You must log in or # to comment.
I have a book, Madness and Memory, by the guy who discovered them. It’s a bit droll but holy heck did they kill a shitload of mice
You’re putting textbooks together from loose pages by reading the numbers on the pages. Each time you finish one, you give it to the publisher, that photocopies it and sends it to the schools. Some pages from other books ended up in your boxes of pages. It’s easy to tell if they don’t belong there if they’re the wrong size, different font, different color, etc. Some pages have typos, but if they end up in your book, it doesn’t necessarily hurt anything. Unfortunately, some of the pages have bad information on them. They have the right number, they fit in the book, but what is written on the page is totally incorrect. If you accidently include one of these pages, the next generation of students are taught bad information. If this information was really important, like building code or growing crops, and the next generation of students start building and farming wrong, society falls apart.
Prions are the bad pages.
Oh shit, I just realized AI summaries are prions.
Digital prions
Well you see, they’re misfolded proteins and when they interact with properly folded proteins they uhhh… shit
So, you know, there’s tons of organised people. And tons of messy people.
Well there’s a variety of messy people who manage to “infect” otherwise organised/tidy people with their messiness.
Those are prions.
TFW I’m a prion
Yeah, my feelings are a little hurt, too 😞
I’ve always thought about it as something similar to what happened with Ritonavir, i.e. disappearing polymorphs. But inside your own body and with proteins instead of a drug.
tl;dr
tl;dr of the above: basically, in the beginning, there was no ritonavir, an antiretroviral drug, anywhere in the world. Then someone synthesized it for the first time, and it produced a form of ritonavir which was highly water soluble, making it ideal for an oral liquid capsule, which they proceeded to manufacture and sell for some time. However, this form of ritonavir existed at a high “potential energy”, let’s say (I don’t think this is technically the right term for it in here, but I can’t remember what is), and could transition to a different form of ritonavir. This second form of the drug was even more stable than the first, existing at a lower energy level, but it was nowhere near as water soluble, crashing out of solution as crystals, and thus vastly less bioavailable. Once you got to this more stable crystal form of ritonavir, you couldn’t go back, the crystals were useless as medicine. Worse still, the first time a molecule of this second form was created (some years into production), it spread like a virus, ruining every batch manufactured, and temporarily halting all production of the oral formulation worldwide until an alternative solution was found.
It might be that normal proteins, while optimal in their function with their shape, might be more stable or have a lower potential energy when misfolded as prions. They don’t do the job they originally did, anymore, hence why they cause disease; but they certainly seem to be a lot more stable (given they require significant time in an autoclave to fully denature them…) and there doesn’t seem to be a way to make them go back to the way they were before. It’s just our luck that they’re not easily transmissible the same way tiny crystals of ritonavir were, else we’d be really fucked.
It’s the old chaos vs. order bit.
So … prions are the yin to the yang of me wanting to stay alive?
This, but it’s the most basic chemistry of life itself:
