From asweinbe@midway.uchicago.edu Fri Apr 13 20:29:16 2001 Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology Subject: Re: Very important, please read, or I will cry. From: asweinbe@midway.uchicago.edu (Plorkwort) The moving finger of James "Kibo" Parry wrote So, I will be bringing my laptop computer in a feeble, desperate attempt >to not be bored. What I would like everyone to do is to post a new >short story RIGHT NOW so that tomorrow I will have some stuff I can quietly >enjoy in the back of the courtroom while some boring person is on trial. ha, a perfect opportunity to post the last essay I wrote. And y'all are lucky; this time it isn't on Kant or Newton or even Babylonian mathematics; it's an interpretation of Shmakov, A N; Ghosh, S. Prion proteins and the gut: une liaison dangereuse? Gut. 48(4):443-447, April, 2001. which must be a reputable journal, since it's published and with a title like that (teetering perilously close to [Hammond]'s favorite, Puke). At any rate, Invasion ... Of the Protein Snatchers! It was a quiet summer night when they came. Jack, a normal body protein, was floating around the intestinal cell which was his home. He lived in a nice peaceful neighborhood in one of the Peyer's patches, areas with lots of transfer of nutrients through his cell into the blood. Outside, the cell was performing its normal business of reaching out pockets of membrane and bringing in fats and sugars and proteins floating by in the intestine. Suddenly the ominous music started, although Jack only noticed the occasional stirring of the fluids around him. But way way up, where the cytoplasm was purplish-black from distance, a strange familiar shape had just entered the cell. Buffeted by the gentle convection of Brownian motion, Jack eventually floated close enough to touch the intruder, who looked quite like him. At the touch of that chilling pseudopod of fate, his features flowed and changed; ... and life in the M cell would never be the same again. "He looks nearly the same," she said. "Only.. something... something's not right about him. He doesn't behave the same way any more, just sits around. I'm too scared even to touch him; Ralph did, and something changed about him too. Oh, Doctor, what's the matter?" The doctor, in a white blood cell lab coat with probing antibody stethoscope, looked serious. "Becky, I'm afraid I have very bad news for you. I'm afraid that your husband . . . that Jack has become a prion." Becky looked confused and distressed, inasmuch as a protein in a pillbox hat could. "As you said, he's changed. He touched an abnormal form of protein, one called a prion, and it converted him into one of them. The prions hang around the body, sitting around not doing much. The body doesn't get rid of them, because they look pretty much like the normal form of that protein. If they run into a normal protein, though, they make him lose his normal shape, isolate him from his usual functions, and make him into one of them." "However did this happen? What can we do?" she wailed. "I don't know. I don't think anyone knows. There are places where we take in things from the outside world, nutrients, big truckloads of groceries. Sometimes we send out membranes to be filled with food, sometimes foods push themselves through our membrane. Maybe there's even a traitorous receptor. Since we're right on the border of the whole nutritional highway of the intestine, our membrane is more permeable than others; stuff enters and leaves all the time. Maybe the prion came in through there; they do tend to enter our world through cells which have a lot of contact with the outside world." "But can we help him?" "Again, I don't know; I don't think anyone knows. But the outlook's not good. Nobody has succeeded in transforming a prion back into a normal form; they're just so stable that they sit around and accumulate. We can only hope that Jack, or another one of them, won't get out, through our neighboring nerve cells, and into the nervous system or even the brain. We'd better hope that the immune system sends in the cavalry of T-cells; but I don't know if we can even trust them; they often aren't able to figure out who's a prion, or to destroy those they do identify." HOW can we protect our homes and cells from Prion Invasion? WHERE do they enter the nervous system? HOW do they perform the fiendish transformation of normal, innocuous proteins to disguised invader? WHO can save us from them? The shocking story . . . In Invasion of the Protein Snatchers! Plorkwort -- Thomasina: It is plain that there are some things a girl is allowed to understand, and these include the whole of algebra, but there are others, such as embracing a side of beef, that must be kept from her until she is old enough to have a carcass of her own. --Tom Stoppard, _Arcadia_