The Insanity Virus

Is schizophrenia caused by genetics or environment? The answer may be both, but in a way you’d never imagine. The culprit may be a virus! The good news is that you don’t have to worry about catching this virus. The bad news is that we all carry it in every cell of our bodies.

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.”

But such genetic intrusions stick around a very long time, so humans are chockablock full of these embedded, or endogenous, retroviruses. Our DNA carries dozens of copies of Perron’s virus, now called human endogenous retrovirus W, or HERV-W, at specific addresses on chromosomes 6 and 7.

This virus was long thought to be “junk DNA”, which makes up a fair amount of our genetic material, but doesn’t affect us. The new line of research says that this virus, if it is activated at a certain age under the right conditions, may cause changes to human immune systems that lead to the development of not only schizophrenia, but multiple sclerosis and possibly other diseases.

GRONK. Ugh.

I am waiting for my sleep script to be renewed in a couple of weeks, as we are switching insurance companies. It's actually going better than it has before, me not having sleep meds, except that cold/sinus infection I had last weekend is lingering, but really only flares up at night; when I get horizontal, I start coughing and hacking, and my nose gets that lovely combo of congested, yet running.

So I got sleep, but I slept pretty crappy with all the coughing and snorting, and I find it impossible to sleep with my mouth guard in without meds, so I have spent the last 3 days grinding my teeth, and my jaw hurts.

Jessica, happy birthday! A deep clean sounds like a FAB gift!!!

Which I realized last weekend staring at my senior portrait, mostly shocked at my eyebrows in their natural state.

Oh, god, this. My eyebrows and my hair color are natural, and I am wearing pink and pearls. And my jewelry is gold, not silver or white gold. Oh, 17 year old self! You still had not found your place in the world!

D's brother left this morning. He was a lovely guest, and I like him very much, but I am happy to be able to walk around without a bra again.

Also, I really agree with what you all said about the retreat thing. It wouldn't ping me so bad if they were growing some of their own food, or knitting mittens, or constructing prayer wheels for sale to support themselves or something. As a very hermit-like person myself, I totally support contemplative practices, but I also believe in balance. They could be all anchorite-y for three years and still do some shit. Milk some goats, yo. Make your own cheese. Mindful work is meditative.

The Insanity Virus

I read the Discover article on that last night. It's pretty interesting stuff.

Congrats, sj!

So I finished the SciFi novel The Windup Girl the other day and it is amazing. OK, I don't read as much fiction as I used to, but I'd say it's the best novel I've read in a few years.

Starred Review. Noted short story writer Bacigalupi (Pump Six and Other Stories) proves equally adept at novel length in this grim but beautifully written tale of Bangkok struggling for survival in a post-oil era of rising sea levels and out-of-control mutation. Capt. Jaidee Rojjanasukchai of the Thai Environment Ministry fights desperately to protect his beloved nation from foreign influences. Factory manager Anderson Lake covertly searches for new and useful mutations for a hated Western agribusiness. Aging Chinese immigrant Tan Hock Seng lives by his wits while looking for one last score. Emiko, the titular despised but impossibly seductive product of Japanese genetic engineering, works in a brothel until she accidentally triggers a civil war. This complex, literate and intensely felt tale, which recalls both William Gibson and Ian McDonald at their very best, will garner Bacigalupi significant critical attention and is clearly one of the finest science fiction novels of the year.

The world-building is amazing.

Anyone read other stuff by Bacigalupi? (Pump Six and Other Stories or Ship Breaker?)

Actually, that's Delaware.

What the what??? There was a tv show set in Delaware??

Hah. My senior high school portrait shows bad hair (long, frizzy, out of control) and a horrible sweater, but...I think mostly still looks like me (it's the pink cheeks, and the dimples). I got a picture taken in college also, but it looks AWFUL--somehow the photographer got me where my one eye is MOSTLY closed, but the other isn't, and my smile is weird, and it looks like I had a STROKE while he was taking the picture! Needless to say, I did not purchase any of those.

My BROTHER's senior picture cracks me the hell up--he posed with the CONSTITUTION and an AMERICAN FLAG background. OMG.

What the what??? There was a tv show set in Delaware??

The only one apparently.

There was a tv show set in Delaware??

It's so much easier to run an Evil Conspiracy from Delaware thanks to the business-friendly corporation law.

My UK high school never took class pics. My grade school class pics are deliberately awful (it was the one day I decided to wear my glasses, and I undid my plaits just before the sitting) for reasons I don't care to examine.