I first became a vegetarian all the forums widely advised making your own vegetable broth by boiling down veggies and freezing large amounts for later use, using multiple smallish containers so you never had to deal with thawing more broth than you needed. At the time I was a college student with no freezer (or stove) so that wasn't an option, and I ended up getting used to the bouillon and never trying the recommended option, but it may be worth trying out.

Good read! If you get a chance, visit India/South Asia to try out various vegetarian dishes (preferably from different regions). You will be surprised by how much variety is available for vegetarians.

The ones branded as Indian cuisine outside India tend to be mostly a collection of popular dishes rather than sampling of everything. So you will end up feeling that most of them taste similar.

You may not be aware of this, but the dairy and egg industries kill an insane amount of animals. I too was an ethical vegetarian for years before discovering that and reevaluating my dietary ethos.

I'm in the process of reducing my dairy and egg intake. Soy milk was okay, but I've found I much prefer almond milk, and it works well enough in my cooking. We have some egg replacer we use for baking, but I've not yet tried in it cooking dishes. Cheese is a harder one, as the vegan cheeses aren't bad on a pizza but don't fill all the roles of cheese for me.

You make an excellent point about those industries - I originally had a comment about them above, but dropped it as it was getting a bit (more) off topic. My point at the time is that I'm not ethically against the actual act of eating eggs or consuming dairy, but you are correct that those industries, even many of the "friendly" ones, do things that I'm not ethically okay with.

The hardest part about becoming a vegetarian was actually admitting to myself that my actions AREN'T ethical by my own definitions, and that I would have to accept that while not giving up on the idea of improving. Kind of like how we are about charity - we all spend money on our own frivolities that we would spend to help someone in need were they in front of us...but we try very hard to not have such issues in front of us.

AFAIK the egg industry throws the male chickens in the grinder alive and keep just the egg producing females.

I went veg 12 years ago and life has been so much simpler!

Isn't it better that the animals are being efficiently utilized preventing the need for killing more animals. I

Just stick to honest to earth filet mignon

That's really scary. I hadn't heard about it affecting slaughterhouse workers, but that totally makes sense. I hope the slaughterhouses will stop these sorts of AMR practices.

>I hope the slaughterhouses will stop these sorts of AMR practices

good luck with that

If it is of any consolation, the odds of picking up such as disease is likely to be very low. Bone meal feeding was extremely prevalent prior to human cases of CJD started to emerge and the number of cases remained thankfully small.

A similar argument could be made for other bad things such as thalidomide: we understand now that it is actually quite safe when used outside a fairly short window when the long bones of the limb is developed in a foetus. While the number of victims are numerous, it is an extremely small fraction out of all the doses prescribed in Europe before the ban.

I even remember watching an interesting X-files episode about this.

AMR and such, is that our famous pink slime that became all the rage/outrage awhile back? To the point we have quite a few establishments making it well known they never used such products.

industrialization did not do any favors towards animals, especially in regards to processing and such for food

When indigenous peoples work to make use of all of an animal we call it respect.

Do it in a factory and all of the sudden it is gross.

There's pet foods that advertise on the TV that they don't contain any chicken byproduct meal. The horror of feeding a dog stuff it would be happy to eat.

They're right that industrialization did no favors for animals, but that's because of how animals are treated and farmed.

It's kind of like how I respect someone more for hunting a wolf with their bare hands vs someone that snipes them from a helicopter.

They both possibly result in a dead wolf, but that's not the point.

make use of all of an animal

This does not imply eating the entire animal.

What's your point? There's not actually any real problem with eating mechanically separated meat, it just makes for good TV to say that it isn't real food.

For style points, make a show of how bad it is the week before doing an episode on pâté.

Your inclusion of the statement regarding "mak[ing] use of all of an animal" is to show hypocrisy between respect for efficient use of animals by indigenous people and distaste for some industrial food processing practices. This is sloppy or disingenuous as they're different domains: one is efficient use of the animal for any purpose and the other is efficient use of the animal for food.

Similarly here you bring up mechanically separated meat, and in the comment I responded to, chicken byproduct meal in pet food. These are all food production, which is different from making efficient use of all of an animal for any purpose.

Editted to correct my confusing pâté and foie gras.

The pâté comment is not loaded; pâté is literally any meat paste (or maybe even not meat). Are you thinking of foie gras or something?

Anyway, to try to be clearer: What's the difference between making efficient use of an animal and making efficient use of an animal?

Are you just complaining that traditional cultures didn't know how to mechanically separate meat? Are you making a claim about what they would have been likely to do if they possessed such knowledge?

Indeed, I was thinking of foie gras. Thank you for the correction.

Given that I've twice expressed quite explicitly the point I was making, I fear we're talking past each other. I wish you a good day.

I understand full well that you are expressing that there is some difference between eating and other uses.

You've done little to argue why this difference is substantial (hence my just restating the position I started with, where they are conflated).

"A [real or imagined] respect for animals that led to a reduction in waste product."

is not the same as

"Maximizing profit by turning undesirable or inaccessible meat into nuggets in a potentially dangerous process."

I don't think you're wrong to mention them in the same sentence, but it's definitely disingenuous/uncharitable to compare peoples' sentiments on the two apples-to-apples.

A big part of the point I'm trying to make is that the differing sentiments aren't all that coherent. I don't see how it is disingenuous to express my opinion on the matter.

I guess it might not be especially charitable.

I'm interested here because to me they don't seem at all incoherent. Can you unpack that a bit for me?

It comes down to "Maximizing profit by turning undesirable or inaccessible meat into nuggets in a potentially dangerous process."

I don't agree that is a particularly good description of the process. They are making the meat accessible, it isn't undesirable to begin with.

There could be some occupational hazard, I don't know. It seems clear enough that it isn't much of a food hazard (we've been eating it for decades).

I first heard about prions and Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease after getting a letter saying I may have been exposed.

I had surgery after someone with CJD, but before that person died, was autopsied, and diagnosed.

That was over a decade ago. So far no signs of it. I did make peace with the fact that I have a much higher probability of dying from it than the average American. The only substantivu changes in my life are:

(a) My family and I have had very frank discussion about death earlier than we would have otherwise.

(b) I no longer donate blood.

>> My family and I have had very frank discussion about death earlier than we would have otherwise.

It would benefit any family to have that discussion, even if both parents are in their 20s and there has been no "scare scenario". Many people die every single day due to unpredictable events, with no warning whatsoever. Unfortunately, too many people have never really pondered their mortality, leading them to be incapable of even considering what it would mean if man/woman/child died tomorrow. Having a sit-down meeting is likely to be brushed off as a "meh, it'll never actually happen to us".

Any one of us could be dead in the next 5 minutes. That's more reality than paranoia. The trick is to get to the point where you understand just how fleeting life is (you or a loved one might be gone any day now), but without letting it negatively control your life.

>> I did make peace with the fact that I have a much higher probability of dying from it than the average American

You should stop thinking that way. A decade past the initial scare, you're likely no more at risk than anyone else. You weren't given the disease, you were exposed to a small possibility of it. It's still the responsible thing to not donate blood or be an organ donor, but as far as your day-to-day life goes you should consider yourself squarely in the "average" category.

re: Discussions of death

I completely agree that it should be talked about more and plans made. Unfortunately several family members don't see things the same way and this provided the impetus for discussion.

> You should stop thinking that way. A decade past the initial scare, you're likely no more at risk than anyone else.

I'm not an expert, but the last time I researched it, I wouldn't even develop symptoms for at least a decade. So I'm actually at the point where I could actually find out that I have it.

> You weren't given the disease, you were exposed to a small possibility of it.

I absolutely agree! That said, my probability is still drastically higher than the _average American_. I was dating a science teacher at the time and she did some research into it. Basically the only other Americans with similar odds are military personnel stationed in Europe during the Mad Cow scare. There are other populations, e.g. Europeans during the Mad Cow scare, that are at similar or higher probabilities. But among Americans my odds are definitely higher than average.

> but as far as your day-to-day life goes you should consider yourself squarely in the "average" category.

I'm anything but average ;-) but I definitely don't let this impact my day-to-day life. It's much more of an intellectual curiosity and medical awareness for my family and doctors in case I should become symptomatic.

Surely, after a decade it should be fairly easy to detect Prp_sc levels, or at least extract bone marrow sample for examination. That should eliminate beyond any reasonable level of doubt, any reason for worrying about the matter.

Certain categories of people with exposure are to this day disallowed from being blood donors as a result due to the risk and difficulty in testing.

Red Cross rules: " You are not eligible to donate if:

From January 1, 1980, through December 31, 1996, you spent (visited or lived) a cumulative time of 3 months or more, in the United Kingdom (UK), or From January 1, 1980, to present, you had a blood transfusion in any country(ies) in the (UK) or France. The UK includes any of the countries listed below. ... "

http://www.redcrossblood.org/donating-blood/eligibility-requ...

According the always correct source of ultimate wisdom</s> - wikipedia, there isn't currently a way to test for it while alive, but there are some promising areas of research.

>At present, there is virtually no way to detect PrPSc reliably except by examining the brain using neuropathological and immunohistochemical methods after death. Accumulation of the abnormally folded PrPSc form of the PrP protein is a characteristic of the disease, but it is present at very low levels in easily accessible body fluids like blood or urine. Researchers have tried to develop methods to measure PrPSc, but there are still no fully accepted methods for use in materials such as blood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep...

The other side of it is that you can't really prepare yourself for the sudden loss of a close relationship.

Having a life insurance policy sized to the needs of children is probably more beneficial than having a frank conversation with them.

>> you can't really prepare yourself for the sudden loss of a close relationship

I wholeheartedly agree. I didn't mean to sound like you can prepare yourself so far as to avoid any mourning when someone close to you kicks the bucket. I do believe that once you've been through 1-3 such rounds of death, an average person will finally "understand" and take future deaths with a grain of salt.

As an aside, I personally find it frustrating when a family decides to hold a closed-casket funeral. Actually seeing death up front and personal is the only way to truly become acquainted. The number of times I've heard "think of the children"... which is really just adults being in denial about their own eventual death, and perpetuating that fear into their children. Death is a natural eventuality for all; the younger someone can figure that out, the better off they'll be.

Wow, what a frightening letter to receive! Thank you for sharing and best of health to you and your family.

Thank you!

I definitely went through a range of emotions from confusion to anger that more wasn't done to minimize the likelihood of incidents like this.

As I learned more, I realized how improbable this situation was in the first place. My current understanding is that while our* probability is higher than the average American, we're still highly unlikely to develop CJD. More importantly to me is that there isn't anything I can do about it, so I try not to let it consume a lot of my mental energy.

*I think there was a two week window, so anyone operated on at that hospital during that window is in the same situation.

Shouldn't autoclaves destroy all proteins, prion or otherwise? What exactly is the exposure vector?

edit: Unsourced statement from wikipedia[1]: "However, prions, such as those associated with Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease, may not be destroyed by autoclaving at the typical 134 °C for three minutes or 121 °C for 15 minutes.[citation needed]"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoclave

In an autoclave, prions can be deactivated by using a temperature of 270 F at 21 psi for 90 minutes. [1]

[1] http://www.bseinfo.org/priondefinition.aspx

> Normal sterilization procedures such as boiling or irradiating materials fail to render prions non-infective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encep... (The quoted sentence is from the paragraph immediately above the TOC block.)

Remember it was the hospital that sent me, and anybody else who had surgery during the same period, a letter saying I may have exposed. While they followed required sterilization procedures, those standards were apparently not enough to statistically ensure prions were destroyed. I'm not sure if they knew what was required in this regard, because one of the things mentioned in the letter was that all related surgical equipment had subsequently been destroyed.

I understand prion diseases are rare and it's more likely I'll die in a car accident or something, but the persistence of prions is just a horrifying concept.

Highly resistant to heat, radiation, proteases, enzymes... Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you.

They really are terrifying. It's hard to say exactly why this is so, but I think it has something to do with how they can occur (some protein randomly misfolding) and that they aren't really "alive", in the same sense that viruses and bacteria are.

You can kinda forgive viruses and bacteria: they're just looking to survive and multiply, just like us. In some cases they monopolise so much of their hosts' resources, or some really critical resource, that the host dies. But Prions, uhhhhh.... They're just kinda these unnatural things that go wrong and then kill you in pretty awful ways. Though not because they necessarily need to out-compete you for resources. Indeed, they don't seem to have any innate preference for existing or not existing, or thriving or not thriving. But they kill you anyway....

Also, just to scare you a little more, one of the more popular (perhaps dominant) theories about Alzheimer-family diseases is that they are initially caused by Prions, that migrate into your brain and start forming amaloid plaques, and then it's all down-hill from there.

On the upside, I vaguely remember reading some research on a 'almost ready' drug, initially developed to lessen the negative side-effects of chemo-therapy, that might be effective at stopping the progression of these plaques as they spread throughout the brain. If it actually works, we might have a treatment of AD-family diseases on the market in a year or so (the chemo folks have already gone through the lengthy human safety testing part of the exercise).

Not a cure, but at least it might halt or significantly slow progression of symptoms.

I'll probably pass on the Elk jerky on my next road trip through SW Colorado.

What would a cure for prion diseases even look like? Are prions targeted by the immune system at all? That to me is what is scary about them.

Not a direct answer to your question (because I don't know) but there's a couple doing research into a cure for prion disease because one of them (Sonia Vallabh) has it.

Eric Minikel has been blogging about their research [1] [2], maintains an active Twitter presence [3] and has GitHub [4] repositories on the issue. The blog has a lot of information for anyone wanting to know more about bioinformatics, basic research and prion disease in particular.

[1] http://www.cureffi.org/

[2] http://www.cureffi.org/about/

[3] https://twitter.com/cureffi

[4] https://github.com/ericminikel

> Sonia and I set out on a quest to re-train ourselves as scientists. We both started taking night classes, reading papers, calling up scientists, going to conferences. We left our old careers and found jobs in research labs, and eventually enrolled at Harvard Medical School, where we are now PhD students in biological and biomedical sciences.

Wow, what a great story. Inspiring that you can change careers mid life and be successful.

Thanks for sharing.

From what I recall, they are seen as normal proteins by the immune system, thus not targeted.

A simple illustration on prions was to imagine it like a busted cable end that would break the socket it plugs into, then the socket would break other cable ends plugged into it. This would occur until all sockets and cable ends were broken in the same way.

Decades ago, we had a PCMCIA card that did exactly that. A bent pin distorted the plastic in the socket and that led to more bent pins. Of course you had to try to force them in to propagate the problem and we never tested to see how many generations it could last. Once discovered we threw out all defective hardware which was just a few cards by then.

I have heard this one before!

It's the Zip Drive click of death for your body.

I was going to make this same point.

If we do devlop a cure for prion diseases, short of a biofilter in a transporter beam, it will probably be some sort of directed antibody that magically only recognizes prion form of the prion protein, sequesters it and prevents spread; and maybe if we're clever at molecular engineering, also recruits the body's natural capability to clear these proteins (insulin-degrading enzyme).

> What would a cure for prion diseases even look like?

You'd need something that responded to the physical conformation difference in the prion (which is clearly possible because prion disease is exactly a difference in behavior based on that) in a way which somehow selectively disrupts or expels the prion form of the protein (while different reaction is clearly possible, the desired difference is less clearly acheivable.)

I suppose some kind of nanomachine that actually physically reconfigured proteins from the prion conformation to the healthy one might also be plausible, eventually.

The particularity of prions is that when they come into contact with the normal form of the protein, they can change its conformation to create a new prion (that's how the disease spreads). In that light I think an "anti-prion" protein should be possible, going around the body converting prions back into healthy molecules.

We can look at kuru survivors who sadly, recently underwent rapid natural selection. Among this population are those possessing a variant of the prion protein gene that conveys strong resistance to prion diseases and the propogation of misfolded prion proteins. Here's an article: http://www.nature.com/articles/srep21804

There are molecules that cause prions to "refold" back into the healthy form. The problem is that so far every such known molecule is highly toxic, e.g. guanidinium chloride.

> What would a cure for prion diseases even look like?

Well, I mean, in some way the prion behaves differently than its normal counterpart. A molecule that interacted with that in such a way as to destroy the prion would seem to be a cure, right? At least, if not otherwise too harmful...

Or bind with it such that it is now inert, refolded back to a proper configuration or label it for destruction by the immune system.

Or how about a molecule that binds to the harmful part of the prion?

It can happen anywhere at anytime, that's why it's so terrifying.

There's a bit of good news in the fact that the biosphere has not only endured these last 3.8 billion years or so, but it has thrived. So there's probably no prion apocalypse in the future - at least not at the scale of the whole biosphere.

Individuals and species, on the other hand, seem to be fair game.

> Basically if you've got a prion disease it's just a matter of time before they end you.

Unless you had a mind backup and a second body ready.

Which, I think, all medicine ultimately aims, should aim, for; Why bother learning how to repair the single same body over and over (which won't help in unexpected catastrophic failures aka fatal accidents anyway) when you can just grow and jump into a new one?

While we have thousands of years of cultural belief that mind and body are distinct, I'm not aware of any scientific evidence for that. And there is a lot of evidence that the mind is directly dependent on the state of the body--change the body (drugs, injury, etc) and inevitably the state of mind changes too.

So I don't know of any reason to think that it's even possible to separate a mind from a body, let alone move one to a new one.

Just copy everything then.

There's no reason to roll over and just accept death from aging, accident or violence, any more than we accept death by flu or any other curable disease. Things which would've outright killed people 200 years ago merely cause a few days of a runny nose to us, so to speak. You cannot deny that medicine is, after all, basically the quest for immortality, and that is where it's going to end up.

You cannot copy "all" of the information stored in the human body. Briefly, this happens because the physical limitations of information storage require cooling (Landauer's principle) which requires kT×log(2) energy per bit, or about 2.5 zJ at room temperature. The brain's memory capacity is about 2.5 * 10^15 bytes (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-the-memor...), but the amount of information which can be retrieved is much smaller than the amount of information required to fully describe the system -- in the same way that knowing the contents of my hard disk will not help you recreate my laptop. The brain weighs about 1300 grams, of which maybe 5%, or 65 grams, is protein, composed of amino acids which weigh about 0.25 zeptograms, so contains about 2.6 * 10^23 amino acids. If we assume that we need a kilobit of information per amino acid, which seems like a lowball, it would require about 650 kilojoules of energy at the absolute thermodynamic minimum (vastly more efficient than real computers) just to store the information in the human brain. The electrical power required to simulate its dynamics would be tectonic, and that's assuming perfect efficiency.

Therefore, no computer that is composed of components which interact with the electromagnetic field and which operates at a temperature comparable to Earth temperatures will ever simulate a human mind to complete accuracy. It will always be an approximation.

Copying a disk does in no way require simulating each atom of the disk, though?

• We can already clone mammalian bodies.

• I'll assume that "growing" an adult human body, with a "blank" or "default" brain, isn't too inconceivable.

• Your real, natural brain can access the information within itself.

• At the moment of "copying", we figure some way to biologically link the two brains together, and write some biological software to pull data from the source brain to the destination brain.

The disk is designed to be copyable. The brain is not. See e.g. this evolved circuit:

https://www.damninteresting.com/on-the-origin-of-circuits/

The brain is, as far as we can tell, more like that circuit than a disk. Information is encoded within the structure of the processor itself, rather than being one of 2^N easily defined conformations of a memory device. As such, there is no way to copy the memories of brain A into brain B -- it simply isn't a thing. It would be like saying: copy all of the stains on this shirt, but the stains are integrated into the fibers and are unique to the stitching. In particular, this statement is false:

>Your real, natural brain can access the information within itself.

It cannot, for example, I cannot fully describe how to walk, given a pair of human legs and a butt. My brain can only encode information into language in the particular ways in which it is "designed" to do so. There is no way at all for the brain to report, e.g., the number of synapses within it, even if the firings of some neurons are recorded electronically.

I say "design" in this sense because the structure of my brain is contingent on its fitness-for-purpose in a way that affected its formation, via biological evolution, similar to the way that the structure of an intentionally designed object is contingent on its fitness-for-purpose, which affected its formation as it was constructed by the entity which made it.

Well then. If copying's out of the question (for now), then I propose Plan B:

A single brain, in a secure location, remotely controlling multiple bodies (one at a time, but able to switch between them.)

• Identify all the points of contact – the I/O pins – between the brain and body.

• Identify the medium and format of communication between brain/body/senses. I think most of this has already been achieved.

• Grow a body, a shell, without a brain.

• Take your brain out and keep it alive in a vat.

• Put wireless transceivers at each I/O point on the controlling brain and the shell body/bodies.

Will anything like this be remotely (<pun) possible?

You'd have to get used to lag but in the case of a fatal accident/violence* and most diseases your brain would be safe and able to switch to a new body..

I expect something like that would be very valuable to soldiers and workers in hazardous environments, like space.

While the information stored in the disk is stored in the "analog" world (magnetic potential of parts of the platters), there's an infinite amount of states that lead to the same digital disk contents. You can't take the digital representation and reconstruct the analog state that leads to it, since by doing the analog-to-digital conversion there was information loss.

And growing a body with a "blank" brain, what does that mean? Your conscience is absolutely intertwined with your body. If you take my mind and put it in Usain Bolt's body, that Frankenthing won't run 100m in <10s.

Given the focus of other responders on copying, I'd just like to point out that

"I'll assume that "growing" an adult human body, with a "blank" or "default" brain, isn't too inconceivable."

is problematic as well.

Okay, come on, Razengan. This thought experiment is not a difficult one.

I invent a machine that "scans" your body in such a way that I'm able to create a perfect replica of the state your body was in, nearly to the atom. Molecule, by molecule, the machine can rebuild your body, within a near infinitesimal margin of error.

I put you inside this machine, and scan your replica file, and then I save it to a massive storage device, and, when called upon I can rebuild that version of you whenever I want.

Now, after being successfully scanned, you exit the device. I blow your head off with a shotgun, and your headless corpse slumps on the floor. No witnesses.

Do you really think you'll come back to life, if I print out your replica from the file?

There is some fiction that touches on exactly that dilemma, and I love it. SOMA [0] being a prominent example.

As I said in other comments, once such technology is available, our laws and ethics will have to adapt to it one way or the other.

[0] http://store.steampowered.com/app/282140/

It is good to note that Lauder's principal is a statistical argument for degrees of freedom in a system. The Landauer principal on a statistical averaging of this effect, meaning you will sometimes be able to store a little more information.

I think you have your calculations off for the amount of energy required to store a human brain. Assume 8.6 x 10^10 neurons (more accurate number as its simple density measurement) each holding a 64-bit weight which gives us 5.5 x 10^12 bits. This multiplied by the lower bound e.g. k(1)ln2 or 9.56 x 10^-24 J, gives us 5.3 x 10^-12 J which is lower than the energy required to type a letter on this keyboard. Now even if we increase this by body temperature say 37 C we get 310.15 K or about 1.7 x 10^-8 J. This is of course a lower bound on the problem but even if you pump up the number of neurons or weight value you still get less than a joule of energy required.

>each holding 64 bits

There is no way in hell you're going to store the entire physical state of a neuron in anything near 64 bits. The question is not "information stored in the brain". The question is "information required to recreate the brain". In fact a single neuron has many more than 64 synapses, each of which itself has a highly intricate structure. All of the information describing this structure must be retained intact in order for the image brain to be equivalent to the substrate.

this is a really cool comment -- thank you! -- do you have any more reading you can link to?

Same, would love to read more about this!

Let's do a though experiment, and say that it is possible to 'copy' a person.

We live in the future where we all use fancy teleporters. You happily live in Amsterdam and commute to the Bay Area every morning. The way the teleporter actually works is by making a quick copy, deconstructing the object and the recreating the exact copy some place else. One day you go to the teleporter and realize it's broken. You contact customer service and are totally missing that 9 o clock meeting. Customer support says: "We're sorry but there has been a malfunctioning. You were teleported but not deconstructed properly. Could you please step back in the teleporter so we can deconstruct you?".

Body and self are intertwined in ways we don't yet fully understand. But it will be verry difficult to transfer consciousness. In the case of copying, you are for sure just dying and a new copy of you will be born.

A scarier thought even: Perhaps this is the case when we go to sleep and your consciousness dies and a new one wakes up every morning. Sure would explains why I always have a hard time falling asleep ;)

Other commenters brought this up too. :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082961

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14082866

I'm not sure I'd even want to exist inside a computer. Much of the pleasure in life is having a body.

There's an head transplant scheduled for this year with some major luck we'll soon know more about what's consciousness.

Do you consider your copy to be you?

Do you consider the "you" of today to be the same as the "you" of a year ago? Or is the current "you" just some bloke who has the same memories of the old "you"? Considering how much material in the body gets replaced over time.

OK, that's a bit off-topic, but an interesting question regardless, and I've been thinking about this lately. I've finally decided on something some time ago, though my opinion on the matter could still change.

I think that we are in perpetual evolution. Our memories are perpetually updated, and we make our choices based on our experience (and probably some biochemical mechanisms that affect the decision making process, probably by changing how those memories are accessed, among others.

Aren't we dying everyday, for someone else to wake up in our place the next day? To put it more bluntly, our consciousness is interrupted for the night, a "garbage collector" running, and we "reboot" the next day. What about this night you can't remember because of alcohol? Someone was here, controlling your body, yet it wasn't you (and to repeat myself, the one writing this - me - is probably going to be slightly different than the one reading the possible replies - "me" as well - and that's OK).

What I find valuable is experience. Period. It takes a huge amount of energy to train a child, and the goal is for him to be beneficial to the society (think tribe/species if you want) in return. He will be able to pass on part of his experience to the next generation, thus improving the pool of knowledge for the society (this is a general rule, it can work with genes as well).

Thus, jumping a bit to conclusions, I value my experience and memories more than this body. And I would gladly part with it if it could mean a longer life span for them. Even existing only as an "archive". But I consider that I have still much data/experience collection I can do before passing out. And there is no way to pass this data on.

If you think about it this way, a copy is a fork, and is likely to preserve experience: that's good. And cooperation is a given if the two share this idea. Moreover, I consider it to be a rather optimistic and cheerful way of viewing things, it can be comforting at times; And I feel like some robot apocalypse or similar is simply a non issue, as long as knowledge is preserved.

That's the thought process you can have if you think too much about issues like teleportation.

Now, I need to get back to work on my brain scanner.

Seriously though, what is your opinion on the matter, now that I exposed my current one? I would be curious if you could "share your experience" with me :P

> Aren't we dying everyday, for someone else to wake up in our place the next day? To put it more bluntly, our consciousness is interrupted for the night, a "garbage collector" running, and we "reboot" the next day.

That.. is eerily similar to something I heard or read from a character in a game/anime/book/show very recently, but the name escapes me..

Maybe it was from Tides of Numenera.. You should definitely check out that game as well as SOMA. There's also a charming-yet-mindfuck'y anime called Kaiba. They go pretty deep into the idea of consciousness, identity and free will.

By the way, is there a name or term for that, uh..idea? That our self "resets" in sleep?

This thought has crossed my minds many times! Great to see it here. I don't know if there is an experiment that could prove or disprove this theory. How does one differentiate between two 'different' selves? And should there be a difference?

Ah there's where it gets icky, but it's something for the philosophers to sort out. :)

As long as my copy has my memories up to that point, and the plans I had for the future from there on, it's as good as me.

> As long as my copy has my memories up to that point, and the plans I had for the future from there on, it's as good as me.

What happens if they don't destroy the original version of you and now two exist...

Although fiction that touches on these issues is my favorite genre (like [0][1][2]), I don't have an answer for that.

All I can say is that technology has a way of forcing people to reevaluate their laws, ethics and society, and this will be no different.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiba

[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/272270/ (Tormenet: Tides of Numenera)

[2] http://store.steampowered.com/app/282140/ (SOMA)

A short story in this vein that I really like is "Fat Farm" by Orson Scott Card. The copied dude looks wistfully after his copy who just walked out the door, and asks "Now what?" The answer is not pleasant.

Many of you have probably heard about Prions and Papua New Guinea but the end of the article discusses new prion diseases showing up in deer within North America.

The idea that human's could get a prion disease from deer meat, coupled with a potentially long incubation period, is frightening. Living in a hunting community I may avoid eating deer for the foreseeable future.

it's highly unlikely... There's a (probably directed, weighted) graph of species-species transmission potential, and it does seem to obey some rough distance rule, which does NOT correlate necessarily with species distance rule. We think that cows can transmit to humans; cows and sheep can co-transmit. (if you have a sheep with scrapie sharing a pasture with cow, the cow can get mad cow disease). deer though do not seem to transmit to cow, even though CWD is super common in deer and deer and cow pasture together pretty much everywhere in the US except maybe hawaii.

Here, a transgenic mouse with human prion protein is resistant to CWD transmission; but the same mouse with elk protein is susceptible.

http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19336896.2015.11...

Identification and containment is also a management priority:

http://www.michigan.gov/dnr/0,4570,7-153-10366_54559_59155-3...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5hTF2pw-4s

Hawaii too- there are a handful of deer and a ton of cows on the Big Island.

That's really great information thanks for sharing

Here is a really good review:

https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/66/1/199/284812/Other-a...

Reminds me of a scene in the film Book of Eli, which, if you're a fan of Fallout, should watch.

An underrated movie, imo.

Prions were the cause of the BSE cattle disease. more commonly known as mad cow disease in europe some years ago, which was blamed on cattle being fed animal products. It killed a couple hundred human and millions of animals either died or were slaughtered.

The incubation period is several years so at the height of the crisis the worst case scenario involved hundreds of thousand of people developing the disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bovine_spongiform_encephalopat...

Lots of US people end up hearing about this in a roundabout way, having lived in the UK for a period of time is a disqualifier for donating blood in the US. So each time you donate blood you read a question asking about cumulative time spent:

https://www.fda.gov/BiologicsBloodVaccines/BloodBloodProduct...

Can we view this as nature's mechanism to prevent cannibalism amongst species? Mad cow disease occurred when cattle were fed the remains of other cattle in the form of meat and bone meal

I think assigning animus to nature is misleading here. It's a factor that once known would influence people away from cannibalism, but there's plenty of cannibalistic species that don't seem to suffer from prion diseases (and CWD is the opposite -- prion disease with rare cannibalism).

Why would nature care?

Cannibalism seriously threatens a species' survival. Risk of disease from eating same-species meat is a good way to stop it.

Small mammals often respond to stress with cannibalism.

http://www.petplace.com/article/small-mammals/general/when-y...

Rabbits are somewhat infamous for eating their young.

I'm not sure there is any research about it, but it could be a resource preserving behavior.

Hardly. Plenty of species exhibit cannibalism; see certain spiders and praying mantis (mantis?) post-mating rituals.

Correct, I don't mean to imply that no species are cannibalistic; as you note, some instances are well-known.

Nevertheless, cannibalism can be a real risk for some species and adaptations to prevent it are useful, especially in the case of mammals.

A hard to detect and easy to mis-attribute wasting disease is not an adaption.

Nature cares not a whit about "species".

All things equal.

Specie A (with this disease) stop cannibalizing after seeing the outcome, better chance of survival.

Specie B (without this disease) eat themselves to the last person... Lower chance of survival as a specie.

Nature "cares" by generating lots of options, then let the fittest to survive. So while nature doesn't intend or plan for a specie to survive, the outcome is no different from if it did. I believe the OP means "care" in this sense.

"Specie B (without this disease) eat themselves to the last person... Lower chance of survival as a specie."

That seems unlikely. A bigger risk would be a carnivorous species exterminating its prey species.

Right, having-prions can be seen as adaptive for a species.

Personification of "nature" is a shorthand. No one actually thinks "nature" is an intelligent entity making independent decisions about the biology of creatures (when people refer to that, they call it "God").

Rather, they mean "Could this be the way that the species' internal biological and evolutionary processes are involved in preventing cannibalism?" Personally, I think "nature's way" is a highly preferable and convenient shorthand. :)

I wasn't objecting to the teleological language (as you say, it's a convenient shorthand for an unconscious process). Rather, the idea that "species survival" is a relevant variable for selection to target is thoroughly confused (or, nature cares deeply for the gene, but knows not of your "species").

If anything, the aversion to cannibalism would be an effect of prion disease.

Interesting side story is that Gadjusek did a year in prison for child molestation (which he think is a natural/good thing).

There is a documentary on him on BBC called the Genius and the boys https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OxppDxzSww

Researcher: "I have no solid idea where this problem could be coming from. As a last resort I'll examine whether the ritualistic consumption of decomposing human brains may have something to do with it"

> Lindenbaum had a hunch about what was going on, and she turned out to be right. It had to do with funerals. [0]: Ibid.

Can you be tested for prion disease?

Indeed, you can. What you cannot do, however, is remain alive to get the results.

"Indeed, you can. What you cannot do, however, is remain alive to get the results."

If we're broadening our minds to all possibilities, it's worth pointing out that you can expose a third party to your as-yet-unconfirmed prion disease and then destructively test them, which would then allow you to test yourself while remaining alive.

Unless they are negative?

No, he is making a joke that you can only test by looking at slices of brain tissue (which require you to be dead to do)

You don't have to be dead when they start, but you will be when they finish.

I don't understand. Aren't biopsies of the brain possible? I still remember that episode of House MD, Euphoria.

Sure: http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110130/full/news.2011.59.htm...

The last I heard the test can only be done during autopsy. (Because they're analyzing slices of brain tissue.)

For the past months I've been seriously considering starting a theme restaurant that served wild meats - deer, hogs, gators, large constrictors, etc. That idea just went out the window.

Prion-disease transmission from wild game is still quite rare.

I'd be more worried about exotic parasites or radioactivity from the wild hogs.

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/germany/110...

Around here, deer meat is illegal to sell. You would probably have to farm the meats.

>My own interest in this question became rekindled by my experiences in New Guinea over the last 50 years. When I arrived in New Guinea for the first time, it became clear to me almost immediately that New Guineans are curious, questioning, talkative people with complex languages and social relationships, on the average at least as intelligent as Europeans and Americans.

http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Guns,_Germs,_and_S...

Is it certain this came from cannibalism and not infected pigs?

Yes, very certainly. When the cannibalism stopped, so did instances of Kuru. Although you can get Prion diseases from eating infected pig brain and nervous tissue, the instances discussed in the article were solely caused by ritual cannibalism.

This article make me unwell. Just thinking of the cannibalism makes me wanna throw up.

Let me accelerate that then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beginning_Was_the_End

This might just have been the best thing I've ever seen on Wikipedia.

We evolved from a species of ape that developed an appetite for going on cannibalistic brain-eating killing sprees followed shortly after by a lot of rape because eating brains fills us with uncontrollable lust. In the long-term this made us super intelligent, but killed our psychic abilities and thus our ability to connect with nature, so we began to do a lot of really awful things like pollute the environment, develop nuclear weapons, and become racially-tolerant (gasp!). If you want to escape from the hell that awaits modern society, then you should drop out, become vegetarian, get acquainted with Eastern philosophy, and maybe try and reshape your head using some wooden frames. Also, modern cannibalistic tribes are really just trying to play catch-up with white people.

But the best part of all has to be the Devo connection.

Wow, that book seems like a load of bollocks and a half. Makes Truthers look like the picture of sanity by contrast...

And that's why you never grok.

NPR needs to be more concise. Their informative articles such as this one are written as if the writer is trying to get an A in creative writing 101. Knock off the color and give us the scoop in 2-3 paragraphs.

Okay, atleast some benefit of being a vegetarian. But iirc there was some vegies too that can infect the brain.

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