simonshack wrote: ↑Fri Apr 03, 2020 10:08 pm
A must, MUST watch :
Do viruses even exist?
I think this sums up the Lanka point of view pretty nicely, for those of you who are not yet familiar with it. Garnished with a few hints to Hamer and his 5 biological laws.
Alas, the problem with Hamer is the same as with virology and modern medizine in general: Everyone thinks that ONLY their own view of the matter is correct. My opinion is, that you could integrate Hamers laws in a much more general theory that would not totally offend modern medizine. At the core of this theory I'd place the very general concept of adjustment (assimilation, modulation, conformation, alignment, ...) of biological entites to their environment and to new requirements. These "environmental factors" may e.g. be physical or emotional.
One of the problems of the above video is, that
it does not address the PCR/DNA topic at all, which is totally at the core of modern virology. No one will take you seriously as long as you don't at least try to understand and explain what's going on there.
I recently had a talk with someone who does genetic fingerprinting (of humans, animals and plants) for the police, using PCR in a laboratory. He's not familiar with viruses, but what I learnt about genetic fingerprinting is interesting. You can find it summed up in the
Wickedpedia entry. I also learnt a couple of things about the human genome. The genome is thought to have "coding sequences" (like whether you are male/female, what's your eye color and so on) and other, non-coding sequences, some of which are rather repetitive, like ATATATATATA. The length of theses repetitive sequences differs among humans, but is consistently the same in the same human. As far as I understand, it works like this:
- You take 8-15 different primers, as an example, one of them could be ATATATATATATATAT (or even longer).
- If you test person A, who has a sequence like XXXATATATXXXXXXATATATATATXXX, you will end up getting sequences ATATAT and ATATATATAT in large amounts.
- If you test person B, who has a sequence like XXXXXXATATATATATATATXXXXXXXX, you will only get a large number of sequences ATATATATATATAT
- You can then use gel electrophoresis to "sort" those sequences according to their weight and get "bands"
If you do this with 15 different primers, you get 15 separate results, each having about 1-4 different bands. Taken together, these are very specific for the individual. But they don't tell you anything about properties of the person, because these are "non-coding" parts of the genome. On a side note, the use of those "coding sequences" is not widespread. Probably they are not half as specific as assumed or at least not all of them are known.
What can we derive from this about the existence of viruses? First of all, it seems that you can always find DNA which is "static", specific for an individual. And then there is "viral" DNA, which may vary over time within the same individual, but might be similar in different individuals. My idea then was, that there might exist something as "viral fingerprinting" as well... but a search did not yield very much. I found this blog article, which provides some insight and is also mildly interesting on its own:
https://jenjdanna.com/blog/2015/12/15/viral-fingerprinting-as-a-method-of-identification.html wrote:
Viral Fingerprinting as a Method of Identification
The research project started as a way to identify Finnish bones from World War II, lost for decades in the wilderness of the Soviet Union and finally brought home in the last 17 years. In total, 106 soldiers were recovered and DNA was extracted from their bones in hopes of identifying the unknown men.
Researchers from University of Helsinki and the University of Edinburgh ... wanted to examine the DNA for viral infections ... They selected Parvovirus B19 (which causes Fifth Disease) as it is a fairly prevalent virus and one that, once established,
persists within the body. Many viruses are cleared from the body by the immune system following infection, but some viruses, like herpes viruses for example,
form life-long latent infections that can be detected years after the initial infection.
Of the 106 subjects, 43 (45%) tested positive for one of two different strains of Parvovirus (there are three genotypic strains in total). In fact, upon further testing, while 41 men tested positive for one strain, the 2 men that tested positive for the second strain were found via mitochondrial and Y chromosome testing to be Russian in origin and not part of the Finnish army at all. Only the Finns tested positive for that specific strain, one that disappeared from Europe in the 1970s, but was known at the time to be a Northern European strain.
This last part raises the question: How were "Northern European strains" identified before the advent of PCR in the mid 1990s? Did they use other techniques, such as
RFLP?
The part about the different viruses is interesting as well. I knew they say this about Herpes, HIV and Epstein-Barr that once you get it, it remains in your body. So it can permanently be detected by PCR, with or without having symptoms of a disease. I guess they have at least SOME controls where they could demonstrate that a person tested negative for such a virus in the past, but from a certain point on began testing positive. Which could mean that these sequences became part of his DNA.
Someone claimed that the human genome "contains a lot of viral DNA" - but isn't that a contradiction in itself? How can you truly distinguish "viral DNA"? Just by the fact that you somehow "aquire" it during the course of your life? As far as I know, it's also common knowledge by now, that parts of our DNA change over time or at least certain genes get "activated". Whatever that means.