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WILLFUL MUTANTS. “The ability genetically to hack one's own source code will unleash an exponential growth of genomic rewrites - not mere genetic tinkering but a comprehensive redesign of "human nature".” http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/ View in LinkedIn

REPLICATION. “Viruses are genetic material encased in protein. They self-replicate and cause disease. Prions are just proteins. They self-replicate and cause disease. How viruses and prions work. Self-replication by hijacking or inducing mis-folding, respectively, might not be what biologists have in mind for self-replication, but the end result is still more virus particles and prions in the world.” https://lnkd.in/dzZgRcM View in LinkedIn

FUTURIST VISION. "As the era of open-source genetics unfolds, tomorrow's biohackers will add, delete, edit and customise their own legacy code in a positive feedback loop of cognitive enhancement.” http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/ View in LinkedIn

PRIONS “can multiply exponentially and can pass through membranes; transmission can occur between individual (e.g. by blood); they can even be transmitted between different species; they are resistant against proteases (enzymes that break down proteins) and the body’s defense mechanisms; they can mutate, creating different forms of pathogenic prions.” https://lnkd.in/dN2v7fv View in LinkedIn

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