Fun Guy and Shrooms
Okay, the corona virus in China has made the jump and passed from human to human as both relatives and care workers become infected, even entering the U.S. said STAT. One could almost think that our planet might be saying "enough." The earth as one big organism theory (commonly termed the GAIA hypothesis) has been around for ages, the thought being that the planet as a whole acts as a giant cell of sorts, one which will fight off invaders (perhaps even species such as us) as valiantly and as vigorously as any antibody in our own bodies (admittedly, anti-body is an odd term in itself since such cells actually work to help fight off infections). I couple this with an amazing self-regulating feature of the Amazon rainforest, one we've only recently discovered but one which we may soon lose before we have time to study it, and that is the cordycep fungus which evokes a sort of mind control before taking down the body.* As shown in Our Planet, the fungus works to ensure "that no one species (will be) gaining the upper hand."
The GAIA theory has been around since the 1970s, a hypothesis which Wikipedia described as that which: ...proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet...a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life. The arrival of yet another corona virus disease variant is perhaps little more than our planet's "adjustment." At the end of Bill Bryson's book he talked about humanity's long history of diseases we know little about: If you want to imagine what a disease might do if it became bad in every possible way, you could do no better than consider the case of smallpox. Smallpox is almost certainly the most devastating disease in the history of humankind. It infected nearly everyone who was exposed to it and killed almost 30 percent of victims. The death toll in the twentieth century alone is thought to have been around 500 million. Bryson goes on to note that even if you got the smallpox vaccine it doesn't last (one of the last people to die from it had been vaccinated 12 years earlier). Only the U.S. and Russia are thought to have the remaining stocks of the infectious smallpox and both have promised to destroy their frozen holdings several times, the destruction of which still cannot be confirmed: In 2002, the CIA claimed there were probably also stocks in France, Iraq, and North Korea. No one can say whether, or how many, samples may survive accidentally as well. In 2014, someone looking through a storage area at a Food and Drug Administration facility in Bethesda, Maryland, found vials of smallpox dating from the 1950s but still viable. The vials were destroyed, but it was an unnerving reminder of how easily such samples can be overlooked. He goes on to note that in the Western world, there are so many diseases we've never heard about: ...diseases like leishmaniasis, trachoma, and yaws, which few of us have ever heard of. Those three and fifteen others, known collectively as neglected tropical diseases, affect more than a billion people worldwide... Altogether there are about seven thousand rare diseases --so many that one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn't that rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people, it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 percent of rare diseases, there are no treatments at all. Smallpox, it should be noted, is airborne in its transmission, the last patient to die from it simply leaning out the window for a smoke and accidentally inhaling the molecules that had accidentally "escaped" from the lab two stories below...
Which brings us to fungus. Wait, what sort of a jump was that? But just as with those "rare" tropical diseases, it turns out that we know very little about fungus and fungal spores, even as you add your koji and shitake to your dishes. What good or bad traits might be lurking in the fungal world? In a quick summary again from Wikipedia, it said this: These organisms are classified as a kingdom, fungi, which is separate from the other eukaryotic life kingdoms of plants and animals...Fungi are the principal decomposers in ecological systems...it is now known fungi are genetically more closely related to animals than to plants. But what do you think of when you hear the word fungus? Mold (yes), yeast (yes), mushrooms (yes), and right there you likely know almost as much as the medical world knows about treating fungal diseases. If you want to hear some diseases that you've likely never heard before, jump to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and read their list of just the known fungal diseases, several of which they list as serious or "present a serious global health threat." There are millions of fungal species and perhaps millions more yet to be studied or identified, many of which are in our soil...and they're coming our way.
Alan Alda's Clear and Vivid podcast featured Dr. Jo Handelsman on her report that we're churning up and losing our soil at an unsustainable rate (Iowa is estimated to have already lost 25% of its topsoil), and in doing so, we're also unleashing microbes into the air. Indeed, the discovery of streptomycin to fight off tuberculosis came primarily from one grad student testing hundreds of samples of soil. As the grad student discoverer Albert Schatz** said about his professor's reaction: He (the professor) also knew that tubercle bacilli got into the soil. "It is estimated that the thirty pounds of moist feces produced daily by the average cow would contain, in the case of diseased animals, 37,000,000 microscopically demonstrable tubercle bacilli." And he knew that tubercle bacilli "survive in the soil for many years without losing their virulence." Soil, as Dr. Handelsman told Alda, is loaded with bacteria: ...soil is a mixture of pulverized rock that has been weathered by the elements and by bacteria over a very, very long time, millennia. And then it becomes colonized by bacteria and plants, and then eventually animals. And as those organisms grow and die, the bacteria decompose what’s left of them and that releases carbon and all sorts of other nutrients into the soil, and that’s what makes what we call the organic component of the soil that gives it its rich black color, if you’re in Wisconsin, the black color. Not all soils are black, of course. And that’s what gives it its life giving properties. That’s why we can grow plants in it is that it’s this dynamic rich ecosystem. There are more organisms in soil than any other ecosystem we know. It’s the most biologically diverse environment. And that’s because these bacteria have diversified throughout the soil. As to the bacteria and microbes themselves, she added: There’s something like between twice and 10 times as many bacterial cells in us as there are human cells in us, so they are us and we are them. They outnumber our cells quite dramatically. And they also have tremendously more genetic capacity...if you think of the complexity and the number of different genes in the human genome, if you take all the bacteria together, they exceed our own genetic complexity or capacity by somewhere between 100 and 1000 fold. So that means that they have 100 to 1000 fold more different kinds of pathways and functions and abilities to do things than we ourselves do...that’s why they have the ability to shape so many different diseases...When Alda asks her what effect this has on us, she replied: It’s certainly challenging, and that’s why we rarely get it down to a single species having an effect because there’s enormous redundancy as well...There are only about 80 species that we know of that are actual full-blown pathogens. But there are thousands and thousands of species that benefit us in their environmental effects, in the soil, in the atmosphere, and in our own bodies. And in just about every process that we run on earth or in our own health, the microbes play a role and that spans from the kinds of neurological disease or health that we’ve been talking about from depression to Parkinson’s all the way to climate change. And the microbes were here long before we were, billions of years before we were. They shaped the earth that we know today...my lab did an estimate a number of years ago where, for the soil, and we ended up with a range of between 4000 species and 40000 species per gram of soil, which is like a small teaspoonful. And that was as close as we could get. We know that there are, of course, many, many more thousands of species of that. Some people say there are a few million species of bacteria, but I think we’re so far from describing all of bacterial life that it’s kind of hard to know...Every time we do a DNA analysis of an environment, we usually find new kinds of bacteria that hadn’t been seen before because we can’t culture many of them. And that was the means for 150 years of microbiology. That was how we assessed the microbes of an environment was through culturing. Now that we’ve moved to a combination of culturing and DNA based methods, we can see organisms that won’t grow in culture but we can see that their signature is there and their signatures are often quite divergent, quite different from the ones that we can culture.
So that's soil, and as we churn up the soil with plows and heavy rains and melting permafrost, we are discovering that long-lost pathogens might be re-emerging such as the devastating influenza virus of 1918 which killed an estimated third of the world's population (at that time, that represented 50 million people). Said the CDC: While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood. And to jump to the present, STAT said this about the new corona virus making its way to distant shores: The suggestion that sustained transmission may be happening will ratchet up already high concerns about the new virus, which is provisionally called 2019-nCoV. The virus is a coronavirus, from the same family as the viruses that caused SARS and MERS. While the source of the new virus is not yet known, Chinese authorities have said they believe it was transmitted to people from some type of wild game animal. “Each day our new findings are not good,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “This is beginning to look more like SARS every hour.”
Back a few posts I wrote about a piece that appeared in WIRED about the one controlling factor of fungus being our global temperature...but they are adapting. To repeat one section of the post: Said the head of fungal studies at the CDC (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta) the newly discovered super-yeast fungi may be "more infectious than Ebola." The article went on: ...if something encouraged fungi to tolerate higher temperatures, more of them could become a threat to us -- and the slow heating of the planet may be creating the perfect laboratory in which fungi can adapt...“It’s difficult how rapidly this has spread across the globe,” says Johanna Rhodes, an infectious diseases research fellow at Imperial College London and coauthor of a new review of the yeast’s global spread. “We definitely weren’t ready for it.”...That super-yeast has wreaked havoc in England and South Africa -- as well as here in the US, where it has spread explosively in hospitals, infecting surgical wounds, brewing whole-body bloodstream infections, and clinging to every surface that investigators have thought to check...Imagine every yeast problem that we consider unthinkably minor --skin rashes, vaginal problems, infections of the mouth and throat-- being caused instead by a potentially lethal organism that no drug can touch. It's taken us hundreds of years to feel comfortable with bacteria and viruses, at least those which we have discovered. But even the tubercle bacillus which causes tuberculosis is adapting, one as a new strain proving resistant to any antibiotic we can produce. There are millions more microscopic species ready to discover, and perhaps millions more that will adapt and change and lead to diseases that may attack us; Discover wrote that some microbes in our gut apparently appear able to jump from human to human, perhaps leading to Alzheimer's or diabetes. What?? One thing seems to becoming clearer and that is that in our apparent quest to eliminate top predators in both the oceans and on the land, and to cut down the forests and jungles and churn up their soils, we may unleash an even new predator, one we not only know little about but one we cannot see or smell or feel, a species more closely related to our genetic upbringing than we realize...our planet may have antibodies of its own, and we may discover too late that we have become the virus infecting it and that we were far, far away from ever being the "top" predator.
*In another version of "mind control," imagine that you noticed your memory beginning to diminsh and yet found that you were still quite functional, even to the point of making a health directive that specified your wishes should your dementia progress...only later you discover (while you were still functional) that your wishes would be ignored. It could be the start of a disturbing new trend, one where even "legal" documents such as that are overridden as noted in a story from Kaiser Health News.
**Albert Schatz, the discoverer, apparently got royally screwed --or royalty screwed-- when he was told by his professor, Selman Waxman, to give all of his patent rights to the university; he did so but not so the professor who turned over only some of the rights to the university and kept the rest for himself which later resulted in millions of dollars of personal income annually. Schatz sued (and won) but watched in frustration as Waxman got all the credit for the discovery, even being awarded the Nobel Prize all without ever mentioning his grad student. Said Schatz on writing about the discovery: Waksman was therefore not directly involved in any way with the early stages of my streptomycin research, which I did independently of him in a basement laboratory. For one thing, he was away at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and elsewhere for much of that time. Secondly, I did not need him or anyone else to tell me what research to do, how to do it and how to interpret the results. The techniques and equipment I used were simple and familiar to students who had taken undergraduate courses in Soil Microbiology and Chemistry. Also, I had done isolation and testing in an army hospital before I began my streptomycin research in Waksman's laboratory...I learned Russian as a young boy on my grandparents' farm in Connecticut. Later, in the summer between my third and fourth undergraduate years at Rutgers University, I learned more Russian in a course I took at Columbia University. I was at that time interested in Pedology - the science of the origin, formation and distribution of soils; and planned to get a Ph.D. in that field. I therefore wanted to be able to translate the original Russian works of Dokuchaev, Glinka and others who established the science of Pedology. In my research in Pedology, I introduced the concept of chelation as a major mechanism in the formation and fertility of soils...I therefore did not need a tutor for my streptomycin research. There was simply no need for Waksman to do anything after he arranged for me to receive a monthly stipend of $40.00. I subsequently learned that that was the lowest stipend of all graduate students in his department at the time. I was 23 years old, skinny, and weighed only 120 pounds. But I had an overwhelming compulsion to find something that would control infections caused by gram-negative bacteria and the tubercle bacillus...It is hard to imagine what life was like in the pre-antibiotic era. During my early years in school, some of my classmates, friends and relatives died of infectious diseases. When I worked in army hospitals in World War II, I saw first-hand the tragedy of uncontrollable gram-negative bacteria. They were killing wounded servicemen, some of whom had been flown back to the U.S. from the North African campaign. I isolated and identified the deadly bacteria. That was the easy part. I often spent many hours at night with servicemen as they were dying. That was the hard part..
The GAIA theory has been around since the 1970s, a hypothesis which Wikipedia described as that which: ...proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet...a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life. The arrival of yet another corona virus disease variant is perhaps little more than our planet's "adjustment." At the end of Bill Bryson's book he talked about humanity's long history of diseases we know little about: If you want to imagine what a disease might do if it became bad in every possible way, you could do no better than consider the case of smallpox. Smallpox is almost certainly the most devastating disease in the history of humankind. It infected nearly everyone who was exposed to it and killed almost 30 percent of victims. The death toll in the twentieth century alone is thought to have been around 500 million. Bryson goes on to note that even if you got the smallpox vaccine it doesn't last (one of the last people to die from it had been vaccinated 12 years earlier). Only the U.S. and Russia are thought to have the remaining stocks of the infectious smallpox and both have promised to destroy their frozen holdings several times, the destruction of which still cannot be confirmed: In 2002, the CIA claimed there were probably also stocks in France, Iraq, and North Korea. No one can say whether, or how many, samples may survive accidentally as well. In 2014, someone looking through a storage area at a Food and Drug Administration facility in Bethesda, Maryland, found vials of smallpox dating from the 1950s but still viable. The vials were destroyed, but it was an unnerving reminder of how easily such samples can be overlooked. He goes on to note that in the Western world, there are so many diseases we've never heard about: ...diseases like leishmaniasis, trachoma, and yaws, which few of us have ever heard of. Those three and fifteen others, known collectively as neglected tropical diseases, affect more than a billion people worldwide... Altogether there are about seven thousand rare diseases --so many that one person in seventeen in the developed world has one, which isn't that rare at all. But, sadly, so long as a disease affects only a small number of people, it is unlikely to get much research attention. For 90 percent of rare diseases, there are no treatments at all. Smallpox, it should be noted, is airborne in its transmission, the last patient to die from it simply leaning out the window for a smoke and accidentally inhaling the molecules that had accidentally "escaped" from the lab two stories below...
Which brings us to fungus. Wait, what sort of a jump was that? But just as with those "rare" tropical diseases, it turns out that we know very little about fungus and fungal spores, even as you add your koji and shitake to your dishes. What good or bad traits might be lurking in the fungal world? In a quick summary again from Wikipedia, it said this: These organisms are classified as a kingdom, fungi, which is separate from the other eukaryotic life kingdoms of plants and animals...Fungi are the principal decomposers in ecological systems...it is now known fungi are genetically more closely related to animals than to plants. But what do you think of when you hear the word fungus? Mold (yes), yeast (yes), mushrooms (yes), and right there you likely know almost as much as the medical world knows about treating fungal diseases. If you want to hear some diseases that you've likely never heard before, jump to the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and read their list of just the known fungal diseases, several of which they list as serious or "present a serious global health threat." There are millions of fungal species and perhaps millions more yet to be studied or identified, many of which are in our soil...and they're coming our way.
Alan Alda's Clear and Vivid podcast featured Dr. Jo Handelsman on her report that we're churning up and losing our soil at an unsustainable rate (Iowa is estimated to have already lost 25% of its topsoil), and in doing so, we're also unleashing microbes into the air. Indeed, the discovery of streptomycin to fight off tuberculosis came primarily from one grad student testing hundreds of samples of soil. As the grad student discoverer Albert Schatz** said about his professor's reaction: He (the professor) also knew that tubercle bacilli got into the soil. "It is estimated that the thirty pounds of moist feces produced daily by the average cow would contain, in the case of diseased animals, 37,000,000 microscopically demonstrable tubercle bacilli." And he knew that tubercle bacilli "survive in the soil for many years without losing their virulence." Soil, as Dr. Handelsman told Alda, is loaded with bacteria: ...soil is a mixture of pulverized rock that has been weathered by the elements and by bacteria over a very, very long time, millennia. And then it becomes colonized by bacteria and plants, and then eventually animals. And as those organisms grow and die, the bacteria decompose what’s left of them and that releases carbon and all sorts of other nutrients into the soil, and that’s what makes what we call the organic component of the soil that gives it its rich black color, if you’re in Wisconsin, the black color. Not all soils are black, of course. And that’s what gives it its life giving properties. That’s why we can grow plants in it is that it’s this dynamic rich ecosystem. There are more organisms in soil than any other ecosystem we know. It’s the most biologically diverse environment. And that’s because these bacteria have diversified throughout the soil. As to the bacteria and microbes themselves, she added: There’s something like between twice and 10 times as many bacterial cells in us as there are human cells in us, so they are us and we are them. They outnumber our cells quite dramatically. And they also have tremendously more genetic capacity...if you think of the complexity and the number of different genes in the human genome, if you take all the bacteria together, they exceed our own genetic complexity or capacity by somewhere between 100 and 1000 fold. So that means that they have 100 to 1000 fold more different kinds of pathways and functions and abilities to do things than we ourselves do...that’s why they have the ability to shape so many different diseases...When Alda asks her what effect this has on us, she replied: It’s certainly challenging, and that’s why we rarely get it down to a single species having an effect because there’s enormous redundancy as well...There are only about 80 species that we know of that are actual full-blown pathogens. But there are thousands and thousands of species that benefit us in their environmental effects, in the soil, in the atmosphere, and in our own bodies. And in just about every process that we run on earth or in our own health, the microbes play a role and that spans from the kinds of neurological disease or health that we’ve been talking about from depression to Parkinson’s all the way to climate change. And the microbes were here long before we were, billions of years before we were. They shaped the earth that we know today...my lab did an estimate a number of years ago where, for the soil, and we ended up with a range of between 4000 species and 40000 species per gram of soil, which is like a small teaspoonful. And that was as close as we could get. We know that there are, of course, many, many more thousands of species of that. Some people say there are a few million species of bacteria, but I think we’re so far from describing all of bacterial life that it’s kind of hard to know...Every time we do a DNA analysis of an environment, we usually find new kinds of bacteria that hadn’t been seen before because we can’t culture many of them. And that was the means for 150 years of microbiology. That was how we assessed the microbes of an environment was through culturing. Now that we’ve moved to a combination of culturing and DNA based methods, we can see organisms that won’t grow in culture but we can see that their signature is there and their signatures are often quite divergent, quite different from the ones that we can culture.
So that's soil, and as we churn up the soil with plows and heavy rains and melting permafrost, we are discovering that long-lost pathogens might be re-emerging such as the devastating influenza virus of 1918 which killed an estimated third of the world's population (at that time, that represented 50 million people). Said the CDC: While the 1918 H1N1 virus has been synthesized and evaluated, the properties that made it so devastating are not well understood. And to jump to the present, STAT said this about the new corona virus making its way to distant shores: The suggestion that sustained transmission may be happening will ratchet up already high concerns about the new virus, which is provisionally called 2019-nCoV. The virus is a coronavirus, from the same family as the viruses that caused SARS and MERS. While the source of the new virus is not yet known, Chinese authorities have said they believe it was transmitted to people from some type of wild game animal. “Each day our new findings are not good,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Diseases Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “This is beginning to look more like SARS every hour.”
Back a few posts I wrote about a piece that appeared in WIRED about the one controlling factor of fungus being our global temperature...but they are adapting. To repeat one section of the post: Said the head of fungal studies at the CDC (Center for Disease Control in Atlanta) the newly discovered super-yeast fungi may be "more infectious than Ebola." The article went on: ...if something encouraged fungi to tolerate higher temperatures, more of them could become a threat to us -- and the slow heating of the planet may be creating the perfect laboratory in which fungi can adapt...“It’s difficult how rapidly this has spread across the globe,” says Johanna Rhodes, an infectious diseases research fellow at Imperial College London and coauthor of a new review of the yeast’s global spread. “We definitely weren’t ready for it.”...That super-yeast has wreaked havoc in England and South Africa -- as well as here in the US, where it has spread explosively in hospitals, infecting surgical wounds, brewing whole-body bloodstream infections, and clinging to every surface that investigators have thought to check...Imagine every yeast problem that we consider unthinkably minor --skin rashes, vaginal problems, infections of the mouth and throat-- being caused instead by a potentially lethal organism that no drug can touch. It's taken us hundreds of years to feel comfortable with bacteria and viruses, at least those which we have discovered. But even the tubercle bacillus which causes tuberculosis is adapting, one as a new strain proving resistant to any antibiotic we can produce. There are millions more microscopic species ready to discover, and perhaps millions more that will adapt and change and lead to diseases that may attack us; Discover wrote that some microbes in our gut apparently appear able to jump from human to human, perhaps leading to Alzheimer's or diabetes. What?? One thing seems to becoming clearer and that is that in our apparent quest to eliminate top predators in both the oceans and on the land, and to cut down the forests and jungles and churn up their soils, we may unleash an even new predator, one we not only know little about but one we cannot see or smell or feel, a species more closely related to our genetic upbringing than we realize...our planet may have antibodies of its own, and we may discover too late that we have become the virus infecting it and that we were far, far away from ever being the "top" predator.
*In another version of "mind control," imagine that you noticed your memory beginning to diminsh and yet found that you were still quite functional, even to the point of making a health directive that specified your wishes should your dementia progress...only later you discover (while you were still functional) that your wishes would be ignored. It could be the start of a disturbing new trend, one where even "legal" documents such as that are overridden as noted in a story from Kaiser Health News.
**Albert Schatz, the discoverer, apparently got royally screwed --or royalty screwed-- when he was told by his professor, Selman Waxman, to give all of his patent rights to the university; he did so but not so the professor who turned over only some of the rights to the university and kept the rest for himself which later resulted in millions of dollars of personal income annually. Schatz sued (and won) but watched in frustration as Waxman got all the credit for the discovery, even being awarded the Nobel Prize all without ever mentioning his grad student. Said Schatz on writing about the discovery: Waksman was therefore not directly involved in any way with the early stages of my streptomycin research, which I did independently of him in a basement laboratory. For one thing, he was away at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and elsewhere for much of that time. Secondly, I did not need him or anyone else to tell me what research to do, how to do it and how to interpret the results. The techniques and equipment I used were simple and familiar to students who had taken undergraduate courses in Soil Microbiology and Chemistry. Also, I had done isolation and testing in an army hospital before I began my streptomycin research in Waksman's laboratory...I learned Russian as a young boy on my grandparents' farm in Connecticut. Later, in the summer between my third and fourth undergraduate years at Rutgers University, I learned more Russian in a course I took at Columbia University. I was at that time interested in Pedology - the science of the origin, formation and distribution of soils; and planned to get a Ph.D. in that field. I therefore wanted to be able to translate the original Russian works of Dokuchaev, Glinka and others who established the science of Pedology. In my research in Pedology, I introduced the concept of chelation as a major mechanism in the formation and fertility of soils...I therefore did not need a tutor for my streptomycin research. There was simply no need for Waksman to do anything after he arranged for me to receive a monthly stipend of $40.00. I subsequently learned that that was the lowest stipend of all graduate students in his department at the time. I was 23 years old, skinny, and weighed only 120 pounds. But I had an overwhelming compulsion to find something that would control infections caused by gram-negative bacteria and the tubercle bacillus...It is hard to imagine what life was like in the pre-antibiotic era. During my early years in school, some of my classmates, friends and relatives died of infectious diseases. When I worked in army hospitals in World War II, I saw first-hand the tragedy of uncontrollable gram-negative bacteria. They were killing wounded servicemen, some of whom had been flown back to the U.S. from the North African campaign. I isolated and identified the deadly bacteria. That was the easy part. I often spent many hours at night with servicemen as they were dying. That was the hard part..
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