I’ve not heard about them much until recently, where i keep seeing mention of them, what exactly are they?
In: Biology
Living things manage to be surprisingly tough and surprisingly delicate at the same time. Bacteria are living things, and we have a pretty good grasp on how to kill them. Calling viruses “living things” is a stretch, but they do have some of the characteristics of living things, and we’re starting to get a handle on how to kill them too (though for now, at least, vaccination is still a better solution: we don’t have broad-spectrum antivirals the way we have broad-spectrum antibiotics).
But a prion is just straight-up not alive. It’s a single protein, of a type that our bodies make normally: yo’re full of it, and so am I, and so are all mammals as far as we can tell. No one is quite sure yet what it does. But if one of these molecules gets bent ever so slightly in just the wrong way -it’s not even a different chemical, just a different shape- it takes our brains apart from the inside out. We don’t know what causes it to misfold. We don’t know how to fix it. The fact that it’s not alive means it can’t be killed in any of the classic ways, and we have a *lot* of trouble destroying it by more drastic means. It’s a horrifying way to go. And we haveno way to stop it other than strict quarantines.
Latest Answers