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Comment by tauntz | Hacker News Reader

Prions terrify me as well because it seems like there's no stopping them..

> In 2015, researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston found that plants can be a vector for prions. 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

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I had read this before. It's horrifying. How do you stop the chain reaction of proteins folding into lower energy states? It's not like a bacteria or virus; it's more like ice-nine, except instead of water it's your brain.

This really puts it into perspective...

To save someone else the time, the "ice-nine" referred to in this comment is fictional.

To be fair, "Cat's Cradle" is a famous work of science-fiction

For which generation?

For a new generation of 10000 every day.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Are there many noteworthy modern science fiction authors that hold up to the Asimov / Clarke / Lem generation? I would think someone reasonably versed in science fiction would have at least heard of it -- I'm a "zoomer" and I have.

We have a number of very good modern science fiction authors that easily rival them. While none of them may be as iconic, I think that has more to do with competition in the genre and breadth of the market.

Name some? My experience with authors like Cixin Liu and some contemporaries is that they are unreadable, this could just be bad translations in Liu's case but I'm not at all convinced modern writers rival the classical greats in SciFi.

FWIW either the writing or translation seems to get better as 3BP progresses.

I found myself similarly underwhelmed by Cixin Liu given all the good things I'd heard.

I'm horrible at remembering names, but three of my favorites off the top of my head are Peter Watts, Neil Stephenson and Kim Stanley Robison.

I've generally had decent luck finding new authors by just by seeing who gets Hugo and Nebula nominations.

I read a lot including Sci-Fi and did not find any who are close. Does not mean they do not exist. Most likely not as famous and not exposed to wide public.

The actual writing from a lot of the golden age and New Wave sci-fi authors is... OK at best, with a few exceptions (Bradbury's distinctively poetic and dreamlike prose, for example). Tons of modern sci-fi authors write stories with more literary merit, better clarity, better-conveyed action, more believable characters and dialog, and so on. The improvements there are really obvious when reading, say, an early 70s The Hugo Winners or collections of 1950s stories, and then a 90s The New Hugo Winners.

Whether their ideas and worlds stand up to Asimov and company, or happen to be appealing to a particular reader, is another matter, but the command of writing itself is overall better, I'd say. I don't think a modern author would have much luck getting novels or stories in major magazines published with Asimov-tier dialog & characterization, for example.

Plus those eras were full of tons of garbage, in addition to what we remember. New Wave (60s and 70s) in particular tended to some very special interests that I don't think have held up too well, with some exceptions. A lot of that era's stories are very in love with sex & drugs and not in a way that really translates into a good tale. Most of those aren't exactly well-beloved these days.

On the flip side, there are definitely some modern sci-fi authors that are among the most famous but have some serious problems putting together an entirely good novel. I'll refrain from naming names but among them is maybe the only author whose book has ever made me mad at them for wasting such a good idea, setting, and opening, by just having no damn follow-through and getting super lazy in the last 1/3 or so. They're probably a top-5 sci fi name, among active authors today. But I stand by the overall quality level being notably higher on at least some dimensions, and it's even true for that guy.

> Whether their ideas and worlds stand up to Asimov and company, or happen to be appealing to a particular reader, is another matter, but the command of writing itself is overall better, I'd say.

But that's just the thing -- science fiction is about the ideas, and about the sociological and psychological impact of those ideas.

Whether a work has literary merit is neither here nor there for most people, and "science fiction" as a genre has been looked down upon by literary folks since it's inception. I don't know why anyone would be interested in praise from a community that is so invested in snobbery.

Regardless, science fiction authors of the time did have literary merit, if that's what you care about. LeGuin and Butler, are both regarded well in modern literary circles as far as I know. Vonnegut himself is regarded well also. At the time however, their books were condemned as being inadequate by the prevailing literary reviewers for various reasons unrelated to their actual writing.

Work from that time is perfectly functional and servicable for the most part, especially if you look at the places where the stories were submitted and published -- a small majority of Clarke's works ended up being published in Playboy, I don't think anyone can blame him for not creating a literary masterpiece when the majority of places that would actually pay him for his work were essentially pulp magazines.

> Asimov / Clarke / Lem

Asimov's SF is, sadly, hard to read these days. Clarke has held up better but still a bit dated. Lem reads as fresh as ever, but he's not so well known.

(What happened to Bradbury and Heinlein?)

Gene Wolfe is only one generation younger than these guys, and he just died, but I consider him a better writer than all the others I mentioned except Lem.

Peter F Hamilton. Start with Pandora's Star if you want more Asimovish, or Reality Dysfunction if you want it more Lemmy \m/.

Seminal work of sci-fi, I highly recommend if for no other reason than to get the ice-nine references you'll inevitably come across.

The funny thing is when I posted that, I hadn’t heard of Cat’s Cradle; I was just familiar with what the fictional ice-nine referred to.

However, "ice IX" is real and distinct from "Ice-nine", so clarity is worthwhile.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_IX

Also I only know of Ice-nine because of fun facts like this, didn't even know the name of the story let alone have read it.

Bleach works as surface decontamination agent. They know it works for CWD, and I expect it works for others too.

> Bleach works as surface decontamination agent. They know it works for CWD, and I expect it works for others too.

I remember reading that nothing but incineration would work in the context of Food-and-Mouth disease, but it seems modern techniques in brain surgery do use bleach. Interesting.

Essentially, the only thing that works is disintegrating the prions. You can't wash them off, since you're simply washing them into the water cycle. You can't deal with them in a way that preserves other biological matter, since they are proteins, disintegrating them means disintegrating any other proteins in that area.

Foot

For brain surgery, it seems like washing them off the implements and into the water cycle is still an enormous win in terms of risk.

I'm not sure you understand how irresponsible that is.

That might be. I'm not an expert.

Is it more irresponsible than not removing them prior to operating on someone's brain?

You're acting like those are the only two options available, though. That's not the case.

Do you understand how irresponsible it is? It might be but it's obvious. How common are prions? How many prions get into the water cycle already? Prions probably don't go through the water cycle's gas phase. Are we worried about seafood? Surely lots of prions end up in oceans and lakes already.

It sounds a bit scary but it's not clear that it would change the risk profile.

Foot-and-Mouth disease has a vaccine. I believe burning was for economic reasons: vaccination is expensive; the reproductive cycle (and by extension the population) is essentially human-controlled and the livestock population can recover quickly; and "we don't need to vaccinate" increases livestock sales.

I'm missing the reference to foot and mouth disease. FMD is a viral infection and is not caused by prions.

IIRC at the time the BSE outbreak in the UK[1] was referred to as "foot and mouth disease" and I've heard people refer to it as that since then. I wasn't even aware they were separate things.

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

There may have been some innacurate reporting, but FMD and BSE present very differently in humans so I doubt there was deep confusion.

Prions aren’t new, they’re probably as old as proteins- and they haven’t ice-nined the world yet.

To be fair, neither did ice-nine until somebody decided to eat it.

Gene-drive to edit wild animals so that they don't express PRNP (or express a stabilized version)

Stabilized maybe, it’s probably necessary for something even if we don’t know what yet.

There is also a study from 2014 that suggests that prions were not detected in stems even though the roots of wheat plants were exposed to them. I don't know if there is conclusive evidence yet on getting sick by eating a plant based diet.

"This suggests wheat was unable to transport sufficient PrP(TSE) from the roots to the stem to be detectable by the methods employed."

Source: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/24509640/

>It is thus possible that there is a progressively accumulating number of prions in the environment

I really need to grow my own food.

Make sure to keep the deer out!

Maybe this is a naive question, but your immune system works by identifying foreign proteins and killing those cells. Is there no way for your immune system to target cells contaminated with prions?

The fundamental issue with prions is that they are *not* foreign. Prions are legitimate proteins made by your own body but folded wrong. A misfolded protein acts like a catalyst to cause more misfolding. Prions are *not* alive, they have no ability to reproduce other than through misfolding existing proteins. It's basically a form of crystallization.

Antibodies are shape-sensitive though, so there could be antibodies targeting the mis-folded protein. In fact, maybe many people exposed to them where able to develop an immune response and we just don't know about it because these people never had any symptoms (think about the survivor bias, but in reverse, or from the point of view of the prion).

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