Vaccination Elucidation

19/03/2026

Currently at university, we get told "defensive proteins protect against disease", with antibodies as the hero taking out bugs. Cool story, but honestly? It's misleading. Most people hear "disease" and picture germs-yet autoimmune stuff exists because these proteins ara busy inside us, not out there.
Real deal: the immune system (and its proteins-antibodies, complement, peptides) spends the bulk of its time on homeostasis. Clearing dead cells, fixing leaks, tagging junk, calming overreactions. External invaders? Sure, they get dealt with-but that's like 5-10% of the gig (and perhaps we can say that too is a clean-up activity rather than a defence (the so-called invaders might even be specialised agents/materials for specific renovations or cleanups, as set in over time the optimal path for our biology-as per an underdog perspective in biology (terrain theory vs germ theory)). The rest is housekeeping.
Proof? Check Nature Reviews
Immunology (2018)
Matzinger & Kamala: "Over 90% of antibody/complement activity is self-regulation, no pathogen hunting." It's not sexy like "battling viruses*, so textbooks skip it. But that militaristic vibe? It skews how we see biology—like our body's a warzone instead of a self-cleaning machine. There's heaps more where that came from. The field seems to have been shifting hard toward immune-as-housekeeper for years. If you're keen, I can dump a few extra refs.

19/03/2026

I heard a very prominent physicist (Freeman Dyson) on a podcast say that biology textbooks are updating far more than physics or chemistry ones over the decades. He argued that biology is the most exciting core science to study right now, while physics feels stagnated (he said the 21st century will be the century of biology).
This makes LFS100 feel very relevant. After this course, I wonder if I might actually know more about the basics of how cells really work than Richard Dawkins does, since he may not have kept fully up to date.
Peter Thiel recently said in a lecture that biology has attracted people with lower average IQs over the years, which has slowed innovation. He thinks the field is due for a major revolution.
Dennis Noble (a prominent physiologist who taught Richard Dawkins at university) is now arguing that Darwin was actually right on a major point where the consensus has long aligned with Wallace.
Nota bene: Darwin and Wallace are equally credited with natural selection. They disagreed on sexual selection and on the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The current consensus on sexual selection has shifted toward Wallace’s position (even Dawkins later changed his mind). On acquired characteristics (Lamarckism), Darwin supported it, Wallace didn’t (Wallace even wrote something to the effect of “Darwin wasn’t around by the time the experiments drove the nail in that coffin of Lamarckism”—and strangely, you’ll find prominent websites educating the public that “Darwin gout us away from Lamarckism”). Noble believes Darwin was in fact correct about Lamarckism (note his Pangenesis theory he died working on).
It’s an exciting, rapidly changing time to study biology. Consider many students won’t even know about Wallace whilst being interested to become biologists, and they won’t know that the current consensus of natural selection is more Wallacean rather than Darwinian (hence they would be flabbergasted to hear a renowned academic such as D Noble say “Darwin was actually right” as if it’s not already the current consensus (🤣).

Ps
I’m not sure it was ethical for Ho**er and Lyell to publish Wallace’s writings without his permission (whilst he was abroad), with Darwin’s writings, sealing the deal on natural selection. Nonetheless, Wallace never complained, he did the opposite.

01/03/2026

"The public at large cannot believe that a great profession should have been so perseveringly in the wrong. The present attitude of the public may be said to illustrate the truth of a maxim of Carlyle's: "That no error is fully confuted [refuted] till we have seen not only that it is an error, but how it became one." ... I believe that they were misled most of all by the name of "smallpox of the cow," under which the new protective [vaccination] was first brought to their notice. For that grand initial error, blameworthy in its inception, and still more so in the furtive [sneaky] manner of its publication, the sole responsibility rests with Jenner.
The profession as a whole has been committed before now to erroneous doctrines and injurious practices, which have been upheld by its solid authority for generations." 1889

- Dr. Charles Creighton, MD, professor University of Cambridge, author of numerous writings, including History of Epidemics in Britain (vol 1 & 2), Bovine Epidemics in Man, Cowpox and Vaccinal Syphilis, Jenner and Vaccination: A Strange Chapter of Medical History, and Vaccination in the Encyclopædia Britannica in 1888

(Thanks Roman Bystrianyk)

11/10/2025

They hired someone to measure the dna of a heart, and were thus informed that the dna had all gone within weeks. The indonesian side claims the dna can be extracted.
Somehow we apparently can’t get dna from bones buried over 10kya….

Get ready for my grand virus genome spiel

24/07/2025

Well, I mean, basically…

Frog Apocalypse

22/07/2025

Frog Apocalypse

22/07/2025

Yes it’s me.

18/07/2025

Basically…