Eradicate bats...?

[Scott777]

Possibly not the best turn of phrase.



All the way back in 1979 I perfected a way to bond an enzyme I was interested in to a chromatography column of "blue sepharose" gel.  Sepharose is a sort of powder that makes a sort of gelatinous wallpaper paste. I can's watch any of those feminine hygiene ads without realisign what is in the core shares an ancestry with both my research and the raw material to make pot noodle.



Moving on...



So, I can show you how to take this compound, react it with a sugar or amino sugar of interest that is a target substrate for an enzyme (that reaction incidentally is how they make a lot of the aspartame based artificial sweeteners, i wish to f**k i'd been the first to find that back then, I'd be the chap owning necker bloody island now .. but i digress)



so with that reaction done, you load this stuff in a bog standard glass pipette into which you put a small glass wool plug, then you pour the homogenised extract of the cell culture you have been studying the metabolism of, and as the enzyme you have in mind passes these bound substrates, they clamp on like a fish taking the bait, and suddenly find they cannot detach.



The term "affinity chromatography" was coined to describe this stuff, which as i say was bleeding edge stuff .. in 1979



Instant separation of massively high purity enzyme of interest from a veritable witches broth of all sorts of sh*t



A few years ago a chap in sterling University hit on a way to 3d-print the reagents into a somewhat more rigid matrix. And about a year after that my nephew hit on a way to take all of this, and 3D-print a matrix of sephadex gel each unit hardly bigger than a red blood corpuscle onto which he bonded two materials, one the receptor molecule to target mouse kidney cell membranes in hope it would suck the sephadex blob in (it did) and the other a chemotherapy agent, built in part with radioactive carbon 14 so intracellular levels of chemotherapeutic agent could be determined readily easily.



And presto. Ehrlich's magic bullet.



Does that draw a decent enough picture.

All a bit too technical for me, but your phrase is apt, given that Charles M Lieber was a pioneer in nanoscience, and was on the Chinese program.  He was arrested in January.  His work in China was supposed to be on batteries, even though none of his papers and patents mention batteries.

[johnofgwent]

I'm still curious what you meant about nanobots.

Possibly not the best turn of phrase.



All the way back in 1979 I perfected a way to bond an enzyme I was interested in to a chromatography column of "blue sepharose" gel.  Sepharose is a sort of powder that makes a sort of gelatinous wallpaper paste. I can's watch any of those feminine hygiene ads without realisign what is in the core shares an ancestry with both my research and the raw material to make pot noodle.



Moving on...



So, I can show you how to take this compound, react it with a sugar or amino sugar of interest that is a target substrate for an enzyme (that reaction incidentally is how they make a lot of the aspartame based artificial sweeteners, i wish to f**k i'd been the first to find that back then, I'd be the chap owning necker bloody island now .. but i digress)



so with that reaction done, you load this stuff in a bog standard glass pipette into which you put a small glass wool plug, then you pour the homogenised extract of the cell culture you have been studying the metabolism of, and as the enzyme you have in mind passes these bound substrates, they clamp on like a fish taking the bait, and suddenly find they cannot detach.



The term "affinity chromatography" was coined to describe this stuff, which as i say was bleeding edge stuff .. in 1979



Instant separation of massively high purity enzyme of interest from a veritable witches broth of all sorts of shit



A few years ago a chap in sterling University hit on a way to 3d-print the reagents into a somewhat more rigid matrix. And about a year after that my nephew hit on a way to take all of this, and 3D-print a matrix of sephadex gel each unit hardly bigger than a red blood corpuscle onto which he bonded two materials, one the receptor molecule to target mouse kidney cell membranes in hope it would suck the sephadex blob in (it did) and the other a chemotherapy agent, built in part with radioactive carbon 14 so intracellular levels of chemotherapeutic agent could be determined readily easily.



And presto. Ehrlich's magic bullet.



Does that draw a decent enough picture.

[Scott777]

Given absolutely sod all happens inside the chinese state without the nod from the present day version of Chairman Mao's politburo, I fear your logic seems flawed.

Americans were known to be working for the Chinese - part of the Thousand Talents Program.  They also funded the Institute of Virology.  You can't rule out a deliberate release, without Chinese consent.



I'm still curious what you meant about nanobots.  Come on, spill the beans. :brd:

[papasmurf]

But as proving this is impossible short of a bug in the politburo hq ...

How about anthrax?

[johnofgwent]

Quite.  I can't see the Chinese leadership deliberately wrecking its economy.

If the calculated damage to theirs is less than the calculated damage to the western world, I think I can ...



But as proving this is impossible short of a bug in the politburo hq ...

[papasmurf]

Given absolutely sod all happens inside the chinese state without the nod from the present day version of Chairman Mao's politburo, I fear your logic seems flawed.

Quite.  I can't see the Chinese leadership deliberately wrecking its economy.

[johnofgwent]

I don't quite see the logic of this conclusion.  If I were some kind of megalomaniac, I would make a virus just like CV19 and release it.  It is achieving an objective - profit.  That's all that matters.  However, you've assumed I was blaming the Chinese state, but I didn't.

Now you've confused me.



On the subject of a lab release, you say



"Well, some people will only ever believe such things can only be a mistake, despite all the evidence that suggests otherwise."



And then having firmly nailed your colours to the "they deliberately released this" mast, you claim you do not hold the chinese state to blame.



Given absolutely sod all happens inside the chinese state without the nod from the present day version of Chairman Mao's politburo, I fear your logic seems flawed.

[Scott777]

If you'd ever donned what one might euphemistically call a nuke suit and walked into a microbiology lab, you'd understand how stupid that idea is



Yes I know you want to believe its deliberate.



The problem is, the lab in question published what it was doing, and right now, EVERYTHING I read about the breakdown of this thing put together with my past career in culturing cells screams at me that this was a lab release akin to the janet parker smallpox episode (where I was present but did not at the time know)



Why do i say this ?



Because a number of nasty, nasty people have taken far too great an interest in the human genome project and if I was engineering a weapon I'd be bloody sure to engineer one that didnt hit cells bearing glycoproteins derived from viking dna and I see nothing that tells me this pestilence contains the power to avoid infecting cells containing similar cell surface markers derived from ethnic chinese dna. Quite the opposite to see the death toll



I know the chinese have scantv.egard for human life but even their leaders are not so f**king stupid as to allow a weapon release that would kill off most of the ruling party members ....

I don't quite see the logic of this conclusion.  If I were some kind of megalomaniac, I would make a virus just like CV19 and release it.  It is achieving an objective - profit.  That's all that matters.  However, you've assumed I was blaming the Chinese state, but I didn't.

[papasmurf]

Because a number of nasty, nasty people have taken far too great an interest in the human genome project and if I was engineering a weapon I'd be bloody sure to engineer one that didnt hit cells bearing glycoproteins derived from viking dna

I have only 2% "Viking" in my DNA, 78% is from a small area of the Chiltern Hills, and 20% is from what is now Bavaria.

[johnofgwent]

Well, some people will only ever believe such things can only be a mistake, despite all the evidence that suggests otherwise.

If you'd ever donned what one might euphemistically call a nuke suit and walked into a microbiology lab, you'd understand how stupid that idea is



Yes I know you want to believe its deliberate.



The problem is, the lab in question published what it was doing, and right now, EVERYTHING I read about the breakdown of this thing put together with my past career in culturing cells screams at me that this was a lab release akin to the janet parker smallpox episode (where I was present but did not at the time know)



Why do i say this ?



Because a number of nasty, nasty people have taken far too great an interest in the human genome project and if I was engineering a weapon I'd be bloody sure to engineer one that didnt hit cells bearing glycoproteins derived from viking dna and I see nothing that tells me this pestilence contains the power to avoid infecting cells containing similar cell surface markers derived from ethnic chinese dna. Quite the opposite to see the death toll



I know the chinese have scantv.egard for human life but even their leaders are not so fucking stupid as to allow a weapon release that would kill off most of the ruling party members ....

[patman post]

The hard fact is no country is going to weaponise a virus, without developing a preventive.

With today's globalisation and mass movement of people  and an incubation time of 5 to 14 days, as Covid-19 has shown it can travel around the World in days.

(I won't go into racially specific biological weapons as that turned out to be not as specific and some people thought.)

But that won't stop countries that agree prohibition of the development, production and stockpiling of biological and toxin weapons from researching them to develop defences. Russia still uses them for opposition eradication, North Korea too, and also to keep the president's family and out-of-favour advisers in line.

But no one has provided reasonable evidence that any group has been harnessing bats for similar purposes.

Supplying infected blankets to indigenous people in order to clear them from the land is nothing new...

[Scott777]

The hard fact is no country is going to weaponise a virus, without developing a preventive.

Perhaps.  Personally, I doubt it's a weapon, but only an extra contagious version of the flu.

[patman post]

Reclusive, nocturnal, numerous -- bats are a possible source of the coronavirus. Yet some scientists concur they are not to blame for the transfer of the disease that's changing daily life -- humans are.

Zoologists and disease experts have told CNN that changes to human behavior -- the destruction of natural habitats, coupled with the huge number of fast-moving people now on Earth -- has enabled diseases that were once locked away in nature to cross into people fast.

Scientists are still unsure where the virus originated, and will only be able to prove its source if they isolate a live virus in a suspected species -- a hard task.

But viruses that are extremely similar to the one that causes Covid-19 have been seen in Chinese horseshoe bats. That has led to urgent questions as to how the disease moved from bat communities -- often untouched by humans -- to spread across Earth. The answers suggest the need for a complete rethink of how we treat the planet.

Bats are the only mammal that can fly, allowing them to spread in large numbers from one community over a wide area, scientists say. This means they can harbor a large number of pathogens, or diseases. Flying also requires a tremendous amount of activity for bats, which has caused their immune systems to become very specialized.

"When they fly they have a peak body temperature that mimics a fever," said Andrew Cunningham, Professor of Wildlife Epidemiology at the Zoological Society of London. "It happens at least twice a day with bats -- when they fly out to feed and then they return to roost. And so the pathogens that have evolved in bats have evolved to withstand these peaks of body temperature."

Cunningham said this poses a potential problem when these diseases cross into another species. In humans, for example, a fever is a defense mechanism designed to raise the body temperature to kill a virus. A virus that has evolved in a bat will probably not be affected by a higher body temperature, he warned.

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/health/coronavirus-human-actions-intl/index.html">https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/heal ... index.html">https://edition.cnn.com/2020/03/19/health/coronavirus-human-actions-intl/index.html



Even if bats need an intermediary to pass a virus onto humans (fruit bats are thought to have infected pig food in Central and South America which led, some medics believe, to the 2009 outbreak in humans), they can still be considered an originating source. Bats' global distribution, abundance, social lifestyle and ability to fly long distances make them well-equipped to acquire and spread viruses, write Donis and his colleagues in an article published today (Feb. 27) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers were unable to grow the virus in the lab, but they did find that components from the bat flu virus could be mixed and matched with those of a human flu virus (an H1N1 virus isolated in 1933). This means the bat virus should be capable of a process called re-assortment, in which different flu viruses that have infected the same cell switch parts, creating a new virus with new properties. This process has generated pandemic strains, such as the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, dubbed swine flu.

All grist to the mill, but not one hint of conspiracy or cover up...

[papasmurf]

Well, some people will only ever believe such things can only be a mistake, despite all the evidence that suggests otherwise.

The hard fact is no country is going to weaponise a virus, without developing a preventive.

With today's globalisation and mass movement of people  and an incubation time of 5 to 14 days, as Covid-19 has shown it can travel around the World in days.

(I won't go into racially specific biological weapons as that turned out to be not as specific and some people thought.)

[Scott777]

I suspect a lab cock-up safety/breach is the most likely. Those have happened World wide including in Britain. (In the case of Britain is has often been many decades if ever before such "oops" incidens come to light, I expect it is the same in every other country.)

Well, some people will only ever believe such things can only be a mistake, despite all the evidence that suggests otherwise.