Hope This Phoenix Never Rises
My Idiot Files just can't keep up to the demand for membership. The big problem with this latest addition is that the membership-seekers I'm about to introduce to you are not doing something that they can guarantee won't harm us all. It could smash every one of us in the face before these pointy-head dodos are finished.
It seems that scientists at the Gustave Roussy Institute in Villejuif, France have been busily reconstructing the DNA sequence of a human retrovirus that attacked our forebears five million years ago. They have shown that it is able to produce infectious particles. Proud of their work, they have given their baby a name, calling it "Phoenix". It is the "ancestor of a large family of mobile DNA elements, some of which may play a role in cancer".
The motivation may be to determine the role played by retroviruses in such human diseases as germline tumours and melanomas, but surely the researchers could find some other way to do this. They have shown that their resurrected retrovirus is capable of infecting mammalian cells in culture. One more lab to worry about. One more potential security breach to lose sleep over. It seems somehow fitting that I found this little news nugget on Robert Burns' day. Obviously, those French scientists have never read the Bard's lines, "The best laid plans o' mice an' men/ Gang aft agley". The lines and their meaning have been used so often by so many that they have a spot in the "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". If that tome is too much for the scientists to slog their way through, maybe someone could introduce them to another source of food for thought. Michael Crichton loves to base his novels on medical technology gone awry.
This one sounds like perfect fodder for Crichton's pen.
It seems that scientists at the Gustave Roussy Institute in Villejuif, France have been busily reconstructing the DNA sequence of a human retrovirus that attacked our forebears five million years ago. They have shown that it is able to produce infectious particles. Proud of their work, they have given their baby a name, calling it "Phoenix". It is the "ancestor of a large family of mobile DNA elements, some of which may play a role in cancer".
The motivation may be to determine the role played by retroviruses in such human diseases as germline tumours and melanomas, but surely the researchers could find some other way to do this. They have shown that their resurrected retrovirus is capable of infecting mammalian cells in culture. One more lab to worry about. One more potential security breach to lose sleep over. It seems somehow fitting that I found this little news nugget on Robert Burns' day. Obviously, those French scientists have never read the Bard's lines, "The best laid plans o' mice an' men/ Gang aft agley". The lines and their meaning have been used so often by so many that they have a spot in the "Dictionary of Cultural Literacy". If that tome is too much for the scientists to slog their way through, maybe someone could introduce them to another source of food for thought. Michael Crichton loves to base his novels on medical technology gone awry.
This one sounds like perfect fodder for Crichton's pen.
1 Comments:
I can see the scientific impetus for this type of research. What I don't get is the need to recreate a retrovirus so completely, that it can infect healthy cells in the lab. These types of things have a habit of making it out of the lab and into general population. How did that quote go about the end of humanity? Not going out with a bang but a whimper ...
I think I need to see the Andromeda Strain again.
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