The four-alarm fire

I present to you three recent articles with a linked theme.

The first is about a study at the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research in Australia, and describes an mRNA vaccine that appears to be capable of stopping malaria in its tracks.  The impact of malaria is astonishing, a fact that often escapes the notice of those of us who live in temperate parts of the world where it doesn't occur.  I still remember my shock, when one of my biology professors asked what species of animal has caused more human deaths than any other -- in fact, more than all the other animals combined.

Turns out, of course, it's the mosquito.  Between malaria, yellow fever, and dengue, and a host of other less-common diseases like chikungunya, eastern equine encephalitis, and West Nile virus, mosquitoes (actually several species, but lumping them together for the sake of simplicity) have by far outstripped all other animals in their negative impact on humans.  And of the diseases they carry, malaria is the worst, infecting an estimated three hundred million people per year, and causing six hundred thousand annual fatalities.

The new vaccine is, like the COVID-19 vaccine, an activated piece of messenger RNA.  In this case, it targets a gene in the malaria microorganism that is essential to the pathogen's reproduction within the mosquito.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Supyyyy, Double-stranded RNA, CC BY-SA 4.0]

In preclinical trials, the vaccine caused a 99.7% drop in transmission rates.  The potential impact of a therapy with this efficacy is astronomical, especially given that post-infection medical treatment for malaria is of limited benefit -- and has to be administered for the remainder of the patient's life.  A vaccine that could stop malaria transmission almost completely would have as great a positive effect on life in equatorial regions of the world as the smallpox and polio vaccines did globally in the twentieth century.

The second is a series of studies having to do with the use of mRNA vaccines to target cancer.  The difficulty with conventional chemotherapy is that it's hard to find chemicals that kill tumor cells without damaging your own tissues; as I'm sure many of you know all too well, chemotherapy drugs often come along with miserable and long-lasting side effects.  The effectiveness of mRNA cancer treatments is that the strand of mRNA can be designed to target tumor-specific antigens, turning them into what amount to "smart bombs" that destroy cancerous tissues without harming the rest of the body.  The therapy has been demonstrated to be useful against a variety of types of cancer, including the deadly and extremely hard to treat pancreatic cancer.  There has even been dramatic work done that has raised the possibility of a universal cancer vaccine -- something about which University of Florida researcher Duane Mitchell said, "What we found is by using a vaccine designed not to target cancer specifically but rather to stimulate a strong immunologic response, we could elicit a very strong anticancer reaction.  And so this has significant potential to be broadly used across cancer patients — even possibly leading us to an off-the-shelf cancer vaccine."

The third is that the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., just announced that he's canceling five hundred million dollars in funding for the development of mRNA vaccines.

Let me be blunt, here.

This action will kill people.

Not that RFK cares.  His dangerous lies were directly responsible for the vaccine avoidance that caused a devastating outbreak of measles in Samoa that killed eighty people, mostly children -- an action for which he has yet to take responsibility.  (This, of course, is hardly surprising; "It's someone else's fault" should be the new motto of the GOP.)

RFK has built his entire stance on lies.  He called the COVID-19 vaccine "the deadliest vaccine ever made," despite the CDC finding that vaccination saved more than two hundred thousand lives during the peak of the pandemic.  He has claimed without any scientific basis that all mRNA vaccines are dangerous, and in fact has talked about it in such a way as to lead people to believe that mRNA itself is a dangerous chemical, despite the fact that anyone who passed high school biology should recognize how ridiculous this is.  (I actually saw someone post, apparently seriously, that they would "never allow mRNA in their body," to which I responded, "good luck with that.")

I know there's some stiff competition, but I think RFK would top the list of the Most Dangerous Trump Appointees.  His fear-based, anti-science policies are going to directly result in deaths -- if we're lucky, it'll only be in the thousands, but if we have another pandemic, it could well be in the millions.  The scariest part is that I have no idea what we can do about it.  Besides not taking responsibility, the other thing the Republicans seem to be awfully good at is not bowing to pressure from knowledgeable experts.  In fact, being countered makes them double down and hang on even harder.

And can I point out here that almost half of the research funding RFK cut could be offset by canceling the plans for Trump's fucking Versailles-wannabe golden ballroom?

This is a four-alarm fire, and it seems like barely anyone is paying attention.  Certainly no one who can do anything about it.  This goes way beyond whether any of us will be able to get flu and COVID boosters this fall; this is about basic medical research that can save countless lives.  But ignorance and anti-science dogmatism are winning at the moment.

I just hope that we won't have to wait until a deadly global pandemic for people to wake up and start objecting -- and getting this ignorant, dramatically unqualified ideologue out of a position he never should have been appointed to in the first place.

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Snake in the grass

Okay, now I've heard everything.

If you ever run across a more ridiculous claim, I do not want to know about it.  This one already lowered my opinion of the average intelligence of the human species by ten IQ points.

You've probably heard the conspiracy theories about COVID-19 -- that it was deliberately started by the Chinese, that the vaccine contains microchips so The Bad Guys ™ can keep track of us, and so on.  But none of them can hold a candle to what one Bryan Ardis is saying.  Ardis is allegedly a "chiropractor, acupuncturist, and medical researcher," but after you hear his claim, you will probably come to the conclusion that his medical degree came from Big Bob's Discount Diploma Warehouse.

Ready?

Ardis says the Catholic church created the COVID-19 virus from cobra venom, and is using it to turn us all into Satan worshipers.

So far, it's just a wacko guy who came up with a wacko idea.  Nothing special, because after all, that's what wacko guys do.  What sets him apart is that radio broadcaster Stew Peters took him seriously enough that he made a documentary about Ardis and his idea -- a documentary called "Watch the Waters" which has already gotten 640,000 views and is trending on Twitter.

I'd like to hope a significant chunk of the views are by people who are saying, "Whoa, listen up to what this nutcake is saying," but chances are, there are enough people who believe him that it's troubling.  Here's what Ardis says, which I feel obliged to state is verbatim:

The Latin definition historically for virus—originally and historically, virus meant, and means, "venom."  So, I started to wonder, "Well, what about the name ‘corona’? Does it have a Latin definition or a definition at all?"  So I actually looked up what’s the definition and on Dictionary.com, it brings up thirteen definitions: ‘Corona, religiously, ecclesiastically, means gold ribbon at the base of a miter.  So, this actually could read, "The Pope’s Venom Pandemic."  In Latin terms, corona means crown.  Visually, we see kings represented with a crown symbol.  So put that together for me: king cobra venom.  It actually could read, "King Cobra Venom Pandemic."

I actually believe this is more of a religious war on the entire world.  If I was going to do something incredibly evil, how ironic would it be that the Catholic Church, or whoever, would use the one symbol of an animal that represents evil in all religion? …  You take that snake or that serpent, and you figure out how to isolate genes from that serpent and get those genes of that serpent to insert itself into your God-given created DNA.  I think this was the plan all along; to get the serpent’s—the Evil One’s—DNA into your God-created DNA.  And they figured out how to do this with this mRNA [vaccine] technology.  They’re using mRNA—which is mRNA extracted from I believe the king cobra venom—and I think they want to get to that venom inside of you and make you a hybrid of Satan.

 Probably needless to say, I read this whole thing with this expression on my face:

It does leave me with a few responses, however:

• Satan has DNA?
• Linguistics is not a cross between free association and a game of Telephone.  
• When mRNA is injected into you (e.g. the COVID vaccine), it degrades in only a couple of days.  By that time, if the vaccine worked, you've begun to make antibodies to the protein the mRNA coded for (in this case, the spike protein).  It doesn't get into your DNA, nor affect your DNA in any way.  So if the COVID vaccine was engineered to turn us into demons, we'd all turn back into ordinary humans a couple of days later, which now that I think of it could be kind of fun.
• Injecting king cobra venom into you would kill you within minutes, given that this is basically what happens when you get bitten by a king cobra.
• "Corona" is Latin for "crown," that bit is correct.  But coronaviruses are a big family of viruses that has been known to scientists since Leland Bushnell and Carl Brandly first isolated them in 1933, and were named not for the pope's miter but because the rings of spike proteins on the surface look a little like a crown.
• Is Bryan Ardis stark raving loony?  Or what?

So there you have it.  We are now in the Pope's King Cobra Venom Pandemic.  Despite these dire warnings, my wife and I have both been vaccinated three times, and we haven't turned into hybrids of Satan.  But we have, so far, avoided getting COVID, which is kind of the point.

But I will end with reiterating my plea: if you find a crazier claim, please don't tell me about it.  Reading about this one made countless cells in my cerebral cortex that I can ill afford to lose die screaming in agony.  From now on in Skeptophilia, I think I'll focus on happy bunnies and rainbows.  We'll see how long that lasts.

Hopefully a while, at least.  The last thing we need is my brain cell loss contributing to a further drop in the average human IQ.

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Reconsidering the junk

Regular readers of Skeptophilia know how much I respect science, and the women and men who have devoted their lives to increasing our understanding of how things work.  The curiosity, drive, intelligence, and creativity of scientists have provided us not only with stunning technological and medical advances, but basic knowledge about everything from the origins of life to the bizarre and counterintuitive behavior of the subatomic particles that make up all the matter in the universe.

Still, scientists are only human.  They make mistakes, misunderstand what the data mean, follow leads in the wrong direction.

Fortunately, science self-corrects.  It still baffles me when people think self-correction in science is a weakness; I call this the "Everything About This Could Be Proven Wrong Tomorrow" argument.  Why anyone would think that a system of knowledge that either couldn't detect errors, or else simply ignored them, would be preferable, is beyond me.

We had a great example of science's capacity to self-correct just this week, in a paper that came out in the journal Cell.  "Sensing Self and Foreign Circular RNAs by Intron Identity," by Y. Grace Chen, Myoungjoo V. Kim, Xingqi Chen, Pedro J. Batista, Saeko Aoyama, Jeremy E. Wilusz, Akiko Iwasaki, and Howard Y. Chang, of Stanford University, the Yale School of Medicine, and the University of Pennsylvania, sounds at first like something that would only be interesting to genetics geeks like myself.  To see why it's much more than this will take a bit of background explanation.

Our traits, and the traits of every living thing on Earth, arise through a pair of processes called transcription and translation.  DNA, as you undoubtedly know, is the master set of instructions for building everything in your body; but somehow, that information has to then direct our cells to produce brown hair or A+ blood type or resistance to malaria or any of a thousand different other features of our bodies.

The way it does that is through synthesizing proteins that then are responsible for guiding everything.  The synthesis of these proteins takes two steps.  The first, transcription, is a little like making a temporary copy (called mRNA) of the instructions from a single page of a cookbook (the DNA).  Then, a structure in the cell called the ribosome reads the copied page (the mRNA), and makes the chocolate cake or honey-glazed spare ribs or eggs Benedict -- whatever the instructions say (those finished dishes represent the proteins).

A diagram showing the process of translation [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Our master cookbook -- the DNA in every single cell in our body -- has, according to most estimates, about 30,000 different recipes.  This gives you an idea of how genetic disorders occur -- they happen when one of the recipes has a mistake, produces too much of its final product, or doesn't get read at all.

Anyhow, back in the 1950s and 1960s, when scientists were first figuring out how all of this worked, they assumed that most of the DNA was made up of actual, readable recipes, that produced something essential for the cell.  Otherwise, why would it be there?

So it came as a bit of surprise when it was found that a significant portion of your DNA -- early estimates said it could be as much as 40% -- is "noncoding."  In other words, it's made up of recipes that don't make anything.  This noncoding DNA was derisively labeled "junk DNA" -- although why such a high proportion of our genetic material would have no function whatsoever was a considerable mystery.

I was pretty skeptical about the "junk" epithet right from the get-go.  For one thing, you'd think that stretches of DNA that had no function would eventually get scrambled by random mutations, but at least some of them have patterns (such as the tandem repeat sequences -- regions of DNA that have the same base sequence repeated over and over, and which are remarkably similar even in distantly-related species).  The fact that these patterns get preserved through millions of years of evolutionary distance indicates that changing them causes problems -- i.e., they do have some function, even if we don't know what it is.

Some "junk DNA" probably does deserve the title, of course.  We have old, damaged copies of genes floating around in our DNA, which don't ever get transcribed and simply are hangers-on from our distant ancestors.  We also have odd things called transposons, which are genes that almost act like independent life forms, copying themselves and splicing the copies elsewhere in our genomes.  (Some of those transposons are functional in switching genes on and off, but others are more like intranuclear parasites.)

Anyhow, my point is that I've long suspected that most of the noncoding DNA would turn out not to be useless after all.  And the paper by Chen et al. has just shown us that some of what seemed to be the junkiest of junk DNA -- the introns, pieces of DNA that are transcribed into mRNA but then cut out before the process of translation -- might have a function that is downright critical.

What the paper in Cell suggests is that these introns -- the leftovers bits of RNA after they're spliced out following transcription -- could have a role in the detection of "non-self" -- i.e., the basis of our immune systems.  Chen et al. write:

Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are single-stranded RNAs that are joined head to tail with largely unknown functions.  Here we show that transfection of purified in vitro generated circRNA into mammalian cells led to potent induction of innate immunity genes and confers protection against viral infection...  These results reveal innate immune sensing of circRNA and highlight introns—the predominant output of mammalian transcription—as arbiters of self-nonself identity.

Which I think is astonishing.  These chunks of RNA, which have been compared to the full-page advertisements in a magazine article that you can tear out and throw away without losing any information, might well have a role in protecting us from infection by viruses.  How exactly they do this is beyond the scope of the current study; but just the fact that this is possible will open up huge avenues for research, possibly even leading to treatments for hitherto intractable viral infections.

So what were once derisively considered useless stretches of DNA now appear to be downright critical.  All of which brings me back to my original point; that science is powerful because it has a methodology for sifting out and correcting errors or misunderstandings.  Without that, there would be no progress -- no way, in fact, for us to discern and excise the junk in our knowledge about the universe.