Ever since Robert Sapolsky hooked me up with the ideas about toxoplasmosis I am doing double take on cats and thinking the frightening thoughts of being defenseless against a virus. There is certain order to the hereditary universe and the somewhat comforting hypothesis that a metal illness is coded DNA. But it is increasingly likely that there is a latent viral agent that attacks randomly. Discover – The Insanity Virus:
“Sixty million years ago, a lemurlike animal—an early ancestor of humans and monkeys—contracted an infection. It may not have made the lemur ill, but the retrovirus spread into the animal’s testes (or perhaps its ovaries), and once there, it struck the jackpot: It slipped inside one of the rare germ line cells that produce sperm and eggs. When the lemur reproduced, that retrovirus rode into the next generation aboard the lucky sperm and then moved on from generation to generation, nestled in the DNA. “It’s a rare, random event,” says Robert Belshaw, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oxford in England. “Over the last 100 million years, there have been only maybe 50 times when a retrovirus has gotten into our genome and proliferated.”
I would like a tour this Chevy Chase building, I mean just to look at the architecture:
“Much of their research revolves around the contents of a nondescript brick building near Washington, D.C. This building, owned by the Stanley Medical Research Institute, maintains the world’s largest library of schizophrenic and bipolar brains. Inside are hundreds of cadaver brains (donated to science by the deceased), numbered 1 through 653. Each brain is split into right and left hemispheres, one half frozen at about –103 degrees Fahrenheit, the other chilled in formaldehyde. Jacuzzi-size freezers fill the rooms. The roar of their fans cuts through the air…”