Carl Zimmer: Our Viral Future - A Planet of Viruses

This is a clip of science writer Carl Zimmer's recent talk at The 2012 Singularity Summit about the roles viruses will play in the future of humanity. Deadly new epidemics, or virus built solar cells? Or both? Zimmer's book on this topic is A Planet of Viruses.

  Author Carl Zimmer: Our Viral Future from Singularity Institute on FORA.tv
Since we are on the topic, back in June of 2012, Zimmer wrote that 8 percent of the human genome seems to derive from endogenous retroviruses (an article excerpted from his book A Planet of Viruses, mentioned above). Other research I have seen would make this a low number.

As Razib Kahn points out in Discover:

Additionally, this isn’t just limited to viruses. See: Horizontal gene transfer between bacteria and animals.

I think on of the chasms between geneticists and the public is that a lot of things that seem creepy and strange to the public are part & parcel of the geneticist’s professional toolkit. For example, to my knowledge no transgenic mice have turned into the Brain. I have friends that order weird mouse varieties, and then do weirder things to them, every week.

Documentary - The Secret Micro Universe: The Cell

Very cool, but geeky.

The Secret Micro Universe: The Cell

There is a battle playing out inside your body right now. It started billions of years ago and it is still being fought in every one of us every minute of every day. It is the story of a viral infection – the battle for the cell.

This film reveals the exquisite machinery of the human cell system from within the inner world of the cell itself – from the frenetic membrane surface that acts as a security system for everything passing in and out of the cell, the dynamic highways that transport cargo across the cell and the remarkable turbines that power the whole cellular world to the amazing nucleus housing DNA and the construction of thousands of different proteins all with unique tasks. The virus intends to commandeer this system to one selfish end: to make more viruses. And they will stop at nothing to achieve their goal.

Exploring the very latest ideas about the evolution of life on earth and the bio-chemical processes at the heart of every one of us, and revealing a world smaller than it is possible to comprehend, in a story large enough to fill the biggest imaginations. With contributions from Professor Bonnie L Bassler of Princeton University, Dr Nick Lane and Professor Steve Jones of University College London and Cambridge University’s Susanna Bidgood.

Narrated by David Tennant, this is the story of a battle that has been raging for billions of years and is being fought inside every one of us right now. Swept up in a timeless drama – the fight between man and virus – viewers will see an exciting frontier of biology come alive and be introduced to the complex biochemical processes at the heart of all of us.

The programme features contributions from Professor Bonnie L Bassler of Princeton University, Dr Nick Lane and Professor Steve Jones of UCL, and Cambridge University’s Susanna Bidgood. It is the life story of a single epithelial lung cell on the front line of the longest war in history, waged across the most alien universe imaginable: our battle against viral infection.

David McNab, creative director of Wide-Eyed Entertainment Ltd, commented: “This programme would never have been possible without the guidance, enthusiasm and financial support of the Wellcome Trust. It is the kind of cutting-edge, complex science that needs ambitious visuals to make it accessible to a general audience.

“It has been a privilege to bring to life the work of so many brilliant and dedicated scientists and to reveal a scientific frontier that is both important and genuinely awe-inspiring. I sincerely hope it becomes an inspiration to a new generation of scientists and film-makers.”

Clare Matterson, director of Medical Humanities and Engagement at the Wellcome Trust, says: “‘Secret Universe’ will reveal a world that few people will have seen before, presenting scientifically accurate molecular biology in a gripping visual manner – perfect Sunday night viewing. It is a wonderful example of science programming at its best.”

Wellcome Trust broadcast grants offer support for projects and programmes that engage an audience with issues in biomedical science in an innovative, entertaining and accessible way. Previous programmes funded through the scheme include ‘The Great Sperm Race’ and ‘Inside Nature’s Giants’.

Me, Myself, and Us - Looking at Human Beings as Ecosystems

This is a seriously interesting and potentially game-changing article from The Economist. There is a growing group of biologists who see people as ecosystems, not individuals. As a system, the "descendant of the fertilized egg" is only one component - "the others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual, which are found in a person’s gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that subtend from his body’s surface."

The human egg and sperm provide about 23,000 different genes, but the microbiome, as the body’s bacterial community are collectively known, is estimated to have around three million. The idea is that if we can make sense of this fact, it will fundamentally change our approach to medicine.

Looking at human beings as ecosystems that contain many collaborating and competing species could change the practice of medicine

Me, myself, us

Aug 18th 2012 | from the print edition

WHAT’S a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, however, think this definition incomplete. They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is merely one component of the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual, which are found in a person’s gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that subtend from his body’s surface.

A healthy adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his gut alone. That is ten times as many bacterial cells as he has cells descended from the sperm and egg of his parents. These bugs, moreover, are diverse. Egg and sperm provide about 23,000 different genes. The microbiome, as the body’s commensal bacteria are collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3m. Admittedly, many of those millions are variations on common themes, but equally many are not, and even the number of those that are adds something to the body’s genetic mix.

And it really is a system, for evolution has aligned the interests of host and bugs. In exchange for raw materials and shelter the microbes that live in and on people feed and protect their hosts, and are thus integral to that host’s well-being. Neither wishes the other harm. In bad times, though, this alignment of interest can break down. Then, the microbiome may misbehave in ways which cause disease.

That bacteria can cause disease is no revelation. But the diseases in question are. Often, they are not acute infections of the sort 20th-century medicine has been so good at dealing with (and which have coloured doctors’ views of bacteria in ways that have made medical science slow to appreciate the richness and relevance of people’s microbial ecosystems). They are, rather, the chronic illnesses that are now, at least in the rich world, the main focus of medical attention. For, from obesity and diabetes, via heart disease, asthma and multiple sclerosis, to neurological conditions such as autism, the microbiome seems to play a crucial role.

A bug’s life

One way to think of the microbiome is as an additional human organ, albeit a rather peculiar one. It weighs as much as many organs (about a kilogram, or a bit more than two pounds). And although it is not a distinct structure in the way that a heart or a liver is distinct, an organ does not have to have form and shape to be real. The immune system, for example, consists of cells scattered all around the body but it has the salient feature of an organ, namely that it is an organised system of cells.

The microbiome, too, is organised. Biology recognises about 100 large groups of bacteria, known as phyla, that each have a different repertoire of biochemical capabilities. Human microbiomes are dominated by just four of these phyla: the Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Firmicutes and Proteobacteria. Clearly, living inside a human being is a specialised existence that is appropriate only to certain types of bug.

Specialised; but not monotonous. Just as ecosystems such as forests, grasslands and coral reefs differ from place to place, so it is with microbiomes. Those of children in Malawi and rural Venezuela, for instance, contain more riboflavin-producing bugs than do those of North Americans. They are also better at extracting nutrition from mother’s milk because they turn out lots of an enzyme known as glycoside hydrolase. This converts carbohydrates called glycans, of which milk has many, into usable sugars.

That detail is significant. Glycans are indigestible by any enzyme encoded in the 23,000 human genes. Only bacterial enzymes can do the job. Yet natural selection has stuffed milk full of them—a nice example of co-evolution at work.

This early nutritional role, moreover, is magnified throughout life. Like the glycans in milk, a lot of carbohydrates would be indigestible if all the digestive system had to work with were the enzymes that it makes for itself. The far larger genome of the microbiome has correspondingly greater capabilities, and complex carbohydrates are no match for it. They are relentlessly chewed up and their remains spat out as small fatty-acid molecules, particularly formic acid, acetic acid and butyric acid, that can pass through the gut wall into the bloodstream—whence they are fed into biochemical pathways that either liberate energy from them (10-15% of the energy used by an average adult is generated this way) or lay them down as fat.

The fat of the land

This role in nutrition points to one way in which an off-kilter microbiome can affect its host: what feeds a body can also overfeed or underfeed it. One of the first analyses of such an effect was Jeffrey Gordon’s work on bacteria and obesity. In 2006 Dr Gordon, who works at the Washington University School of Medicine, in St Louis, Missouri, published a study that looked at the mixture of bacteria in the guts of fat and thin Americans. Fat people, he discovered, had more Firmicutes and fewer Bacteroidetes than thin ones. And if dieting made a fat person thin, his bacterial flora changed to match.

Experiments on mice suggest this is not just a question of the bacteria responding to altered circumstances. They actually assist the process of slimming by suppressing production of a hormone that facilitates the storage of fat, and of an enzyme that stops fat being burned. This may help explain an otherwise weird observation from agriculture, which is that adding antibiotics to cattle feed helps fatten beasts up—though cattle treated in this way put on muscle mass as well as fat.

Having shown that gut bacteria are involved in obesity, Dr Gordon wondered if the converse was true. In a study he conducted in Malawi, he revealed at a meeting last year, he found that it is. Having the wrong sort of bacteria can cause malnutrition, too.

To show this, he and his team looked at 317 pairs of twins (some fraternal, some identical). In 43% of these pairs, both members were well nourished. In 7% both were malnourished. Crucially, though, in 50% of them one twin was well nourished and one malnourished.

As in the case of overweight and slim Westerners, the well-nourished and malnourished twins had different microbiomes. The bugs in the malnourished children lacked both the ability to synthesise vitamins and the ability to digest complex carbohydrates. And when Dr Gordon transplanted some of the microbiomes into specially prepared mice which had, up until that point, had sterile guts, the bacteria induced the same results in the rodents as had appeared in the people they were taken from. Thus it would seem bacteria might cause malnutrition even in someone whose diet would otherwise be sufficient to sustain him.

If that is true (and the human studies to prove the point have yet to be done) it is an extraordinary result. Some malnutrition, obviously, is caused by an inadequate diet. But in the case of twins, their diet can be assumed to be the same and therefore, in the case of the discordant twins, to be adequate. It might thus be possible to treat quite a lot of malnutrition by rejigging a sufferer’s gut bacteria.

Even more surprising than the microbiome’s contribution to diseases of nutrition, though, is its apparent contribution to heart disease, diabetes, multiple sclerosis and many other disorders.

The link with heart disease is twofold: an observation in people, and an experiment on mice. The observation in people was made by Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College, London. Dr Nicholson, who studies the links between metabolic products and disease, has shown that the amount of formic acid in someone’s urine is inversely related to his blood pressure—a risk factor for cardiac problems. The connection appears to be an effect that formic acid has on the kidneys: it acts as a signalling molecule, changing the amount of salt they absorb back into the body from blood plasma that is destined to become urine. Since the predominant source of formic acid is the gut microbiome, Dr Nicholson thinks the mix of bacteria there is a factor in heart disease.

Stanley Hazen of the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio has come up with a second way that the microbiome can affect the heart. He and his colleagues worked with mice specially bred to be susceptible to hardening of the arteries. They found that killing off the microbiome in these mice, using antibiotics, significantly reduced their atherosclerosis—though why this should be so remains obscure.

The link with diabetes was noticed in morbidly obese people who had opted for a procedure known as Roux-en-Y, which short-circuits the small intestine and thus reduces the amount of food the body can absorb. Such people are almost always diabetic. As a treatment for obesity, Roux-en-Y is effective. As a treatment for diabetes, it is extraordinary. In 80% of cases the condition vanishes within days. Experiments conducted on mice by Dr Nicholson and his colleagues show that Roux-en-Y causes the composition of the gut microbiome to change. Dr Nicholson thinks this explains the sudden disappearance of diabetes.

The diabetes in question is known as type-2. It is caused by the insensitivity of body cells to insulin, a hormone that regulates the level of blood sugar. Insulin sensitivity is part of a complex and imperfectly understood web of molecular signals. Dr Nicholson suspects, though he cannot yet prove, that some crucial part of this web is regulated by the microbiome in a way similar to the role played by formic acid in the case of high blood pressure. The intestinal bypass, by disrupting the microbiome, resets the signal, and the diabetes vanishes.

Signal failures

Besides heart disease and type-2 diabetes, Dr Nicholson also thinks several autoimmune diseases, in which the body’s immune system attacks healthy cells, involve the microbiome. A lot of immune-system cells live in the gut wall, where they have the unenviable task of distinguishing friendly bacteria from hostile ones. They do so on the basis of molecules (generally proteins or carbohydrates) on the bacteria’s surfaces. Occasionally a resemblance between a suspicious-looking bacterial marker and one from a human cell leads the immune system to attack that cell type, too. As with many of the links between the microbiome and ill health, it is not clear whether this is just bad luck or reflects circumstances in which the interests of some set of bugs in the microbiome diverge from those of the ecosystem as a whole.

Autoimmune diseases linked by Dr Nicholson to the microbiome include type-1 diabetes (caused not by insulin resistance, but by the autoimmune destruction of insulin-secreting cells), asthma, eczema and multiple sclerosis. Again, the details are obscure, but in each case some component of the microbiome seems to be confusing the immune system, to the detriment of body cells elsewhere.

In the case of multiple sclerosis, a confirmatory study was published last year by Kerstin Berer and her colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Immunobiology and Epigenetics in Freiburg, Germany. They showed, again in mice, that gut bacteria are indeed involved in triggering the reaction that causes the body’s immune system to turn against certain nerve cells and strip away their insulation in precisely the way that leads to multiple sclerosis.

These and other examples of microbiomes going awry raise an intriguing question. If gut bacteria are making you ill, can swapping them make you healthy? The yogurt industry has been saying so loudly for many years: “Top up your good bacteria!” one advert enjoins. The implication is that an external dose of suitable species acts as a tonic to health.

A question of culture

Clinical trials have indeed shown that probiotics (a mixture of bacteria found, for example, in yogurt) ease the symptoms of people with irritable-bowel syndrome, who often have slightly abnormal gut microbiomes. Whether they can cause a beneficial shift in other people is not known. A paper published last year by Dr Gordon’s group reported that in healthy identical twins the microbiome is unaffected by yogurt; when one twin was asked to eat yogurt regularly for a couple of months while his sibling did not, no change in the microbiome was seen.

Yogurts are limited in the range of bacteria they can transmit. Another intervention, though, allows entire bacterial ecosystems to be transferred from one gut to another. This is the transplanting of a small amount of faeces. Mark Mellow of the Baptist Medical Centre in Oklahoma City uses such faecal transplants to treat infections of Clostridium difficile, a bug that causes severe diarrhoea and other symptoms, particularly among patients already in hospital.

According to America’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, C. difficile kills 14,000 people a year in America alone. The reason is that many strains are resistant to common antibiotics. That requires wheeling out the heavy artillery of the field, drugs such as vancomycin and metronidazole. These also kill most of the patient’s gut microbiome. If they do this while not killing off the C. difficile, it can return with a vengeance.

Dr Mellow has found that treating patients with an enema containing faeces from a healthy individual often does the trick. The new bugs multiply rapidly and take over the lower intestine, driving C. difficile away. Last year he and his colleagues announced they had performed this procedure on 77 patients in five hospitals, with an initial success rate of 91%. Moreover, when the seven who did not respond were given a second course of treatment, six were cured. Though faecal transplantation for C. difficile has still to undergo a formal clinical trial, with a proper control group, it looks a promising (and cheap) answer to a serious threat.

Perhaps the most striking claim, however, for links between the microbiome and human health has to do with the brain. It has been known for a long time that people with autism generally have intestinal problems as well, and that these are often coupled with abnormal microbiomes. In particular, their guts are rich in species of Clostridia. This may be crucial to their condition.

A well functioning microbiome is not one without internal conflicts—there is competition in every ecosystem, even stable, productive ones. Clostridia kill bacteria competing for their niches with chemicals called phenols (carbolic acid, the first antiseptic, is one such). But phenols are poisonous to human cells, too, and thus have to be neutralised. This is done by adding sulphate to them. So having too many Clostridia, producing too many phenols, will deplete the body’s reserves of sulphur. And sulphur is needed for other things—including brain development. If an unusual microbiome leads to the gut needing extra sulphur, the brain may pay the price by developing abnormally.

Whether this actually is a cause of autism is, as yet, unproven. But it is telling that many autistic people have a genetic defect which interferes with their sulphur metabolism. The Clostridia in their guts could thus be pushing them over the edge.

The microbiome, made much easier to study by new DNA-sequencing technology (which lets you distinguish between bugs without having to grow them on Petri dishes), is thus a trendy area of science. That, in itself, brings risks. It is possible that long-term neglect of the microbes within is being replaced by excessive respect, and that some of the medical importance now being imputed to the microbiome may prove misplaced.

Whether or not that is true, though, there is no doubt that the microbiome does feed people, does help keep their metabolisms ticking over correctly and has at least some, and maybe many, ways of causing harm. And it may do one other thing: it may link the generations in previously unsuspected ways.

Generation game

A lot of the medical conditions the microbiome is being implicated in are puzzling. They seem to run in families, but no one can track down the genes involved. This may be because the effects are subtly spread between many different genes. But it may also be that some—maybe a fair few—of those genes are not to be found in the human genome at all.

Though less reliably so than the genes in egg and sperm, microbiomes, too, can be inherited. Many bugs are picked up directly from the mother at birth. Others arrive shortly afterwards from the immediate environment. It is possible, therefore, that apparently genetic diseases whose causative genes cannot be located really are heritable, but that the genes which cause them are bacterial.

This is of more than merely intellectual interest. Known genetic diseases are often hard to treat and always incurable. The best that can be hoped for is a course of drugs for life. But the microbiome is medically accessible and manipulable in a way that the human genome is not. It can be modified, both with antibiotics and with transplants. If the microbiome does turn out to be as important as current research is hinting, then a whole new approach to treatment beckons.

From the print edition | Science and technology

Via Open Culture, this cool project from The Open University has created a series of short videos that explain various elements of religion in small 60-second animated clips.

60-Second Adventures in Religion: Watch New Animations by The Open University

October 15th, 2012

American friends who went studying abroad in the Great Britain of the 70s all have a story about discovering the Open University. They usually did so late at night, more than a little inebriated, and well into a bout of semi-exotic channel-flipping. Suddenly they’d stumble upon a plaid-jacketed lecturer introducing psychology, say, or biology, or some branch of literature, and find themselves surprised and transfixed. Back then, the OU had to lean on television and radio as content distribution systems, but now that they can make use of the internet, they’ve put out all sorts of educational materials of great interest to Open Culture readers. We’ve previously featured their 60-Second Adventures in Thought and 60-Second Adventures in Economics. Now you can watch and learn about another subject from the latest in their series of animated, joke-filled intellectual primers, 60-Second Adventures in Religion.

“Karl Marx was a German philosopher-economist, and the least funny of the Marxes,” says the narrator of the first adventure, “Religion as Social Control.” “He famously called religion ‘the opium of the people,’ in that religion was not only used by those in power to oppress the workers, but it also made them feel better about being oppressed when they couldn’t afford real opium.” The other three adventures approach religion as ritual, religion as mother, and religion as virus. Each video (watch them below) references a different theorist and takes their views as seriously as such a humorous project can, though they all avoid ascribing absolute authority to anyone in particular. The fourth installment, for instance, opens by quoting Richard Dawkins, whom the narrator introduces as “an atheist, evolutionary biologist, and probably not someone you should ask to be a godfather.” But hearing about his thoughts on the virus of religion will certainly get you curious about what else OU has to offer on the subject.

(You can also download 60-Second Adventures in Religion on iTunes.)

Religion as Ritual

Religion as Mother

Religion as Virus

Related Content:

• 60-Second Adventures in Economics: An Animated Intro to The Invisible Hand and Other Economic Ideas
• 60-Second Adventures in Thought
• Science Behind the Bike: Four Videos from the Open University on the Eve of the Tour de France
• 540 Free Online Courses from Top Universities

Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.

FORA.tv - Carl Zimmer: A Planet of Viruses

Good stuff . . . we are about 90% alien DNA ("Our own bodies are made up of 10 trillion human cells, 100 trillion bacteria, and 4 trillion very busy viruses"), so this is highly relevant to making sense of our biology, as well as the entire ecosystem of our planet. Zimmer's new book, and the basis for this talk, is A Planet of Viruses.

Carl Zimmer - A Planet of Viruses

The frontier of biology these days is the genetics and ecology of bacteria, and the frontier of THAT is what's being learned about viruses. "The science of virology is still in its early, wild days," writes Carl Zimmer. "Scientists are discovering viruses faster than they can make sense of them."

The Earth's atmosphere is determined in large part by ocean bacteria; every day viruses kill half of them. Every year in the oceans, viruses transfer a trillion trillion genes between host organisms. They evolve faster than anything else, and they are a major engine of the evolution of the rest of life. Our own bodies are made up of 10 trillion human cells, 100 trillion bacteria, and 4 trillion very busy viruses. Some of them kill us. Many of them help us. Some of them are us. Viral time is ancient and blindingly fast.

Science journalist Carl Zimmer's new book, A Planet of Viruses, is the best introduction to the subject. His previous books include Parasite Rex and Microcosm.

Tags: FORA.tv, Carl Zimmer, A Planet of Viruses, The Long Now Foundation, ecosystems, biology, virus, evolution, time, books, genetics, ecology of bacteria, viruses, genes, viral time

Douglas Fox (Discover Magazine) - Virus Causes Schizophrenia?

An article from the June issue of Discover Magazine posits that schizophrenia is caused by a virus we all carry in our DNA. If this turns out to be true, it could open whole new possibilities for treatment - and more importantly, early detection, before the hallucinations begin.

One important quote from later in the article:

The infection theory could also explain what little we know of the genetics of schizophrenia. One might expect that the disease would be associated with genes controlling our synapses or neurotransmitters. Three major studies published last year in the journal Nature tell a different story. They instead implicate immune genes called human leukocyte antigens (HLAs), which are central to our body’s ability to detect invading pathogens. “That makes a lot of sense,” Yolken says. “The response to an infectious agent may be why person A gets schizophrenia and person B doesn’t.”

Big clue in those studies, along with Dr. Fuller Torrey's observations that the blood of schizophrenics contains immune cells one might expect to see in mononucleosis.

The Insanity Virus

Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person's DNA.

by Douglas Fox

From the June 2010 issue; published online November 8, 2010

Steven and David Elmore were born identical twins, but their first days in this world could not have been more different. David came home from the hospital after a week. Steven, born four minutes later, stayed behind in the ICU. For a month he hovered near death in an incubator, wracked with fever from what doctors called a dangerous viral infection. Even after Steven recovered, he lagged behind his twin. He lay awake but rarely cried. When his mother smiled at him, he stared back with blank eyes rather than mirroring her smiles as David did. And for several years after the boys began walking, it was Steven who often lost his balance, falling against tables or smashing his lip.

Those early differences might have faded into distant memory, but they gained new significance in light of the twins’ subsequent lives. By the time Steven entered grade school, it appeared that he had hit his stride. The twins seemed to have equalized into the genetic carbon copies that they were: They wore the same shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair. They were both B+ students. They played basketball with the same friends. Steven Elmore had seemingly overcome his rough start. But then, at the age of 17, he began hearing voices.

The voices called from passing cars as Steven drove to work. They ridiculed his failure to find a girlfriend. Rolling up the car windows and blasting the radio did nothing to silence them. Other voices pursued Steven at home. Three voices called through the windows of his house: two angry men and one woman who begged the men to stop arguing. Another voice thrummed out of the stereo speakers, giving a running commentary on the songs of Steely Dan or Led Zeppelin, which Steven played at night after work. His nerves frayed and he broke down. Within weeks his outbursts landed him in a psychiatric hospital, where doctors determined he had schizophrenia.

The story of Steven and his twin reflects a long-standing mystery in schizophrenia, one of the most common mental diseases on earth, affecting about 1 percent of humanity. For a long time schizophrenia was commonly blamed on cold mothers. More recently it has been attributed to bad genes. Yet many key facts seem to contradict both interpretations.

Schizophrenia is usually diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 25, but the person who becomes schizophrenic is sometimes recalled to have been different as a child or a toddler—more forgetful or shy or clumsy. Studies of family videos confirm this. Even more puzzling is the so-called birth-month effect: People born in winter or early spring are more likely than others to become schizophrenic later in life. It is a small increase, just 5 to 8 percent, but it is remarkably consistent, showing up in 250 studies. That same pattern is seen in people with bipolar disorder or multiple sclerosis.

“The birth-month effect is one of the most clearly established facts about schizophrenia,” says Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase, Maryland. “It’s difficult to explain by genes, and it’s certainly difficult to explain by bad mothers.”

The facts of schizophrenia are so peculiar, in fact, that they have led Torrey and a growing number of other scientists to abandon the traditional explanations of the disease and embrace a startling alternative. Schizophrenia, they say, does not begin as a psychological disease. Schizophrenia begins with an infection.

The idea has sparked skepticism, but after decades of hunting, Torrey and his colleagues think they have finally found the infectious agent. You might call it an insanity virus. If Torrey is right, the culprit that triggers a lifetime of hallucinations—that tore apart the lives of writer Jack Kerouac, mathematician John Nash, and millions of others—is a virus that all of us carry in our bodies. “Some people laugh about the infection hypothesis,” says Urs Meyer, a neuroimmunologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “But the impact that it has on researchers is much, much, much more than it was five years ago. And my prediction would be that it will gain even more impact in the future.”

The implications are enormous. Torrey, Meyer, and others hold out hope that they can address the root cause of schizophrenia, perhaps even decades before the delusions begin. The first clinical trials of drug treatments are already under way. The results could lead to meaningful new treatments not only for schizophrenia but also for bipolar disorder and multiple sclerosis. Beyond that, the insanity virus (if such it proves) may challenge our basic views of human evolution, blurring the line between “us” and “them,” between pathogen and host.

Read the whole article.

Tags: Douglas Fox, Discover Magazine, Virus, schizophrenia, The Insanity Virus, DNA, Fuller Torrey, immune system, birth-month effect, infection, Psychology, mental illness, brain, Urs Meyer, neuroimmunology