A new understanding of viruses
The word ‘virus’ comes from the Latin for a poisonous liquid, and before that from the Sanskrit for the same. The hunt for them started when, towards the end of the 19th century, it was suggested that invisible living particles much smaller than bacteria might cause the epidemic illnesses for which no bacterial cause could be found.
As more of these were searched for and found in sick people, many illnesses became blamed on them. They became the invisible enemy, the nano-terrorist we must fear. We were instructed that one of our first duties for our newborn children is to vaccinate them against this dreaded foe. Thus was an ever-growing multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry created.
But, as I have travelled through the science that underlies this industry, I have gradually learnt to ask questions. I now realise that there is another way to see this story that fits all the data. I have learnt from biologists that our cells naturally produce viral-like particles without being invaded or infected, both when healthy and sick.
Currently such particles are named by asking what illnesses they cause as if this is their raison d’être, their only importance, the sole reason for cells making them. They would be named far more positively and comprehensively by asking what cells produce them and for what purpose.
Scientists like Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize for finding that cells operate with intelligence and seek to repair themselves, have given us a very different understanding of the particles they make.
We now know that our cells create multitudes of tiny transport particles (vesicles) to carry the proteins and genetic codes needed within and between cells. The ones that travel between cells, those our cells use to communicate with each other - are puzzlingly just like those that we have long blamed for illnesses.
"Barbara McClintock and the discovery of jumping genes" - http://www.pnas.org/content/109/50/20198.full
It now seems that we may have broadly misconceived the virus; that most of them may be simply inert messages in envelopes carried from cell to cell. In the last ten years scientists have begun to rename them as ‘exosomes’, ‘particles that leave the body’ of the cell, thus removing the inference that they are all poisons.
Distinguishing the healthy particle from the pathogenic is now an enormous problem for the virologist, for it has been discovered that our cells make them all in the same way, in the very same place. It also seems we cannot stop this process without risking severely damaging our cells.
So, perhaps we need to halt the juggernaut of virology with its virus hunt, and look to see if there is another way of helping us keep healthy. We need to know how we can strengthen the malnourished cell, rather than use the many medicines that try to prevent it from making particles by interfering with its essential processes.
We need to know if a poisoned cell may produce unhealthy messengers or viruses. We need to learn far more about cells - for only now are we starting to understand how they communicate and the very important role played in this by the particles we had totally demonised as viruses.
http://www.whale.to/a/intro.html
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There are some basic facts about viruses all biologists agree on. Viruses have no metabolism so they cannot produce energy or eat. They have no nervous system, no sensory system, no intelligence that can facilitate any kind of invasion or hi-jacking of a cell a billion times larger.
But, the conventional theory of viral hijacking is that, after the short genetic code of a virus has been absorbed by a cell, the ‘viral genes’ absorbed start to ‘direct the production of proteins by the host cellular machinery.’ It is assumed they are able to force the host cell to do this. It is said they force the cell to assemble proteins into a shell or ‘capsid,’ to insert into this a clone of the original viral genetic code and then to launch it out of the cell by using the same machinery that the cell uses to harmlessly produce its own exosomes and other extra-cellular particles or vesicles.
But I had to ask, would cells give such minute and ‘dead’ messenger vesicle the extraordinary ability to pirate vastly larger and intelligent cells - including cells of the same organism? This is the quandary we are left with if we agree that viruses are not alive and thus incapable of having a survival instinct.
But what if cells create viruses as weapons - against other cells? If they do, then this would be remarkably suicidal as viruses usually pass from cell to cell within the same organism.
I went to consult a standard textbook, ‘Introduction to Modern Virology’ by N. Dimmock and S. Primrose, published by Blackwell Scientific Publications.
On page 230 I found it surprisingly reported that, although people have presumed that flu is spread by coughing, ‘transmission experiments from people infected with a rhinovirus to susceptibles sitting opposite at a table proved singularly unsuccessful. Equally unsuccessful was the transmission of influenza from a naturally infected husband/wife to his/her spouse.’
Also on the same page it reported: ‘it has been shown that recently bereaved people are susceptible to infectious diseases. Thus one’s resistance is influenced by one’s state of mind.’ It then went on to discuss winter life styles; such as living crowded in unventilated and over-heated rooms, all things it says might make us produce the symptoms of illness - and all things that make cells ill without any need of help from viruses.
It then concluded on page 212: ‘Evidently viruses do not kill cells by any one simple process and we are far from understanding the complex mechanisms involved …[it] seem more akin to death by slow starvation than acute poisoning. Lastly it is by no means clear what advantage accrues to the virus in killing its host cell. This situation may represent a poorly evolved virus-cell relationship or virus in the ‘wrong’ host cell.’
See: "Questioning Aerosol Transmission of Influenza" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2725811/
http://iseektruth.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/poisoned-cells-make-viruses/
-
It thus seems that cells may be sick, poisoned, stressed or malnourished in some way before they show the symptoms of ‘viral infection.’ There is a considerable body of research that indicates cellular illness or malnourishment often precedes the production of viruses, rather than the converse.
For example: it is reported that deficiency in selenium, a metal our cells use as an antioxidant, can precede the symptoms of colds, flu and even AIDS. (There is also a strong co-relation between selenium levels in soils in African countries and the prevalence of AIDS symptoms.)
Dr Melinda Beck reported that selenium-deficient mouse cells show symptoms of illness and emit viruses. She and her co-authors deduced from this that a lack of selenium made viruses dangerous - and consequently that these viruses made the cells ill. But was this deduction soundly based? Selenium is a component of glutathione peroxidase (GPX), an enzyme that protects cells from oxidative stress. Selenium-deficiency thus makes cells ill with oxidative stress without any need for a viral illness. They consequently could produce viral-like particles as waste or for repair purposes.
"Selenium Deficiency Causes Flu Virus To Mutate" - http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20010511055027data_trunc_sys.shtml
Another research paper reported that, when cells are suffering from ‘oxidative DNA damage’ (such as from chemotherapy), then they are more likely to get hepatitis due to HCV viral infections. Again, what comes first? The authors presume the virus must cause the illness - but surely the illness started with the earlier oxidative stress.
The first observation of retroviruses is credited to Peyton Rous. ‘It is generally accepted that Peyton Rous discovered retroviruses in 1911 when he induced malignancy in chickens by injections of cell-free filtrates obtained from a muscle tumour.’ But, when I went back to his records, I found that he also suggested that the cause of his chickens’ illness might be a chemical toxin in his filtrate! If retroviruses were indeed also present, might they have appeared as a defence against this toxin?
I had long presumed the evidence for illnesses like polio, AIDS, measles, mumps, flu and colds being due solely to viral infection must be overwhelming - but I have found to my surprise that scientists have long known that the guaranteed way to make cells produce viruses in the laboratory, including flu and measles virus, is not primarily by getting them infected, but by exposing them to stress and toxins!
In 1928 the President of the Royal Society of Medicine’s Pathology Section, A. E. Boycott, in a report on the ‘nature of filterable viruses,’ stated that with toxins ‘we can with a considerable degree of certainty stimulate normal tissues to produce viruses.’
Then in 1963 the famous Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research reported that viruses multiplied after cells were exposed to ‘x-ray, ultraviolet light or certain mutagenic chemicals’ and that this exposure seemed to ‘alter the benign relationship’ that otherwise existed between cells and bacteria.
Then in the 1980s Robert Gallo reported that, when he added certain chemicals to cell cultures, these cells produced retroviruses. Gallo thus named these chemicals his viral ‘growth factor’ - and Montagnier at the Institut Pasteur used the same. If retroviruses were indeed thus produced, then surely this can be explained as a cellular response to stress from toxins?
In 2007 Dr Dominic Dwyer, a Senior Medical Virologist, formerly of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, testified that to persuade blood cells to produced HIV retroviruses, ‘we stimulate them with compounds such as PHA.’ He added; if we want to persuade cells to produce the flu virus ‘we use other things like tryspin.’ - thus that they expose cells to different chemicals to make them produce different viruses! (Tryspin is destructive to proteins, and Phytohemagglutinin (PHA) is mitogenic. ) This surely suggests that virus production can be a cell’s response to being stressed and poisoned - and that there might thus be no need for it to be infected beforehand?
Dr David Gordon, the Chair of the Clinical Drug Trials Committee at Finders University in Australia, testified, at the 2007 Parenzee trial in Australia, that there is no need to ‘purify a virus in order to identify it’. He repeated emphatically: ‘No need to purify’ then rhetorically questioned: ‘Has any virus ever been purified?’ He explained: ‘The issues are exactly the same with any virus.’ He doubted if any virus was ever isolated from sick cells. It seemed that a cellular illness was all the proof he needed to conclude that unseen viruses were present - no matter how artificial the laboratory circumstances or what chemicals were added.
So - viruses may not be the primary causes of illnesses - they might instead be caused by a cell being poisoned. Why do our cells make them? Could they be possibly a protective reaction?
-Janine Roberts, "Fear of the Invisible" (2008)
As more of these were searched for and found in sick people, many illnesses became blamed on them. They became the invisible enemy, the nano-terrorist we must fear. We were instructed that one of our first duties for our newborn children is to vaccinate them against this dreaded foe. Thus was an ever-growing multibillion-dollar pharmaceutical industry created.
But, as I have travelled through the science that underlies this industry, I have gradually learnt to ask questions. I now realise that there is another way to see this story that fits all the data. I have learnt from biologists that our cells naturally produce viral-like particles without being invaded or infected, both when healthy and sick.
Currently such particles are named by asking what illnesses they cause as if this is their raison d’être, their only importance, the sole reason for cells making them. They would be named far more positively and comprehensively by asking what cells produce them and for what purpose.
Scientists like Barbara McClintock, who won a Nobel Prize for finding that cells operate with intelligence and seek to repair themselves, have given us a very different understanding of the particles they make.
We now know that our cells create multitudes of tiny transport particles (vesicles) to carry the proteins and genetic codes needed within and between cells. The ones that travel between cells, those our cells use to communicate with each other - are puzzlingly just like those that we have long blamed for illnesses.
"Barbara McClintock and the discovery of jumping genes" - http://www.pnas.org/content/109/50/20198.full
It now seems that we may have broadly misconceived the virus; that most of them may be simply inert messages in envelopes carried from cell to cell. In the last ten years scientists have begun to rename them as ‘exosomes’, ‘particles that leave the body’ of the cell, thus removing the inference that they are all poisons.
Distinguishing the healthy particle from the pathogenic is now an enormous problem for the virologist, for it has been discovered that our cells make them all in the same way, in the very same place. It also seems we cannot stop this process without risking severely damaging our cells.
So, perhaps we need to halt the juggernaut of virology with its virus hunt, and look to see if there is another way of helping us keep healthy. We need to know how we can strengthen the malnourished cell, rather than use the many medicines that try to prevent it from making particles by interfering with its essential processes.
We need to know if a poisoned cell may produce unhealthy messengers or viruses. We need to learn far more about cells - for only now are we starting to understand how they communicate and the very important role played in this by the particles we had totally demonised as viruses.
http://www.whale.to/a/intro.html
-
There are some basic facts about viruses all biologists agree on. Viruses have no metabolism so they cannot produce energy or eat. They have no nervous system, no sensory system, no intelligence that can facilitate any kind of invasion or hi-jacking of a cell a billion times larger.
But, the conventional theory of viral hijacking is that, after the short genetic code of a virus has been absorbed by a cell, the ‘viral genes’ absorbed start to ‘direct the production of proteins by the host cellular machinery.’ It is assumed they are able to force the host cell to do this. It is said they force the cell to assemble proteins into a shell or ‘capsid,’ to insert into this a clone of the original viral genetic code and then to launch it out of the cell by using the same machinery that the cell uses to harmlessly produce its own exosomes and other extra-cellular particles or vesicles.
But I had to ask, would cells give such minute and ‘dead’ messenger vesicle the extraordinary ability to pirate vastly larger and intelligent cells - including cells of the same organism? This is the quandary we are left with if we agree that viruses are not alive and thus incapable of having a survival instinct.
But what if cells create viruses as weapons - against other cells? If they do, then this would be remarkably suicidal as viruses usually pass from cell to cell within the same organism.
I went to consult a standard textbook, ‘Introduction to Modern Virology’ by N. Dimmock and S. Primrose, published by Blackwell Scientific Publications.
On page 230 I found it surprisingly reported that, although people have presumed that flu is spread by coughing, ‘transmission experiments from people infected with a rhinovirus to susceptibles sitting opposite at a table proved singularly unsuccessful. Equally unsuccessful was the transmission of influenza from a naturally infected husband/wife to his/her spouse.’
Also on the same page it reported: ‘it has been shown that recently bereaved people are susceptible to infectious diseases. Thus one’s resistance is influenced by one’s state of mind.’ It then went on to discuss winter life styles; such as living crowded in unventilated and over-heated rooms, all things it says might make us produce the symptoms of illness - and all things that make cells ill without any need of help from viruses.
It then concluded on page 212: ‘Evidently viruses do not kill cells by any one simple process and we are far from understanding the complex mechanisms involved …[it] seem more akin to death by slow starvation than acute poisoning. Lastly it is by no means clear what advantage accrues to the virus in killing its host cell. This situation may represent a poorly evolved virus-cell relationship or virus in the ‘wrong’ host cell.’
See: "Questioning Aerosol Transmission of Influenza" http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2725811/
http://iseektruth.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/poisoned-cells-make-viruses/
-
It thus seems that cells may be sick, poisoned, stressed or malnourished in some way before they show the symptoms of ‘viral infection.’ There is a considerable body of research that indicates cellular illness or malnourishment often precedes the production of viruses, rather than the converse.
For example: it is reported that deficiency in selenium, a metal our cells use as an antioxidant, can precede the symptoms of colds, flu and even AIDS. (There is also a strong co-relation between selenium levels in soils in African countries and the prevalence of AIDS symptoms.)
Dr Melinda Beck reported that selenium-deficient mouse cells show symptoms of illness and emit viruses. She and her co-authors deduced from this that a lack of selenium made viruses dangerous - and consequently that these viruses made the cells ill. But was this deduction soundly based? Selenium is a component of glutathione peroxidase (GPX), an enzyme that protects cells from oxidative stress. Selenium-deficiency thus makes cells ill with oxidative stress without any need for a viral illness. They consequently could produce viral-like particles as waste or for repair purposes.
"Selenium Deficiency Causes Flu Virus To Mutate" - http://www.scienceagogo.com/news/20010511055027data_trunc_sys.shtml
Another research paper reported that, when cells are suffering from ‘oxidative DNA damage’ (such as from chemotherapy), then they are more likely to get hepatitis due to HCV viral infections. Again, what comes first? The authors presume the virus must cause the illness - but surely the illness started with the earlier oxidative stress.
The first observation of retroviruses is credited to Peyton Rous. ‘It is generally accepted that Peyton Rous discovered retroviruses in 1911 when he induced malignancy in chickens by injections of cell-free filtrates obtained from a muscle tumour.’ But, when I went back to his records, I found that he also suggested that the cause of his chickens’ illness might be a chemical toxin in his filtrate! If retroviruses were indeed also present, might they have appeared as a defence against this toxin?
I had long presumed the evidence for illnesses like polio, AIDS, measles, mumps, flu and colds being due solely to viral infection must be overwhelming - but I have found to my surprise that scientists have long known that the guaranteed way to make cells produce viruses in the laboratory, including flu and measles virus, is not primarily by getting them infected, but by exposing them to stress and toxins!
In 1928 the President of the Royal Society of Medicine’s Pathology Section, A. E. Boycott, in a report on the ‘nature of filterable viruses,’ stated that with toxins ‘we can with a considerable degree of certainty stimulate normal tissues to produce viruses.’
Then in 1963 the famous Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research reported that viruses multiplied after cells were exposed to ‘x-ray, ultraviolet light or certain mutagenic chemicals’ and that this exposure seemed to ‘alter the benign relationship’ that otherwise existed between cells and bacteria.
Then in the 1980s Robert Gallo reported that, when he added certain chemicals to cell cultures, these cells produced retroviruses. Gallo thus named these chemicals his viral ‘growth factor’ - and Montagnier at the Institut Pasteur used the same. If retroviruses were indeed thus produced, then surely this can be explained as a cellular response to stress from toxins?
In 2007 Dr Dominic Dwyer, a Senior Medical Virologist, formerly of the Institut Pasteur in Paris, testified that to persuade blood cells to produced HIV retroviruses, ‘we stimulate them with compounds such as PHA.’ He added; if we want to persuade cells to produce the flu virus ‘we use other things like tryspin.’ - thus that they expose cells to different chemicals to make them produce different viruses! (Tryspin is destructive to proteins, and Phytohemagglutinin (PHA) is mitogenic. ) This surely suggests that virus production can be a cell’s response to being stressed and poisoned - and that there might thus be no need for it to be infected beforehand?
Dr David Gordon, the Chair of the Clinical Drug Trials Committee at Finders University in Australia, testified, at the 2007 Parenzee trial in Australia, that there is no need to ‘purify a virus in order to identify it’. He repeated emphatically: ‘No need to purify’ then rhetorically questioned: ‘Has any virus ever been purified?’ He explained: ‘The issues are exactly the same with any virus.’ He doubted if any virus was ever isolated from sick cells. It seemed that a cellular illness was all the proof he needed to conclude that unseen viruses were present - no matter how artificial the laboratory circumstances or what chemicals were added.
So - viruses may not be the primary causes of illnesses - they might instead be caused by a cell being poisoned. Why do our cells make them? Could they be possibly a protective reaction?
-Janine Roberts, "Fear of the Invisible" (2008)