I mean surely anyone making the first claim would also make the claim that the measles vaccine is bogus. That second claim is already infamously popular enough in areas of the U.S. that there have been measles outbreaks among unvaccinated children.
I say that viruses are still a theory. To truly scientifically prove it they need to isolate (truly isolate) the virus, and they never did that. Always there was cell materials in the concoction the virologists call an "isolated" virus.
> I mean, the virus can be viewed under a microscope https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC375751/ -
They looked at an concoction with lots of other biological particles: cells, decaying cells, cell parts, etc. There is simply no way to know they EM-photo'ed a virus or one of the other things.
And all the while they have not been able to truly isolate viruses, they were able to isolate all kinds of other small biological particles. Some carrying DNA. They managed to properly sequence that DNA. So far they never manage to truly sequence the DNA of a virus , but instead virologists do an "in silico" sequencing, which is more guesswork than actual sequencing.
Viruses clearly exist. You can observe them infecting and lysing cells in real time. You can do controlled experiments where only the cultures containing viruses you've added get lysed. You can purify antibodies against them. You can prove that the antibodies inactivate the virus. As there are viruses that affect everything from bacteria to plants and animals, proving Koch's postulates for at least one virus is trivial.
None of that depends on EM. Microscopy merely gave us a picture of these things which lets us understand their structure better.
It doesn't depend on genome sequencing. That just helps us understand what proteins they make and why they vary.
However, both those techniques are substantially more valid than you give them credit for and are always used in the context of other tests to assure you're studying the right thing.
You talked about bovine serum and monkey cells. While both can be used in virology, the trend is for serum-free media and generally you want to use human cells when studying human viruses. In any event, if both the control culture and the test culture use the same media and cell type, anything different between them is likely due to the test. That's kind of fundamental to how science works. After all, human cells may contain dormant viruses or viral genomes, so you want to make sure that your controls are identical such that your intentionally infected cells are the only ones that show viral activity.
I used to joke that mouse deer didn't actually exist. That they were just jackelopes that the taxidermists made up for the museum of natural history. I bet that I could have made that very convincing with a lot of rhetoric. A visit, however, to a zoo with said ungulates alive and in the flesh would quickly prove me wrong. I think you're relying on the fact that you won't have to put your ideas to the test and nobody in your real life will be sophisticated enough to show you the reality. In that case, perhaps you'd be better served asking what you can do to prove that viruses exist? Otherwise you'll just go on like this.
Where? How?
> proving Koch's postulates for at least one virus is trivial.
I thought Koch's postulates were too strict for virologists... And hence were relaxed. (lol)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5182102/
Can you show a somewhere the old postulates are all met for a virus?
> It doesn't depend on genome sequencing. That just helps us understand what proteins they make and why they vary.
And, not totally unimportant, to ID the particle we're looking at.
> While both can be used in virology, the trend is for serum-free media and generally you want to use human cells when studying human viruses.
Nice trend. Now can they also truly isolate (that is without other DNA/RNA carrying particles present) a virus? Like biologists have done with other biological particles of similar size?
Because without true isolation you could always be looking at "dead cell debris" or other stuff that is there and is not the virus, but may look like one.
> After all, human cells may contain dormant viruses or viral genomes, so you want to make sure that your controls are identical such that your intentionally infected cells are the only ones that show viral activity.
Bingo! So as long as you put "culture" cells in the sample and call that an isolate, it is polluting the sample.
> you'd be better served asking what you can do to prove that viruses exist?
Isolate them. Truly isolate them.
> I used to joke that mouse deer didn't actually exist. That they were just jackelopes that the taxidermists made up for the museum of natural history. I bet that I could have made that very convincing with a lot of rhetoric. A visit, however, to a zoo with said ungulates alive and in the flesh would quickly prove me wrong.
Because in the zoo you can see the animal all by itself. Now if you say you can only see deer mouse when they are in a soup with 50 other species of mouse, and you make a crummy black white pictures of the soup claiming some provide proof of your deer mouse: should I take you seriously?
Why is it so hard to believe viruses exist?
So what does it look like? We only have crummy black-white EM images, that look like any dead cell debris to me.
> Why is it so hard to believe viruses exist?
It was easy, I did it most of my life. It's much harder to question my beliefs, but maybe that's something you have less experience with.
> Why is it so hard to believe viruses exist? (2)
Because they have never been truly isolated. While other bio particles of similar size have.
No, it is not. HN is for more or less like-minded people and if you stay too far from the beaten path you risk the ire of moderators regardless of whether you are right or not.
Apparently this is the price of keeping it civilised.
I didn't know scurvy was considered contagious; that's pretty cool. I did know people used to cure it by drinking tea made from Arborvitae trees - or at least its European counterpart (I think they have the same common name).
I find the stance a little baffling though; if Measles isn't a virus, why can it's spread by halted by vaccination? Aside from the general usage and success thereof, sometimes it's easy to wonder just because the major outbreaks in the US happened a fairly long time ago. But a couple years back I had a coworker from Nigeria - I guess they still have outbreaks there?... anyway he scrambled to help get them money for MMR vaccines (I don't know if they're usually free via the WHO but supply wasn't abundant so - I guess bribes are a thing there moreso than here). And lo-and-behold none of his family got sick at all, but most of their smaller town did -- including their neighbors; a few had persistent physical problems (I don't recall what now) and a few people died. That's anecdotal, but goes very well with existing evidence and provides a nice microcosm for observation.
The MMR vaccine isn't a nutrient cocktail and I find it quite hard to conjure a Occam's razor explanation that doesn't involve a known virus (or maybe I severely lack imagination or am too tainted by existing knowledge). To make the vaccines (at least ones like the MMR vaccine) they culture viruses - letting them replicate in cells - and then weakening or killing them. Do the vaccines just happen to have a weakened form of a virus that doesn't cause Measles and it's protective quality merely a startling coincidence?
I mean, the virus can be viewed under a microscope https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC375751/ - if that isn't responsible for the preventative effects of the vaccine, then what actually is?
Sometimes science gets used badly and misconceptions abound or bad routes are taken for a while until they prove untenable; sometimes prevailing wisdom lasts a thousand years and then a Copernican revolution happens. They tend to be most useful to question though when there is a better alternative explanation that better fits the observations than the current prevailing wisdom.
Anyone can "question" anything - but what is the better fitting explanation exists for observations about Measles than the prevalent wisdom and evidence that it is a virus?