keep up the good work

Bye

“Two opposing laws seem to me now in contest. The one, a law of blood and death, opening out each day new modes of destruction, forces nations to be always ready for the battle. The other, a law of peace, work and health, whose only aim is to deliver man from the calamities which beset him. The one seeks violent conquests, the other the relief of mankind. The one places a single life above all victories, the other sacrifices hundreds of thousands of lives to the ambition of a single individual. The law of which we are the instruments strives even through the carnage to cure the wounds due to the law of war. Treatment by our antiseptic methods may preserve the lives of thousands of soldiers. Which of these two laws will prevail, God only knows. But of this we may be sure, that science, in obeying the law of humanity, will always labor to enlarge the frontiers of life.”

my notes: By enlarging, Louis meant more quality and more years…

“Through a physician in Brittany, Nonclercq came across a thick tome on the history of a medicine in which she read that, on his death bed, Louis Pasteur had declared: Claude Bernard war right… the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything.” What Pasteur omitted was that his confession had been based not on single insightful statement by France’s leading physiologist, Bernard, but by Antoine Béchamp, the man with whom he had been locked in struggle for decades.”–

So, Louis Pasteur, after achieving everything he did was:

1) delusional at the end of his life
2) wanted to give a touch of widom to his legacy of knowledge

Jacob Bronowski covered Pasteur in his “Ascent of Man” BBC show. I ws struck that even without technology, Pasteur knew that the phisical shape of molecules, and mirror shape of molecules was important, basically coming up by intuition with the double helix concept of DNA. Early in his career, Pasteur got his big break by solving contamination issues in French winemaking. If he was right on that one, why can’t we trust the master on the terrain one.

So, is it 1) or 2).

Also, I tend to like the theory of Harold Foster selenium postulate:

http://www.wellbeingjournal.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1&Itemid=33

He is doing clinical trials in Uganda with HIV patients above CD4 200, and trying to set up trials in India for terminal AIDS patients.

Final words: If a Galapagos turtle can live to be 250-300 years with an alkaline PH and low calorie diet, why can’t we?

I can’t find the PDF files on the Perth Group website today, but they used to claim that the procedure “required” for purifying a retrovirus was described by these 2 papers:

(1) Sinoussi F, Mendiola L, Chermann JC, Jasmin C, Raynaud M. (1973) Purification and Partial Differentiation of the Particles of Murine Sarcoma Virus (M. MSV) According to their Sedimentation Rates in Sucrose Density Gradients. Spectra 4:237-243.

(2) Toplin I, Sottong P. (1972) Large-Volume Purification of Tumor Viruses by Use of Zonal Centrifuges. Applied Microbiology 23: 1010-1014.

which I immediately suspected might describe purification of virus mixtures because almost all RNA tumor viruses are repliucation defective, requiring a “helper virus” in order to be grown in cell culture for this type of purification. And indeed the Sinoussi paper is describing the partial seperation of the 3 types of virus particles in her preparation. The paper never claims that this type of centrifugation is “required” for any type of virus isolation, they are only poining out that it is one of many useful techniques, and if used with great care can even partially seperate a mix of similar viruses. I don’t think the exact nature of the “tumor virus/helper virus” mix was determined until molecular cloning for the genomes was used to prove what each virus was composed of.

Sinoussi et al were using Moloney murine sarcoma virus (M. MSV). Which was later found to have picked up the mouse c-src gene, replacing parts of the viral genome needed for exogenous replication, thus it requires a helper virus. Sinoussi et al were hoping that their centrifuce preparations could seperate the oncovirus from the helper virus and from virions containing one of each of the two genomes. Figures 5 and 6 show three distinct peaks of RT activity, but with overlapping tails, showing that the seperation was incomplete. Molecular cloning of the viral genomes eventually solved the problem, but cloning was not easy in the 1971 time period.

Tronick SR, Robbins KC, Canaani E, Devare SG, Andersen PR, Aaronson SA.
Molecular cloning of Moloney murine sarcoma virus: arrangement of virus-related sequences within the normal mouse genome.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1979 Dec;76(12):6314-8.
PMID: 392518