Scientists Debate Magical DNA Teleportation
- Thread starter Scott Bullock
- Start date
I'm sure those religious folks back in dark ages named scientists (and those who created medicines and such that the stuff we used today is based on) "nutjobs" and "loons" too.SmokePants said:
Just because something seems like it's from a crazy person now, doesn't mean that it has no signifigance in the future.
This... sounds very much like the absolute crap that homeopathy is supposed to be based on. That water can 'remember' stuff that was put in it, from which they can then sell pills that don't actually have /any/ active ingredients in them and claim that it's functional medicine.
Homeopathy has failed every legitimate, large subject group test it has ever been put to. It should have passed them if it was possible for water to 'remember' DNA in a similar way, so I'm pretty darn skeptical and I'll want a detailed explanation of why this new thing works and Homeopathy does not.
But!
This is why we have a peer review process. After all, it seems this guy did more than just distill a few dissolved atoms several hundred times until nothing was left. If he actually has done what he thinks, then damn. Prepare for hard drives to come with cases to keep the water in them from sloshing around and destroying your music files.
Homeopathy has failed every legitimate, large subject group test it has ever been put to. It should have passed them if it was possible for water to 'remember' DNA in a similar way, so I'm pretty darn skeptical and I'll want a detailed explanation of why this new thing works and Homeopathy does not.
But!
This is why we have a peer review process. After all, it seems this guy did more than just distill a few dissolved atoms several hundred times until nothing was left. If he actually has done what he thinks, then damn. Prepare for hard drives to come with cases to keep the water in them from sloshing around and destroying your music files.
They mean like transporters in Star Trek. That's already sort of like sending a copy of a file over the internet.Jabberwock xeno said:
Or magic. Magic works.
Well, if I would bet on it, my money would be on the "nutjob" option. If, however, I'm proved wrong, I'll give y'all my telephone number and the permission to call me and say I'm a "religious folk coming from the dark ages".
If I read the introduction (See spoiler) correctly (thanks AC10 for the link to the article!) they tried to separate Mycoplasma pirum (a bacterium) from HIV with a filter. Then they added growth medium to the HIV solution, and after a while when no bacteria were found growing in the solution they called it bacteria-free and added the solution to cells which the HIV virus would infect. When later in this last solution bacteria were found, they suggest they ?grew? out of DNA? Seems like an enormous ass-pull to me. Bacteria need A LOT MORE than only DNA to grow. What about ribozymes? Membranes?
Is it really harder to believe the solution got spoiled than to believe in a miracle?
EDIT: relevant piece of article added.
The story started ten years ago when one of us (L.M.) studied the strange behaviour of a small
bacterium, a frequent companion of HIV, Mycoplasma pirum, and like HIV a lover of human
lymphocytes. L.M. was trying to separate the bacterium, which is about 300 nm in size, from
viral particles whose size is about 120 nm by filtration using filters of 100 nm and 20 nm.
Starting with pure cultures of the bacterium on lymphocytes, the filtrates were indeed sterile
for the bacterium when cultured on a rich cellular medium, SP4. Polymerase chain reaction
(PCR) and nested PCR, based on primers derived from a gene of M. pirum which had been
previously cloned and sequenced, adhesin, were negative in the filtrate. However, when the
filtrate was incubated with human lymphocytes, (previously controlled for not being infected
with the mycoplasma) the mycoplasma with all its characteristics was regularly recovered! Then
the question was raised: what kind of information was transmitted in the aqueous filtrate? It
was the beginning of a long lasting investigation bearing on the physical properties of DNA in
water. Indeed, a new property of M. pirum DNA was found: the emission of low frequency
waves in some water dilutions of the filtrate, soon extended to other bacterial and viral DNAs.
bacterium, a frequent companion of HIV, Mycoplasma pirum, and like HIV a lover of human
lymphocytes. L.M. was trying to separate the bacterium, which is about 300 nm in size, from
viral particles whose size is about 120 nm by filtration using filters of 100 nm and 20 nm.
Starting with pure cultures of the bacterium on lymphocytes, the filtrates were indeed sterile
for the bacterium when cultured on a rich cellular medium, SP4. Polymerase chain reaction
(PCR) and nested PCR, based on primers derived from a gene of M. pirum which had been
previously cloned and sequenced, adhesin, were negative in the filtrate. However, when the
filtrate was incubated with human lymphocytes, (previously controlled for not being infected
with the mycoplasma) the mycoplasma with all its characteristics was regularly recovered! Then
the question was raised: what kind of information was transmitted in the aqueous filtrate? It
was the beginning of a long lasting investigation bearing on the physical properties of DNA in
water. Indeed, a new property of M. pirum DNA was found: the emission of low frequency
waves in some water dilutions of the filtrate, soon extended to other bacterial and viral DNAs.
Is it really harder to believe the solution got spoiled than to believe in a miracle?
EDIT: relevant piece of article added.
The homeopathy similarity was my first thought was well. One of the key questions (sorry, haven't looked at the original paper yet) is going to be what he did for blanks and how clean his process was. The entire point of PCR is that amplifies small ammounts of DNA in order to let you see them, so any hint of contamination in a case like this will quickly invalidate the results.Creos said:
Considering the state of homeopathy in general, and the fact that he felt the need to isolate this from the earth's magnetic field (which doesn't actually happen most of the time outside a lab), I'm highly skeptical.
Just a thought, while I agree with your conclusion that the most likely explanation is contamination, I think you have their conclusion slightly wrong.Caylus said:
They don't believe that bacteria grew from the water memory, merely that the PCR process was able to create a copy of the bacterial DNA based on the electrochemical memory of the water that managed to 'store' the signature of the DNA, and that this also happens in living cells as a method of DNA reproduction.
If I'm not mistaken it caused quite a controversy amongst ufologists ... but wasn't the entire experiment debunked as a hoax?The_root_of_all_evil said:
It could have just been an elabourate joke however .... Eldridge ... very close to Eldritch.... from Middle English 'Eldrich', which means 'the unseemly'
As in ... this stuff is fucking ARCANE bitches ;P And the Navy/hoaxers were having one big joke? Just because something is governmental doesn't mean the people suddenly lose their sense of humour.
I don't understand why it's so hard for people to believe that people's and the planets electromagnetic fields are so intertwined. On a purely scientific and evolutionary level, everything on the planet evolved as it is today on this planet. Migratory birds, for example determine their path at least partially according to earths magnetic fields. And all things on this planet produce a magnetic field. Yet it is outside believability that cells have a way of copying DNA that science is only now potentially discovering.
On the flip side, I once met someone who was convinced Acupuncture could cure her cancer, and that didn't work out. Both sides of the argument are completely legitimate. Usually, in Western thought, breaking it down and codifying it makes it work and makes the spread of the knowledge better. In Eastern though, things go deeper than what can be transmitted in books. There are examples of both things being true though.
On a final note, this is not at all DNA "transportation" as much as it is DNA copying. Cells have been doing this since they have existed in a multi-cellular system, and I know for a fact that not all forms of cellular reproduction are understood completely.
You shouldn't lump all forms of homeopathic medicine together. That is just stupid. There are many forms of it, and a lot of them are bullshit. Then there are some that are very effective, two that immediately jump to mind are herbology and "Japanese" Acupuncture. Many have argued, and quite successfully for some, that simply because science is only just catching up to them, doesn't mean they don't work or are ineffective. I myself had an acupuncture treatment that pretty much cured my blown knee. I went from limping and wearing a knee brace 24/7 to walking unassisted without a limp since then. I met a guy who every doctor in the book said he would never walk again, walking up and down stairs, going to the bathroom and everything. He shattered his C4 and C5 Vertebrae in a diving accident.Creos said:
On the flip side, I once met someone who was convinced Acupuncture could cure her cancer, and that didn't work out. Both sides of the argument are completely legitimate. Usually, in Western thought, breaking it down and codifying it makes it work and makes the spread of the knowledge better. In Eastern though, things go deeper than what can be transmitted in books. There are examples of both things being true though.
On a final note, this is not at all DNA "transportation" as much as it is DNA copying. Cells have been doing this since they have existed in a multi-cellular system, and I know for a fact that not all forms of cellular reproduction are understood completely.
I hope not, those teleporters don't actually teleport you, they really just kill you and then clone you somewhere else.Misterpinky said:
I really don't want to sound pretentious, but as someone who works with DNA I find it extremely difficult to believe that DNA was replicated using water as a template. It raises a lot of questions that I'm sure will come up in peer review. I could be mistaken, but it appears that this has been submitted for publication, but not actually accepted and published. I would wait and see where this article ends up before taking it too seriously.
Just go and read the NASA commissioned report into teleportation theory. Good read. Google it.
The TLR of it is such:
Disregarding the concept of psychokinetic teleportation (real magic imo), my understanding of teleportation theory is that you could theoretically 'destroy' an object (be it a person or thing), make a 'blueprint' of its atom structure, send the data to another place and 'reconstruct' the object in another place from a storage of raw matter. So pretty much making a copy from junk matter, using the destroyed object as new junk matter at the original location.
The only problems are that to store the blueprint of an object you'd need storage devices about a billion times larger than exist now, transfer infrastructure that completely surpasses what's currently available - and the real kicker: destroying an object in the first instance would require controlled temperatures that are hotter than the surface of the sun.
Once we get around that - no worries! Although its predicted that if technology continues to progress at its current rate we MAY be able to do it in about 300 years.
Though the same report states that studies in China have already monitored, have video proof of controlled psychokinetic teleportation in action. So... yeah.
The TL
R of it is such:Disregarding the concept of psychokinetic teleportation (real magic imo), my understanding of teleportation theory is that you could theoretically 'destroy' an object (be it a person or thing), make a 'blueprint' of its atom structure, send the data to another place and 'reconstruct' the object in another place from a storage of raw matter. So pretty much making a copy from junk matter, using the destroyed object as new junk matter at the original location.
The only problems are that to store the blueprint of an object you'd need storage devices about a billion times larger than exist now, transfer infrastructure that completely surpasses what's currently available - and the real kicker: destroying an object in the first instance would require controlled temperatures that are hotter than the surface of the sun.
Once we get around that - no worries! Although its predicted that if technology continues to progress at its current rate we MAY be able to do it in about 300 years.
Though the same report states that studies in China have already monitored, have video proof of controlled psychokinetic teleportation in action. So... yeah.
Execpt those transporters pick you apart atom by atom, essietnaly killinf you and producing a copy somewhere else, wheras this keeps you alive while making the copy.Zachary Amaranth said:
Well... now I'm slightly pissed.Baresark said:
Not at you mind you. You bring up good points. I am pissed that things like acupuncture, which have some pretty interesting and remarkable, if inconsistent, results behind them are being associated with homeopathy, which /never/ performs better than placebo when put to proper tests.
Seriously. Homeopathy takes two fairly far out claims and puts them together.
The first is that water can remember stuff that was dissolved and/or mixed with it. The very fact that people don't fall over dead from drinking water that came from a water treatment plant proves that this idea is ludicrous.
Second, it makes use of the idea that 'dilution increases potency'. This should immediately raise eyebrows as to what people who make this snake oil are trying to pull. Really, if using a diluted active ingredient worked better than using the real thing, big buisiness would be all over this, and if they really worked better, real doctors would be prescribing these pills and homeopathy would not be considered alternative medicine.
But, there's wierder ideas in the world that are actually true. So lets be fair and consider just how much dilution is done on average to true homeopathic medicine. To steal a properly geek-acceptable analogy from rationalwiki to show just how insane this idea is, pretend one pixel in your computer monitor is our sample of active ingredient... that term is too fumbly. Lets say it's aspirin. One pixel on your computer monitor is your starting ammount of aspirin. Now take a disc the size of our solar system made out of same sized pixels to be the water and add your single pixel of aspirin to it. Then shake it all up (actually, beat it against a piece of wood. No seriously. This is the part that lets them get away with selling it as something other than the water it really is) and fill up your pills. That is the level of dilution homeopathy does. Do you really think you're going to get any aspirin in that? Oh wait, the water is supposed to know what to do to make your headache stop now.
well... that was.... off topic in the thread... oh well