The most scary thing about prions is that they're inert. They're not even evil or agressive. They just are.

The mere shape of them causes cascading exponential system failures. And that shape happens to be very stable and requires a lot of energy to be broken up.

Like some kind of rock that falls from the sky or materializes out of thin air, and slowly the whole village turns into identical inanimate rocks.

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ChocolateGod 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Viruses are also not evil, they're just random DNA/RNA strands that natural selection forced to have adverse effects.

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Gathering6678 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The scariest part for me is: it can just form randomly in one's body, and there's no way to tell until it's too late.

	▲	giantg2 18 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The really scary part is that there's no real testing in our food supply. Wild animals can also spread it over crops and it can stay present in soil for years. If it makes the jump to humans, were screwed. That or dental tools (they may not get sterilized to the point of destroying prions) will be what gets us.

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skrebbel 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah it sounds like God hired a malicious freelance programmer who put in a self-propagating backdoor huh.

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hypfer 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I suppose one could go on a wild tangent here and argue that - given they're significantly more stable - prions are the correct-er form of proteins.

They just do not get any work done within how known biological life works, but that could perhaps also be read as said whole tree of life relying on a misconfiguration of that building block?

This is wildly unqualified rambling on my part, but I wonder if life could develop that is based on that prion form of proteins.

From my understanding, no. But maybe "life developing" is the wrong metric for correctness?

FWIW, The universe itself seems to be dead-set on entering the most stable configuration of everything.

	▲	ptsneves 3 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I love the hypothesis. It would be interesting if there was research in longevity where proteins that often degrade into unfortunate forms could be slightly modified for self repairing, and bigger resilience to damage. Of course that sounds a lot like a cancer..