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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

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE dwells on those challenging entities called prions. They are not bacteria nor viruses, have no genetic material, are resistant to all forms of sterilization, and are pathogenic infectious entities that break all rules. They are normal proteins that play important roles in our bodies but become infective only by a change of the protein shape, which acts as template to change the shape of normal prion proteins causing infectivity. And they evolve. This breaks the fundamental dogma of biology: that DNA is required for replication. View in LinkedIn

NO GEEVES. “Some people think an advanced AI will be some kind of super-butler, doing whatever they ask with incredible efficiency. But it’s more accurate to imagine an Outcome Pump: a non-sentient device that makes some outcomes more probable and other outcomes less probable. (The Outcome Pump isn’t magic, though. If you ask it for an outcome that is too improbable, it will break).” https://lnkd.in/dmZgBnF View in LinkedIn

UNDERSTATEMENT. “Machine intelligence would be a development of almost unprecedented impact and risk, well worth considering now.” http://intelligence.org/files/AIFoomDebate.pdf View in LinkedIn

THE FUSION. “As the human era comes to a close, the fate of biological (post)humanity is more likely to be symbiosis with AI followed by metamorphosis, not simple replacement.” http://www.biointelligence-explosion.com/ View in LinkedIn