| Iconoclaster 2005-12-28, 12:50 am |
| >"I think it's truer that they sometimes _find_ that their systems don't
behave according to the dogma ;-)"
Yes, I have that experience too. Every study I ever took up ended up with
completely different results than I expected on the basis of the theory I
believed in when I started (and those theories were not even mine).
>"These days, it does. Except in the RNA viruses where it can go
RNA->protein. There are very few enzymatic RNA's it seems."
No, these days it doesn't anymore. It was an incontrovertible rule in the
days of Watson and Crick, when everybody was excited about the double
helix. But now people are starting to realize that DNA is pretty dull
material (which has always my intuitive opinion). It's RNA that does all
the exciting stuff.
>"Of course it is - the RT is required, the RNA alone cannot do it.
Without the correct primers the RNA isn't going to do anything no matter
how much RT you put into the system."
Yes, I can go along with that. And thank you for not mentioning HIV in
this connection.
>"Of course they do! For sure there are selective mechanisms, which is
why things like interferon exist. They selectively destroy
double-stranded RNA complexes."
That may be so in vivo. But in vitro they also destroy any
single-stranded RNA they can get a hold of. I the early days of
RNA-extraction, a contaminating Ribonuclease could be a real nuisance.
>"They never were! It's just that the early methods didn't know that yet.
Jurkats easily grow HIV without mitogens. We (the orthodoxy on
misc.health.aids) have been saying this to the dissidents for years, and
yet still you (the dissidents in general) refuse to accept it.
The earlier culture methods definitely used mitogens. But I've never
worked with Jurkats, so I'll take your word for it. But maybe we (the
dissidents) would have been convinced more easily if anybody had ever
shown us some HIV that had been grown. Real virus, I mean, not some
marker.
>"Every plasmid I obtained to work on, or that I created during the PhD,
was sequenced and compared to wild-type isolates in the GenBank
database."
Right. It's not so much the work you did that I'm suspicious of, but the
GenBank. That has entries that have been declared to belong to HIV,
without anybody ever having had the complete virus from which the RNA
could be extracted. And as it goes for the proviral DNA, the route is
even more indirect.
>"Sadly my purification techniques were not of the standard to get a clean
EM photo, and we didn't have an EM available in any case (or else I might
have actually been tempted to give it a go anyway...)."
Nobody will blame you for that. But surely you were not the only one
working in that field. There must have been older colleagues of yours who
had done this kind of work for years, and who did have ready access to EM
installations, complete with skilled operators. It was a hot field. The
whole world was working on it. Now can anybody blame me for wondering why
*nobody* has come up with that crucial experiment. All we have are
culture supernatants. Why not examine them, to see what they contain? A
single run in the analytical ultracentrifuge would already have told us
much. Did anybody do that? If so, why didn't we hear about it?
>"However, there really has been no need for mitogens to grow HIV for many
years..."
Well, OK, if that's so, then it's still about time somebody showed us what
it is they're growing.
If it's really retrovirus of any kind, it must be highly dependent on
mitosis.
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