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Terrence Mckenna on Epidemiology
- Thread starter FranLover
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waitfornever
Rising Star
Thanks for the video, interesting. The first part I cant agree with completely, didn't coronavirus start in animals? The social aspect lends some truth. I liked the part about spiritual places bringing about disease. Holy water always gave me the creeps.......so many germs!
Cool stuff.
Cool stuff.
downwardsfromzero
Boundary condition
Indeed. Terrence McKenna never was an epidemiologist, nor a virologist. Principally he was a raconteur with a certain sense for the Zeitgeist. He may well have regurgitated some dope-addled scientific half-truths that he'd heard from his brother from time to time. That doesn't make it any less entertaining of course.
The SARS-CoV2 shares strong resemblances to other CoVs found in bats and pangolins. This seems to indicate the high plausibility of the hypothesis that SARS-CoV2 jumped to humans in the Wuhan wild animal market. MERS viruses are endemic in dromedaries. Virology has advanced somewhat since TM gave that interview. SARS1 and MERS hadn't even happened then. TM talks of pilgrimages as hotspots for disease transmission but the modern equivalent seems to have been luxury cruises and business trips.
waitfornever
Rising Star
I'll see if I can find 'A distant mirror' at the library, sounds interesting.
I found this review "William McNeill, writing in the Chicago Tribune, thought that A Distant Mirror, while well-written on a technical level, didn't present an intelligible picture of the period."
How accurate or inaccurate would you say that is?
I found this review "William McNeill, writing in the Chicago Tribune, thought that A Distant Mirror, while well-written on a technical level, didn't present an intelligible picture of the period."
How accurate or inaccurate would you say that is?
FranLover
Long live the world in peace, prosperity, and free
Its totally acurate cause its his view =) The book could be shorter. I'll take a picture of a page or two when I get home so you see why I like it. Its mostly her prose and artistic decisions along with facinating French and English history of the 1350's-1430's of which there is not much literature on the subject. Its praiseworthy.
One more book about disease I highly recommend is
For two hundred years a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. In England, cows attack their owners in the milking parlors, while in the American West, thousands of deer starve to death in fields full of grass.
What these strange conditions–including fatal familial insomnia, kuru, scrapie, and mad cow disease–share is their cause: prions. Prions are ordinary proteins that sometimes go wrong, resulting in neurological illnesses that are always fatal. Even more mysterious and frightening, prions are almost impossible to destroy because they are not alive and have no DNA–and the diseases they bring are now spreading around the world.
In The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, essayist and journalist D. T. Max tells the spellbinding story of the prion’s hidden past and deadly future. Through exclusive interviews and original archival research, Max explains this story’s connection to human greed and ambition–from the Prussian chemist Justus von Liebig, who made cattle meatier by feeding them the flesh of other cows, to New Guinean natives whose custom of eating the brains of the dead nearly wiped them out. The biologists who have investigated these afflictions are just as extraordinary–for example, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a self-described “pedagogic pedophiliac pediatrician” who cracked kuru and won the Nobel Prize, and another Nobel winner, Stanley Prusiner, a driven, feared self-promoter who identified the key protein that revolutionized prion study.
With remarkable precision, grace, and sympathy, Max–who himself suffers from an inherited neurological illness–explores maladies that have tormented humanity for centuries and gives reason to hope that someday cures will be found. And he eloquently demonstrates that in our relationship to nature and these ailments, we have been our own worst enemy.
One more book about disease I highly recommend is
For two hundred years a noble Venetian family has suffered from an inherited disease that strikes their members in middle age, stealing their sleep, eating holes in their brains, and ending their lives in a matter of months. In Papua New Guinea, a primitive tribe is nearly obliterated by a sickness whose chief symptom is uncontrollable laughter. Across Europe, millions of sheep rub their fleeces raw before collapsing. In England, cows attack their owners in the milking parlors, while in the American West, thousands of deer starve to death in fields full of grass.
What these strange conditions–including fatal familial insomnia, kuru, scrapie, and mad cow disease–share is their cause: prions. Prions are ordinary proteins that sometimes go wrong, resulting in neurological illnesses that are always fatal. Even more mysterious and frightening, prions are almost impossible to destroy because they are not alive and have no DNA–and the diseases they bring are now spreading around the world.
In The Family That Couldn’t Sleep, essayist and journalist D. T. Max tells the spellbinding story of the prion’s hidden past and deadly future. Through exclusive interviews and original archival research, Max explains this story’s connection to human greed and ambition–from the Prussian chemist Justus von Liebig, who made cattle meatier by feeding them the flesh of other cows, to New Guinean natives whose custom of eating the brains of the dead nearly wiped them out. The biologists who have investigated these afflictions are just as extraordinary–for example, Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, a self-described “pedagogic pedophiliac pediatrician” who cracked kuru and won the Nobel Prize, and another Nobel winner, Stanley Prusiner, a driven, feared self-promoter who identified the key protein that revolutionized prion study.
With remarkable precision, grace, and sympathy, Max–who himself suffers from an inherited neurological illness–explores maladies that have tormented humanity for centuries and gives reason to hope that someday cures will be found. And he eloquently demonstrates that in our relationship to nature and these ailments, we have been our own worst enemy.
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