The Insanity Virus | Hacker News Reader

The Insanity Virus

discovermagazine.com

170 pointsleonardodw74 comments

>Beyond that, the insanity virus (if such it proves) may challenge our basic views of human evolution, blurring the line between “us” and “them,” between pathogen and host.

Oh, I think we're already there. Given that there are ~10x more microorganisms in your gut than cells in your body[1], and the more you learn about the lymphatic / immune system the more it seems like a symbiote rather than a part of our body, and that mitochondria share many characteristics of symbiotic bacteria[2]. It's another wrinkle, and a very interesting one at that, but that's far from a revolutionary concept.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gut_flora [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrion#Origin

Jeff McMahan has some very interesting arguments about what we are. Simply put, he argues that we are not our cells. Our cells, our organisms are simply part of ourselves. Based on that I think that we are entities made out of e.g. our cells, immune systems and the bacteria which our organisms carry. Sure, we can make a distinction between 'us' and 'them'; it's just that 'us' actually includes 'them', and that it's just a distinction made by ourselves because we like simple models and hate the feeling of being not autonomous. Humans like to compartmentalize: we see that all the time especially when dealing which psychiatric diseases.

Indeed, humans like to "compartmentalize"; the problem is that by definition you have to compartmentalize to define concepts. Without that, everybody would be talking horribly vaguely.

I don’t think I’m my cells or the bacteria living in my gut. Well, that’s not entirely true, I clearly perceive the cells in my hand and the bacteria in my gut as part of myself in some way but not the same way as other things.

Maybe this question is helpful: What do I care about? Clearly not my cells or microorganisms. I would be more than happy to dispose of my hip joint and replace it with titanium should that ever be necessary. I essentially think the same about every other part of my body.

I also don’t care about my DNA at all. If you cloned me after my death I wouldn’t suddenly spring to life, I wouldn’t be reborn as a baby, my clone would be a different person.

What do I care about, then? That, which says this sentence in my brain right now as I type it, whatever it is. It’s probably rooted in structures in my brain somewhere. Which doesn’t mean that I care about the cells in my brain, not at all. If there is a way to preserve that structure and run it I would be just fine. That’s what I care about.

That, to me, is the most important, probably the only really important part of me. The body matters but only in the sense of being a sort of tool.

You should care about your DNA! It isn't just a blueprint, but a computational device that stores an insane amount of state information. In fact, the internal state of your cells as an aggregate (genome/proteome, concentration/expression levels, modifications, etc) hold far more state info than mere synapses.

I understand that we all view our brains as a record of our cognisant experiences. However, there is far more at play at the molecular level than non-biologists usually consider. Brains are not magical "higher level" abstract devices. They work in concert with the existing computational machinery of the cell and the genome.

If you don't buy that argument, at least be mindful that if you don't take adequate care, you will increase your probability of getting a cancer that your immune system cannot fight. Your cells are critical. Your gut flora is critical. You are an ecosystem, not an individual. Your mind is only the deterministic imprinting that the physical world makes on you as you make your way through life.

(I'm a computational biochemist and soon to be systems biology student.)

Ok, then let me rephrase that, I care about whatever it is that makes me think this sentence. I don’t necessarily care about its specific implementation, whatever it is.

This doesn’t mean that I think I shouldn’t take care of my body – I know that it is instrumental to me – I just wouldn’t care much if it were destroyed should I be able to continue be whatever makes me write this sentence.

I find it pretty cool that snippets of information passed down from my ancestors encoded in my DNA can be synthesised into physical objects, find their way into somebody else's body and permanently write themselves into their DNA. We're all infectious!

Some of those bits of information might even turn out to be useful, millions of years down the line. In fact, they probably are, which is why this mechanism has stayed in our genome despite all the unpleasant side-effects. We share genetic information outside of reproduction, just like bacteria do!

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

That thesis would assume that we all live in some sort of bubble were the environment we live in and the foods we consume don't impact our bodies...

Heart Disease is mainly caused by a lifetime of poor behaviour in this regard, for example.

Yep. But as an example, there is currently research looking into the connection between dental hygiene and heart disease. It's all hypothesis at this point, but a lifetime of eating sugary/starchy foods and poor dental hygiene can lead to gums the inflame/bleed easily, which can lead to bacteria more easily getting into your bloodstream, which may contribute to atherosclerosis.

http://www.webmd.com/heart-disease/features/periodontal-dise...

From that article: "And one study found that the presence of common problems in the mouth, including gum disease (gingivitis), cavities, and missing teeth, were as good at predicting heart disease as cholesterol levels."

From the cardiovascular perspective, it's far simpler to conclude that poor vascular perfusion of the mouth can amplify oral disease than it is to postulate an entirely new paradigm upending decades of established research. Vascular disease predisposes you to infections of the limbs; why would we not expect the same in the mouth?

If offered the ability to bet on one vs the other, this is the situation where I'd use my assets as collateral so I could put the maximum possible wager on the line in favor of vascular disease being the causal entity here, not periodontal disease.

That was just an example - another potential bad guy could be Chlamydophila pneumoniae. Of course something like heart disease is probably caused by a myriad of interacting factors, so I wouldn't want to take your wager. I definitely don't assign a lot of confidence to the established research in health and nutrition though - for example, I think the food guide pyramid is bad advice and based on bad science, but it's been officially promulgated by the U.S. government for close to two decades now.

That's interesting, can you throw me a link or two about the food guide pyramid and fixes thereto?

I thought Good Calories, Bad Calories was very good. It's about the bad science behind the high-carb, low-fat diet advice. From there you can get into things like paleo diet etc. I'm not recommending any particular diet - there are plenty of people who think Taubes is full of it (http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/01/big-fat-fake http://www.proteinpower.com/drmike/wp-content/uploads/2008/0...), and I'm not a doctor and have no training in the field. Just an interested observer, since diet, nutrition, and exercise is the base for anything else you're going to do in your life.

Amazon link - http://www.amazon.com/Good-Calories-Bad-Gary-Taubes/dp/14000... Google Books preview - http://books.google.com/books?id=Xdm40JUD9HwC&printsec=f...

Are inflamed, bleeding gums really poorly perfused?

Your genes sure as hell didn't evolve to make you immortal, either. They evolved in the hopes that you'll live long enough to make a few new copies of them, and engineering the vital parts of the body to last significantly longer wasn't a high priority.

I'd be disinclined to throw out the huge volume of research on the subject of what actually causes heart disease and cancer due to a pithy slogan.

Death is an evolved trait. It's an advantage for most organisms because it ensures a steady turnover of populations which enables micro and macro evolution at a reasonable pace in response to environmental, climate, et al changes.

Sounds like the bad kind of group selectionism hypothesis to me. Death bestows no fitness benefit to the individual, and is therefore not evolutionarily selected for. Organisms don't die because evolution says they should, they die because evolution doesn't care.

It's more active than that. A trait that enhances reproduction and reduces longevity will be selected for, so whenever there are engineering tradeoffs between reproduction and longevity, evolution will select in favor of reproduction.

Odd then that the most advanced species have the longest gestation periods and the simplest species have the shortest.

That's because there's no advanced and simple in evolution.

My point was that the parents comment was completely unfounded. Did humans always have super fast gestation periods and then right before we gained intelligence it suddenly took the better part of a year and produced a child that isn't self sufficient for at least a decade?

When the evolution subject comes up it always seems to inspire a bunch of would-be scifi writers to come out and explain "how it all works" based on, as near as I can tell, pure fantasy.

Depends on how you interpret `reproduction' in the comment you're talking about.

Reproduction trumps everything in evolution. It's everything, actually. But for that to be true you can't define it as `number of offspring born', but in a more long-term sense. And e.g. Elephants seem to have more long-term off-spring by investing more in fewer births.

Organisms don't evolve, populations do. Death of individuals is beneficial for most populations. For one, it's easier to build something that lasts a while and reproduces than it is to build something that lasts indefinitely. For another, as mentioned, populations with significant generational turnover bounce back faster after catastrophic environmental or other stresses (because they reproduce faster, among other dynamic effects).

Evolution is not about optimization.

Evolution doesn't cause individuals to perform selfless acts for the good of the species. Where possible, it will select for selfish acts at the expense of the species.

How about acts that that promote your selfish genes? Your relatives share a lot of your genes.

Very close relatives, yes. But not the entire species.

It strikes me as highly implausible that suicide would benefit your close genetic kin more so than staying alive in order to find food and care for offspring, for example.

Death is an evolved trait, but it has to do with life history trade-offs, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory

In some cases life history trade-offs differ between the sexes leading to longevity differences. In general, females live longer than males, although in humans the difference is pretty small. There are some extreme examples of this in spiders, such as the tarantula, where the male lives about 2 years and the female 8.

Cochran collaborator Paul Ewald (they wrote an article hypothesizing that homosexuality is also caused by a pathogen) wrote a book about that subject 10 years ago. This article reminded me about that too, probably because it mentioned the same researcher: http://books.google.com/books?id=HlmxmE6TMCwC&lpg=PP1...

I have a very close family member who has suffered from schizophrenia. It is troubling to think that the months of ear infections (or infections that caused said infections) when she was a newborn could have been the trigger.

On the flip-side, it is very heartening to think they may be moving closer to understanding the disease. Looking at my family history, I believe there is a strong predilection in my family for it, so having some hope that my children and/or grandchildren could possibly be spared would be fantastic.

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

Schizophrenia is, to my understanding, sort of a catch-all phrase for several different problems with similar symptoms but different effective treatments. Even in the study, they found only 49% of people with schizophrenia were infected.

There are a depressing number of such umbrella-terms. The (likely) grand-daddy of them all being "chronic fatigue", which you'll almost certainly get applied to you if you have an undiagnosed cause of "fatigue" for more than 6 months.

The depressing part is that such umbrella terms prevent study of the causes, because they likely come from many sources, and muddle any research.

That's why that 49% figure is so exciting. Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind. And not only could there be different diseases that have very similar symptoms but it's possible that a single disease could be reached via a different set of initial/contributing causes, or at least a slightly different causal pathway. For example, take some hypothetical disease that is found to be "caused by" a lack of vitamin D. Well, it may be possible that a particular person gets plenty of vitamin D intake, but that they have a gene variant that makes their body not utilize vitamin D normally. Or perhaps their genes are fine, but they have some other gross bodily malfunction (organ failure?) that is causing the vitamin D utilization process to be disrupted or minimized. Regardless of the specific chain of causation, they could all result in the same unhealthy symptoms expressed.

Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind.

It's really weird to characterize diseases by their effects rather than their cause, because then you don't really have a disease per se, but rather a pattern of symptoms that may or may not always have the same cause.

One major example is SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), which appears to be little more than a medical term for "the baby died of asphyxiation and we can't figure out how".

"we can't figure out"

That's also synonymous with "it's a viral infection".

this being the second time i've heard the term "catch-all" in this thread, note that words in areas outside of medicine have a similar porosity. our understanding of many things is still naive.

The 1-1 connection viewpoint has always bugged me. It assumes that the existing system has a "correct" state, that it has been off-set by a single item, and that that single item exists in isolation from external influences.

Yeah. Sure. Because things in our bodies never interact with each other.

Considering its complexity, the system is incredibly deterministic. Small perturbations can wreak havoc, and have been fingered for so many disorders.

Just because the etiology of a disorder hasn't yet been determined does not mean it won't be.

Perhaps, though there is a fascinating link between the three illnesses you mention and vitamin D deficiency.[1] The human body is a complex organism that we are only beginning to understand, but there are a few critical things that the human body absolutely needs to survive and thrive.

In the short-term, we all need adequate food, water, and air. Without this short-term fuel, we die.

In the long-term, vitamin D <rant>misnamed as it is not a vitamin but is actually the most powerful seco-steroid hormone in the body -- a seco-steroid hormone is basically just something in the body that is made from cholesterol and turns genes on and off</rant> optimizes health. If you think about it, it makes sense intuitively that vitamin D would be so critical. Most living things have adapted to make something useful from the sun's radiation. Plants use it to feed themselves, and most animals use it to help generate vitamin D.

[1] Sorry for the crazy-long-and-to-a-google-doc link -- I didn't want to give the PDF-link and the original New England Journal of Medicine HTML page is subscriber-only: http://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&q=cache:o13HNdtJjWwJ:c...

You might say up front you are ranting about data published in a very respected publication.

Key takeaway quote from the article you linked:

[Take] 1000 IU of vitamin D3 or 3000 IU of vitamin D2 per day."

Quite so. Cancer, for example, is a catch-all term which is more a genre of diseases rather than a specific disease. Our understanding of biology and disease is still fairly primitive.

Perhaps it is because there is a separate substance called the soul that is affected by these ailments, and since it is not a biological system is unaffected by our biological methods.

A popular idea? No. Fits the evidence well? Yes.

The absence of evidence is not equivalent to evidence.

I maintain there is positive evidence as well as negative.

For instance, having a supportive social group has a significant impact on psychological wellbeing. What is the biological or chemical mechanism in this case?

I have no clue. That's not my area of expertise. I bet if you're interested there's quite a bit of research on it, though. What are you getting at?

What evidence does that hypothesis fit? What predictive value does it have?

A) Biological solutions do not work B) Psychological solutions work a bit better, but they tend to be behaviorist solutions

So, there is at least a progression of greater effectiveness the more we move towards "soulish" solutions.

C) Prediction is the better we understand what the soul needs, just like understanding our psychological needs, the more effective we will be at healing problems with the soul.

Spiritual solutions have not been demonstrated to work any more than biological solutions have — less so, actually, since there are drugs for treating schizophrenia with some degree of efficacy. We can't say, "Thing X is not proven, therefore Unproven Thing Y must be true" — that's illogical.

I know people who have successfully exorcised demons:

http://www.scriptoriumdaily.com/2007/10/04/cosmetic-surgery-...

Plus, how much have you looked into things such as spiritual disciplines? Meditation comes up here on HN quite often, which would be one spiritual solution to psychological problems.

I wouldn't exclude that reason myself. Can you elaborate, though?

One point is that the causal chain should largely be reversed when we look at the relation between biological phenomena and different psychological ailments. Treating the chemicals should be considered mostly treating symptoms. Unfortunately, many children today are over medicated because doctors think that if they've removed the symptom (i.e. ADD) they've fixed the problem.

Second, we should look at what the soul needs. For example, if the soul is a separate, higher substance it will not be satiated by a lower substance. As Jesus says, "man does not live by bread alone." The only thing at the level of a soul is another soul. So, souls need relationships with other souls. Theology also comes into the picture here, since theology claims the only thing higher than a human soul is God. So, ultimate satiation for our soul is found in God. The medieval church has extensive experience and spiritual disciplines aimed at connecting our souls to God. Thus, theology becomes an important aspect of psychology.

Having a "feeling" and then stating such as fact doesn't make sense.

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

Sounds like technical debt. Anyone up for a refactoring code sprint?

http://www.salon.com/technology/feature/2002/08/28/0wnz0red/

By Cory Doctorow

That is one long article/piece of fiction, but I'm enjoying it so far.

I guess somewhere it gets to the point you're making :)

From my childhood experience of computing of deleting things I thought were useless and then finding out soon after I really borked my system, i'd be a bit more careful.

That's why we use version control.

Tempting, but the system's only covered by end-to-end tests that take years to run. I'm afraid to change it!

Wow.

It's remarkable how failure-tolerant the human body is.

I guess that this is truly a sign of 'the future'. Forget hoverboards, we're one step closer to being able to reshape ourselves, one step closer to fixing diseases at the source.

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

I don't know much about Kerouac, but from reading his biography I don't get the impression that Nash was brilliant because of his illness. He was brilliant in spite of his illness, or more accurately I think he was brilliant before his illness really started hitting him and he was never really the same again afterwards.

Schizophrenia has destroyed a lot of promising young minds, and I'm not convinced that it has created any.

That doesn't sound right. From what I've read, people with mental illness and those who are highly creative may get the trait (creativity on the one hand and mental illness on the other) from the same source.[1]

From a study on the subject:

Daniel Nettle, a psychologist at Newcastle University, and Helen Clegg, at the Open University in Milton Keynes, carried out the survey.

On analysing 425 responses, the psychologists found that artists and schizophrenics scored equally high on unusual cognition, a trait which gives rise to a greater tendency to feel in between reality and a dream state, or to feel overwhelmed by one’s own thoughts.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/nov/30/psychology.hig...

the psychologists found that artists and schizophrenics scored equally high on unusual cognition, a trait which gives rise to a greater tendency to feel in between reality and a dream state, or to feel overwhelmed by one’s own thoughts.

I don't think it follows. Just because both schizophrenia and artistic temperament are characterised by "unusual cognition" doesn't mean that they're related. Being drunk is like being a lemur in that they both prohibit you from driving a car, but it doesn't follow that drunkenness and lemurness are related.

Right, you can respond that way to pretty much any correlation. But, if there's a plausible explanation for an actual connection, such a dismissal is too trite.

That's another way of expressing a desire for people to go insane when medicine could have cured them because you have enjoyed the output of the insanity. I realize you may not have thought about it that way, but I hope that once you do you realize that that is an awfully impolite thing to ask of others. We've got enough brilliance around that doesn't destroy the hosts after shredding the best years of their lives to keep you satisfied, I think.

The last paragraph says it all:

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

A honest question, is Discover magazine usually this good?

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

I would say much the opposite.

Given the fact that schizophrenics seem to have different brain morphology, it seems that whatever causes it has organizational, not activational effects.

That is to say, the brain is permanently damaged during a critical period in a child's life, which leads to these effects later on. If it is a virus, perhaps it could be prevented, but almost certainly not cured.

Unless neurogenesis can be triggered in such a way that new neurons develop and migrate along the normal routes, once the disruption is removed.

Therapy to encourage new synapse development could also help, once any morphology-disrupting factor is removed.

Migration of neurons occurs primarily in utero and very early childhood, and as you might notice, during this time very few memories are formed.

That's because memories are built on those very synaptic connection you would need to rewire. Any cure that deals with reorganizing the brain could very well wipe out who they are. If it's even possible. And for that kind of technology we're talking at minimum centuries, not decades.

don't downvote my comment to zero because you may disagree with me. downvote if i said something rude, offensive or off-topic.

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