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Monday, October 17, 2005 

Intro to prions at Panda's Thumb

Andrea Bottaro has an excellent review of prion genetics over at Panda's Thumb. Prions are, of course, the transmissible agents that cause diseases such as kuru and Creutzfeldt-Jakob in humans, and related disease such as "mad cow" disease, scrapie, and chronic wasting disease in animals. Though there was initially much controversy about these agents in the early years (most notably, because they did not contain any nucleic acids), Bottaro notes that this is a "heresy" that the science community has embraced (similar to the ulcer & Helicobacter connection I mentioned a couple weeks ago):

Spurred by a host of new findings in molecular and cellular biology, in recent years an increasing number of determined biologists have come to envision processes that contradict century-old biological assumptions and seem to defy the expectations of Darwinian evolutionary theory…

Naaah, I am not talking about ID. I am talking about prions, the specter of Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, and “heretical” views about biology. And what must be truly baffling for conspiracy-minded ID advocates, the inflexible “Darwinist orthodoxy” seems to positively dig this “heresy”. Now, that must hurt…


And as I pointed out here, this is yet one more reason why, if ID proponents really want to teach a "controversy," they should lay off evolutionary theory and attack the germ theory of disease.

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About me

  • I'm Tara C. Smith
  • From Iowa, United States
  • I'm a mom and a scientist, your basic stressed-out, wanna-have-it-all-and-do-it-all Gen Xer. Recently transplanted from Ohio to Iowa, I've spent most of my life in the midwest (with 4 years of college spent out east in "soda" territory). My main interest, and the subject of my research, is infectious disease: how does the microbe cause illness? What makes one strain nasty, and another "avirulent?" Are the latter really not causing any disease, or could some of those be possible for the development of chronic disease years down the road? Additionally, I've spent a lot of time discussing the value of teaching evolution, and educating others about "intelligent design" and other forms of creationism. My interest in history of science and medicine is also useful as a way to tie all of the above interests together. [Disclaimer: the views here are solely my own, and do not represent my employer, my spouse, that guy who's always sitting by the fountain when I come into work, or anyone else with whom I may be remotely affiliated.]
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