Category: Uncategorized

THE CYCLE. “The accelerating growth of germline engineering will be a comparatively slow process. In this scenario, sentient biological machines will design cognitively self-amplifying biological machines who will design cognitively self-amplifying biological machines.” http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/ View in LinkedIn

ORIGINS. “During the emergence of metazoa, a cysteine-flanked core domain was inserted, or de novo arose, in a pre-existing ZIP ancestor gene to generate a prion-like ectodomain in a sub-branch of ZIP genes. Approximately a half-billion years later, a genomic insertion of a spliced transcript coding for such a prion-like ZIP ectodomain may have created the prion founder gene.” https://lnkd.in/d9yFgCg View in LinkedIn

THE DELTA. “Genetic evolution is slow. Progress in artificial intelligence is fast. Only a handful of genes separate Homo sapiens from our hominid ancestors on the African savannah. Among our 23,000-odd protein-coding genes, variance in single nucleotide polymorphisms ("SNPs") accounts for just a small percentage of phenotypic variance in intelligence as measured by what we call IQ tests.” http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/ View in LinkedIn

PRIONS ARE MADE BY GENES and the gene products, proteins, are transmissible pathogens. Prions amplify their variant conformation but need genes to be created in the first place. https://lnkd.in/dkdVKcb View in LinkedIn

PRION ETYMOLOGY. “The word itself derives from 'proteinaceous infectious particle'; it refers to the initially heretical hypothesis that the infectious agent causing those diseases consists only of protein, with no nucleic acid genome. (All previously known pathogens, such as bacteria and viruses, contain nucleic acids, which enable them to reproduce.).” https://lnkd.in/dkdVKcb View in LinkedIn

FATHER OF PRIONS. “The term 'prion' was coined by Stanley B. Prusiner of the University of California School of Medicine at San Francisco in 1982 to distinguish the infectious agent that causes scrapie in sheep, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (CJD) in humans and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in cattle from other, more typical infectious agents.” https://lnkd.in/dkdVKcb View in LinkedIn

WARNINGS IGNORED. “The 2002 Nobel Prizewinning professor of biophysics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich Switzerland, Kurt Wuthrich, warned last summer that chickens could be a "prion reservoir" that poses a " mad cow" threat to humans.” http://www.rense.com/general64/assume.htm View in LinkedIn

REGULATORY FAILURE. “Even if feeding cattle to cattle is banned in the U.S. and Canada, feeding the banned cattle tissue to poultry and pigs is common and legal in both countries. Protein additives extracted from diseased cows and fed to chickens and pigs contain the same infectious prions that cause mad cow disease. When the birds and pigs who ate the prions are in turn fed to cattle, the infectious tissue is recycled back to its source.” https://lnkd.in/ddp3UUu View in LinkedIn

DIFFERENT SYMPTOMS. “In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. In England, cows attack their owners in the milking parlors, while in the American West, thousands of deer starve to death in fields full of grass.” https://lnkd.in/dZpBrRp View in LinkedIn

FAMILY DISEASE. “For two hundred years a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months.” https://lnkd.in/dZpBrRp View in LinkedIn