Prions Are Going to End the World
Original art by GolanG
Editor’s Note 4/4/21: A few weeks after this article was published, a mysterious prion disease was identified in New Brunswick, Canada.
I do not have to say that viruses have dominated every level of public conversation for the past year. Ancient and odd but relatively easy to talk about, viruses are the perfect vector for the horrors peddled by the BBC, New York Times, and their ilk. Forms of noncellular almost-life that reproduce by hijacking the genetic machines inside host cells, viruses act like parasitic hackers, forcing the hardware inside their hosts to make more and more viral copies. Prions, by comparison, occupy a sinister black box into which human knowledge has barely penetrated, so nobody quite knows how to fear prions yet. Unlike viruses, they are not even close to living, and they are not similar to any other known infectious agent. They’re just protein molecules, folded the wrong way, as uninterested in life and death as oxygen. But what they can do makes the famous horror flick The Thing look like a best-case scenario.
Prions are nothing like viruses. A virus accepts the existing hardware of the brain and hacks it to produce pathological software. It injects its RNA into a cell, which then reproduces that RNA. A prion changes the hardware. It melts the silicon chip and rearranges the circuits like a proteinic Loki.
Only discovered a few decades ago, prions have received an extraordinary amount of attention within a tiny niche of microbiology. Nearly every study of prions begins and ends with some nice, scientific paraphrase of the sentence, “So we don’t really know what these things are doing.” Take, for example, this doom-gong doozy from Dr. Stanley Prusiner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech: “Prions are unprecedented infectious pathogens that cause a group of invariably fatal neurodegenerative diseases mediated by an entirely novel mechanism.”
However, inconclusive as prion studies are, each of them assumes three premises to be true: prion infections are always eventually fatal, there is no cure, and they are contagious. Each known prion disease causes a similar set of symptoms, whether it’s variant Creuzfeldt-Jakob disease, Kuru, or mad cow disease: progressive loss of brain function unto death. Undiscovered prion diseases might cause similar symptoms, or they might make other organ systems fail.
Unlike the infectious alien in The Thing, prions leave no trace, no torn clothes to find, no viciousness to recognize as a symptom. They sit, silent, almost undetectable, waiting for the right moment to expand, kill, and reenter the soil. At least the scientists confronted by The Thing knew that something was happening—if they had been infected by prions, there would have been no movie. They would have finished their research, gone their separate ways, and each of them would have died a decade later in drooling, demented agony, long after the disappointed film crew had gone home.
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Whether despite or because of this unprecedented and almost ungraspable horror of prions, no academic study dares to speculate about what the existence of infectious proteins means in a wider sense. What happens when beef, the main source of human prion infections, can be delivered on longer and longer shipping lanes? Or when we realize, far too late, that prion infections are way more common than anybody thought? No one can blame the scientists for avoiding that type of speculation: respectable academia requires a dedication to demonstrated facts and to the comfort of donors, and wondering about the future of prions requires a departure from both. But of course, anyone born before March 2020 knows how effectively respectable academia fights new diseases.
Horrors in the Dirt: An Introduction to Prions
A prion is the corruptive doppelgänger of a normal brain protein called PrPc. The prion’s structure is corruptive because it is not a copy but a mirror image of the protein, flipped in the opposite direction. In technical terms, some groups of prions have the opposite chirality—Greek for “handedness”—of their normal cousin proteins. The prion is doubly corruptive because it does not keep its inversion to itself: when it encounters its mirror image—a normal protein—it convinces that image to flip, to change chiralities and join the prion group.
A normal protein which obeys this call decouples from the cell in which it resides, no longer capable of interacting with its former neighbors, who now reside on the opposite side of the mirror. The normal protein, PrPc, becomes an infective prion, called PrPsc. This “sc” does not stand for “scary,” but it should: normal proteins cannot resist the seductive siren-song of a prion, and each corrupted protein joins hands in a chain-link of prions that extends outward in all directions as it lures more and more proteins into taking part. In this way, a prion infection doubles in size about every two days, drawing out a line of what is essentially dead matter in what was once a lively area of brain cells.
“At least the scientists confronted by The Thing knew that something was happening. If they had been infected by prions...they would have died a decade later in drooling, demented agony.”
An MRI scan of a brain infected with prions resembles a sponge, with gaping voids of activity where the proteinic corruption has spread. Unlike nucleic-acid-based pathogens—viruses, bacteria, fungi, and amoebas, which tend to infect only certain species until they have mutated enough to jump ship—prions seem to infect all animals with a tastelessly wanton promiscuousness. Because of the way an infected brain looks—whether it is that of a mouse, a cow, or a human—prion diseases are collectively called “transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.” In other words, prions make encaphalos (brains) look spongiform (like a sponge).
There is no treatment. According to scientists from the University of Zurich, “we are still nowhere close to finding an effective therapy.” Infection is always fatal, but the incubation period may last decades: a seemingly healthy cow may either supply its prions to ground beef, or it may pass its prions into soil through its blood or stool, where they lie in wait for the next grazer to come along. Likewise, an infected human can infect others through corpse cannibalism—Kuru, one of the first known prion diseases, is limited to a single tribe in New Guinea that ritually eats their dead—or through growth hormone treatments (watch out, INTJ Lifters), surgical procedures, blood transfusions, and organ donations. Normal disinfection of surgical equipment doesn’t work for prions, and since scientists are not yet sure of the full breadth of diseases caused by prions, it is impossible to know precisely when prion-focused cleaning procedures should be used.
And so, to recap, prions are infectious, they spread exponentially once they find a brain, they don’t die without being submersed in strong acids then seared in an autoclave so hot it makes the destruction of Sodom seem lukewarm, and they can spread from species to species with no mutation, but only a cold, chemical drive to seduce other proteins to flip over to death’s side of the mirror.
To wax poetic: even the soil is sick, only nobody knows how much of it is sick, and nobody knows how far prions have spread. Such questions, for the moment, remain the objects of wild speculation. Regardless, it is certain that, because they are the ultimate hard-asses of the pathogen world—because they, unlike viral and bacterial pathogens, are nothing like life and require no host to sustain them—the total number of prions is constantly increasing. There is no question of a prion “dying”. Like other proteins, they can be “denatured”, or damaged on a molecular level by extremely high heat and specialized chemicals. But until then, they lie in wait to infect a grazing cow or an unsuspecting kid who wants to see what dirt tastes like.
Global Society and Its Prionic Future
One farm in Britain can supply ground beef to the entire United Kingdom. This is why, if you go to donate blood, a questionnaire will ask you whether you traveled to the UK in the 90s. The prion has hijacked industrial infrastructure as a reproduction accelerator—although Britain has only registered a couple hundred human cases of infectious prion diseases, we have to remember their atrociously long incubation period: one study shows that one in 2000 Brits is a carrier of the pathogen. How many might it be in other countries, where prion diseases might be misdiagnosed as spontaneous or genetic? As Jennifer Frazer asks in Scientific American, “What if Alzheimer’s could be transmitted on surgical equipment?”
And as more and more small farms sell out to sprawling conglomerates, and meat production consolidates...imagine a prion which can travel from Belgium to Belgrade, from Ireland to Vladivostok. While the Black Plague of the 1300s traveled a long way, the bacterial disease becomes symptomatic so quickly that people with the resources to do so could flee. Prions can travel just as far but produce a disease that takes so long to show symptoms that no one can do anything to prevent it.
“To wax poetic: even the soil is sick, only nobody knows how much of it is sick, and nobody knows how far prions have spread.”
The anti-globalist movement of the 90s is long dead. The far-left which fueled it has been co-opted, down to the level of its language and internalized identities, by global business interests. Coordinators of anarchist riots appear in Forbes; there are anarchist professors and journalists. There is nothing standing between prions and the slow global sponging of brains but a few loosely organized localists who hold no power but that of enthusiasm. Regardless what their isolationism might mean in a broader sense, localists, nationalists, and small-scale communalists seem to be the only ones who have offered any alternative to the global trade which could spell the prionic end of human consciousness.
So then, I ask with Lenin, что делать? “What is to be done?” I immediately think of the trad homesteaders, the yin to globalist farming’s yang. The neighborhoods in Detroit that, abandoned by their administrative bureaucracy, have planted community gardens. The burning question: how long will such separate peaces be able to hold out? As Ted Kaczynski learned in the mountains of Montana, the grasping globalist Leviathan slows its spread for no man. Isolationists may shout as loudly as they want, but global trade has been established for centuries and has only gotten more entrenched as time has gone on. There is no “retvrning”.
That means, as far as humans’ interactions with prions are concerned, that the future is bleak. But this is not intended to be a blackpill. In the end, the ruthless, relentless spread of prions only forces us into an amor fati, a love of fate, which is the whitepill to rule all whitepills.
How to Stop Worrying and Love Fate: The Prionic Messiah
Imagine the end of consciousness. The Last Thinker drowns in his own saliva with a Swiss-cheese brain. He knows, regardless, that there is nothing he could have done, that there was no fighting the spread. Because of their stability outside of a host, the total number of prions on earth increases constantly. It is only a matter of time.
I have pulled one all-important punch in my attempt to drive home the horror of prions. This punch is described in one 2011 study, a collaboration between scientists in Zurich and Tübingen: prions can go airborne. In the case of the current coronavirus, even a two-week incubation period has been enough to foil most countries’ containment efforts. I do not need to describe the powerlessness of public health authorities against an aerially contagious pathogen with a decades-long incubation and a 100% kill rate. That study I hyperlinked has only been cited 25 times since 2011. Almost nobody knows this. How many lives could this cost? The better question: how many lives has it already cost? How many of us are already walking dead?
For a second—and only a second—I will become an all-out doomer: Consciousness will wipe itself out. Maybe it has already done so. Prions exist stably in soil; call the extinction of humanity humus hubris.
“In the end, the ruthless, relentless spread of prions only forces us into an amor fati, a love of fate, which is the whitepill to rule all whitepills.”
And so I repeat, what is to be done? Nothing at all. Veganism? Cows get prions from the dirt on grass. Do vegans clean all their plants down to the level of the molecule? The prion is immune to all customary methods of disease control, which were developed to deal with bacteria and viruses, which require a host. The prion is a cancer which grows in consciousness itself, which persists in all the human and nonhuman elements which compose and affect that consciousness, its spread a result of civilizational structure, which is controlled by no one, so that no one may intervene in the historic march of the prion, which is equivalent to the equally uncontrollable march of humanity toward annihilation.
All that is left is to wait, and to wait with the prion in mind—in both senses. But the rise of the prion does not require fear except for those who think in terms like “posterity”. This is what I mean by the phrase “love fate”. The abject powerlessness of normal medical structures against prion diseases does not need to be a cause for horror, at least not for long.
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Who knows? Maybe everyone reading this is already infected, the prions in them multiplying by the day, spreading to their eyes, then lower organs. That does not have to matter. Life is always and everywhere framed by death, and that eventual death gives life its meaning like a well-wrought frame makes a painting an exhibit. What I mean to say is that, even ignoring prions, there are two ways to live: We either give in to denial, living without thinking of death; or we live at the level of death and are prepared to die at any moment, knowing that each of our actions has a virtue worthy of the death that will certainly follow it.
If anything, I think the nearly unthinkable, Lovecraftian horror of prions is freeing. If we might learn of our impending death or of the end of large swathes of humanity at any moment, how should we live? I remember my mom, when I was a kid, saying over and over, “What do you want to be doing when Jesus comes back?”
Prions ask the same question. Our answer to this question becomes more and more important with every blood transfusion and every hamburger. But because they infect the very cells that allow such thoughts, the question becomes, “How do we think, when every lucid thought might be the last?” Prions force a deeper engagement with the idea of living with constant purpose. If our minds—and the civilizations they enable—are inevitably doomed to crumble in the grip of an incurable disease, thought itself becomes a precious and scarce opportunity.
And so, in the end, prions’ greatest tragedy might not be that they will kill us, but that they do not give us the time to take advantage of the knowledge of their existence. They destroy the only weapons—our brains—that might give us a chance against them. In this way, approaching the issues posed by prions is nothing like other types of problem-solving. Here, the first step has to be hopelessness. Everything else begins there.
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