Hey Brian. Please try to put a summary in your articles explaining the main idea of what you are claiming. i.e. an informative title was 'Liquid Cancer'' while this is not. Not everyone has the time to read a technical article where the argument is not clear from the title or the summary. You should also start to rethink who you are writing for. If it is scientists they also need a summary, if it is people with not full knowledge of the domain you are writing for then you need a summary and explanations. This is dense and I had to read it sideways a couple of times before I decide whether I need to read it. Thanks!
Thanks, and fair - I usually put more effort into wading off or redirecting readers when I am in the wilds.
I do not write for scientists, but if I did, I would probably flaunt the summary / introduction convention anyway. I don't want to know what researchers think about what they found, just what they found.
But for the lay reader, I am trying to be responsive to the feedback about clearer summarization. It's difficult since I check out as a reader if I start to see the same information twice, so I hew to a nothing-left-to-remove style by instinct. I have created the Shorter Unglossed account to force myself to re-phrase / summarize, though I haven't been able to do so for this week's posts bc limited internet https://www.gettr.com/user/ununglossed
And I take your point about the titles. I may switch to a Friends title scheme soon anyway, I'm running out of puns. However, it's a bit amusing that for this post... "Upside down fractal CUGA" *is* descriptive; it's just that the definition of the description did not exist until the post was written.
There is always awe when reading your posts, especially at the assumption that us readers are somehow arriving at the same conclusions at the same rate as you are… a massive and overly assuming compliment in my case. I thank you for the opportunity to wrinkle a bit more with every post.
Re: Syncytin-1
Since this protein is retro viral derived… so many questions… how did it become so influential and integral in human development? How did our bodies first encounter it? What was the virus and was it deadly? Does our body still have the ability to integrate viral proteins, or is it still?!
Considering what we know of HIV, the autoimmune and neurological effects of the Syncytin mother virus must have been pretty awful. Additionally, it also seems that the retroviridae family has incredible mechanisms via enzyme production for DNA transcription and integration, which further adds to the awe that is the immune system. It makes me wonder even more why we don’t work /with/ our immune systems instead of /against/ them with modern treatments (e.g. let’s kill everything with antibiotics, alcohol, radiation, etc.).
Reading old fact-check and debunking articles on mRNA produced SARS-coV 2 spike protein v. Syncytin-1 obviously leads one to believe “oh, the similarities are nothing”, but comparing them to non-viral protein structures doesn’t really lend the same comparison. My understanding and thinking may be way off base, but to me, a layperson, is: wouldn’t we have a more innate immune response to viral proteins? Or even the envelope of such? Rather than, say, comparing them to hemoglobin or any other human protein that wasn’t viral derived.
As usual, your posts leave me with more questions than I had before reading them. A sign of an excellent teacher.
I am only back online for a brief window so can only manage a partial reply - for a viral gene to cross into the host genome, the virus needs to nondestructively infect a germ cell, i.e. an egg or sperm, at least that's the theory. It's very one in a million that this doesn't result in a nonviable outcome, but that 1 in a million essentially explains evolutionary leaps. I also speculate in "Burned All My Notebooks" (the post linked at the end of this one) that there are evolutionary ways to toggle increased likelihood of germ cell integration, such as stress-immune-system regulation.
Once embryogenesis starts there's no way for a virus to integrate with "your" DNA, only the DNA of individual cells, followed either by destruction of that cell (proliferation) or integration/lysogeny (no proliferation). The virus cannot get from cell to cell without destroying the cell it's in - or fusion which is essentially the same - either way there is a hole in the bucket. Depending on cell lifespan and regeneration, different tissues offer different potentialities for prolonged alteration between dormancy and multiplication, but essentially there's no need to worry about Pfizer inventing a virus that can rewrite the whole world's DNA for example.
Hey Brian. Please try to put a summary in your articles explaining the main idea of what you are claiming. i.e. an informative title was 'Liquid Cancer'' while this is not. Not everyone has the time to read a technical article where the argument is not clear from the title or the summary. You should also start to rethink who you are writing for. If it is scientists they also need a summary, if it is people with not full knowledge of the domain you are writing for then you need a summary and explanations. This is dense and I had to read it sideways a couple of times before I decide whether I need to read it. Thanks!
Thanks, and fair - I usually put more effort into wading off or redirecting readers when I am in the wilds.
I do not write for scientists, but if I did, I would probably flaunt the summary / introduction convention anyway. I don't want to know what researchers think about what they found, just what they found.
But for the lay reader, I am trying to be responsive to the feedback about clearer summarization. It's difficult since I check out as a reader if I start to see the same information twice, so I hew to a nothing-left-to-remove style by instinct. I have created the Shorter Unglossed account to force myself to re-phrase / summarize, though I haven't been able to do so for this week's posts bc limited internet https://www.gettr.com/user/ununglossed
And I take your point about the titles. I may switch to a Friends title scheme soon anyway, I'm running out of puns. However, it's a bit amusing that for this post... "Upside down fractal CUGA" *is* descriptive; it's just that the definition of the description did not exist until the post was written.
There is always awe when reading your posts, especially at the assumption that us readers are somehow arriving at the same conclusions at the same rate as you are… a massive and overly assuming compliment in my case. I thank you for the opportunity to wrinkle a bit more with every post.
Re: Syncytin-1
Since this protein is retro viral derived… so many questions… how did it become so influential and integral in human development? How did our bodies first encounter it? What was the virus and was it deadly? Does our body still have the ability to integrate viral proteins, or is it still?!
Considering what we know of HIV, the autoimmune and neurological effects of the Syncytin mother virus must have been pretty awful. Additionally, it also seems that the retroviridae family has incredible mechanisms via enzyme production for DNA transcription and integration, which further adds to the awe that is the immune system. It makes me wonder even more why we don’t work /with/ our immune systems instead of /against/ them with modern treatments (e.g. let’s kill everything with antibiotics, alcohol, radiation, etc.).
Reading old fact-check and debunking articles on mRNA produced SARS-coV 2 spike protein v. Syncytin-1 obviously leads one to believe “oh, the similarities are nothing”, but comparing them to non-viral protein structures doesn’t really lend the same comparison. My understanding and thinking may be way off base, but to me, a layperson, is: wouldn’t we have a more innate immune response to viral proteins? Or even the envelope of such? Rather than, say, comparing them to hemoglobin or any other human protein that wasn’t viral derived.
As usual, your posts leave me with more questions than I had before reading them. A sign of an excellent teacher.
I am only back online for a brief window so can only manage a partial reply - for a viral gene to cross into the host genome, the virus needs to nondestructively infect a germ cell, i.e. an egg or sperm, at least that's the theory. It's very one in a million that this doesn't result in a nonviable outcome, but that 1 in a million essentially explains evolutionary leaps. I also speculate in "Burned All My Notebooks" (the post linked at the end of this one) that there are evolutionary ways to toggle increased likelihood of germ cell integration, such as stress-immune-system regulation.
Once embryogenesis starts there's no way for a virus to integrate with "your" DNA, only the DNA of individual cells, followed either by destruction of that cell (proliferation) or integration/lysogeny (no proliferation). The virus cannot get from cell to cell without destroying the cell it's in - or fusion which is essentially the same - either way there is a hole in the bucket. Depending on cell lifespan and regeneration, different tissues offer different potentialities for prolonged alteration between dormancy and multiplication, but essentially there's no need to worry about Pfizer inventing a virus that can rewrite the whole world's DNA for example.
I should be so productive when my internet is down. 😄