I hate prions a reasonable amount for how horrifying they are, but they also piss me off because fundamentally the way prions kill is by folding proteins in the other direction. Imagine if someone asked you to make a paper airplane but one person folded their airplane righthanded instead of lefthanded and this burned down the building. This is such a clownshoes way to BSOD organic life and I will die mad about it.
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in reply to @wobblegong's post:
They also like... Don't do anything except exist wrong and somehow they're impossible to get rid of and they make other proteins fuck themselves up
Theyre incredible because they're even further from being alive than a virus is since they're just fucked proteins but that somehow makes them way fucking worse and harder to treat. It's like a flipped bit in a computer that corrupts the whole machine but it's the body. Insane.
This is basically the idea of being able to derail a train by putting a penny on the track, but real.
I don’t know anything about biology so I’m probably wildly off-base but I sometimes wonder if prions or something like them were the earliest form of what would eventually become life. Just proteins shaped in such a way that they create more of themselves
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