disturbedme
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posted
This was in Discover Magazine sometime this year. I am not sure when exactly. I was going to post it here at the time it came out, but never got around to it.
The author is Lynn Margulis.
I think it is SO interesting and I agree with her when she basically says that all humans have lyme. It makes so much sense to me. But I have no idea what to think of the AIDS part. I just thought the lyme and spirochete things she said was extremely interesting.
Yes, and Lyme disease. There are many kinds of spirochetes, and if I'm right, some of them are ancestors to the cilia in our cells. Spirochete bacteria are already optimized for sensitivty to motion, light, and chemicals. All eukaryotic cells have an internal transport system. If I'm right, the whole system -- called the cytoskeletal system -- came from the incorporation of ancestral spirochetes. Mitosis, or cell division, is a kind of internal motility system that came from these free-living, symbiotic, swimming bacteria. Here [she shows a video] we compare isolated swimming sperm tails to free-swimming spirochetes. Is that clear enough?
And yet these ideas are not generally accepted. Why?
Do you want to believe that your sperm tails come from some spirochetes? Most men, most evolutionary biologists, don't. When they understand what I'm saying, they don't like it.
We usually think of bacteria as strictly harmful. You disagree?
We couldn't live without them. They maintain our ecological physiology. There are vitamins in bacteria that you could not live without. The movement of your gas and feces would never take place without bacteria. There are hundreds of ways your body wouldn�t work without bacteria. Between your toes is a jungle; under your arms is a jungle. There are bacteria in your mouth, lots of spirochetes, and other bacteria in your intestines. We take for granted their influence. Bacteria are our ancestors. One of my students years ago cut himself deeply with glass and accidently inoculated himself with at least 10 million spirochetes. We were all scared but nothing happened. He didn�t even have an allergic reaction. This tells you that unless these microbes have a history with people, they�re harmless.
Are you saying that the only harmful bacteria are the ones that share an evolutionary history with us?
Right. Dangerous spirochetes, like the treponema of syphilis or the borrelia of Lyme disease, have long-standing symbiotic relationships with us. Probably they had relationships with the prehuman apes from which humans evolved. Treponema has lost four-fifths of its genes, because you�re doing four-fifths of the work for it. And yet people don�t want to understand that chronic spirochete infection is an example of symbiosis.
You have upset many medical researchers with the suggestion that corkscrew-shaped spirochetes turn into dormant �round bodies.� What�s that debate all about?
Spirochetes turn into round bodies in any unfavorable condition where they survive but cannot grow. The round body is a dormant stage that has all the genes and can start growing again, like a fungal spore. Lyme disease spirochetes become round bodies if you suspend them in distilled water. Then they come out and start to grow as soon as you put them in the proper food medium with serum in it. The common myth is that penicillin kills spirochetes and therefore syphilis is not a problem. But syphilis is a major problem because the spirochetes stay hidden as round bodies and become part of the person�s very chemistry, which they commandeer to reproduce themselves. Indeed, the set of symptoms, or syndrome, presented by syphilitics overlaps completely with another syndrome: AIDS.
Wait -- are you suggesting that AIDS is really syphilis?
There is a vast body of literature on syphilis spanning from the 1500's until after World War II, when the disease was supposedly cured by penicillin. Yet the same symptoms now describe AIDS perfectly. It is in our paper, �Resurgence of the Great Imitator.� Our claim is that there�s no evidence that HIV is an infectious virus, or even an entity at all. There�s no scientific paper that proves the HIV virus causes AIDS. Kary Mullis [winner of the 1993 Nobel Price for DNA sequencing, and well known for his unconventional scientific views] said in an interview that he went looking for a reference substantiating that HIV causes AIDS and discovered, �There is no such document.�
Syphilis has been called �the great imitator� because patients show a whole range of symptoms in a given order. You have a genital chancre, your symptoms go away, then you have the pox, this skin problem, and then it�s chronic, and you get sicker and sicker. The idea that penicillin kills the cause of the disease is nuts. If you treat the painless chancre in the first few days of infection, you may stop the bacterium before the symbiosis develops, but if you really get syphilis, all you can do is live with the spirochete. The spirochete lives permanently as a symbiont in the patient. The infection cannot be killed because it becomes part of the patient�s genome and protein synthesis biochemistry. After syphilis establishes this symbiotic relationship with a person, it becomes dependent on human cells and is undetectable by any testing.
Is there a connection here between syphilis and Lyme disease, which is also caused by a spirochete and which is also said to be difficult to treat when diagnosed late?
Both the treponema that causes syphilis and the borrelia that causes Lyme disease contain only a fifth of the genes they need to live on their own. Related spirochetes that can live outside by themselves need 5,000 genes, whereas the spirochetes of those two diseases only have 1,000 in their bodies. The 4,000 missing gene products needed for bacterial growth can be supplied by wet, warm human tissue. This is why both the Lyme disease borrelia and syphilis treponema are symbionts -- they require another body to survive. These borrelia and treponema have a long history inside people. Syphilis has been detected in skull abnormalities going back to the ancient Egyptians. But I�m interested in spirochetes only because of our ancestry. I�m not interested in the diseases.
-------------------- One can never consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar. ~ Helen Keller
My Lyme Story Posts: 2965 | From Land of Confusion (bitten in KS, moved to PA, now living in MD) | Registered: Jun 2007
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James1979
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Thanks for sharing this article! I found it very interesting.
I am opposite of you - I thought the human sperm / spirochete connection was strange and unfounded.
BUT I thought the spirochete / AIDS connection was fascinating. IF this were true that AIDS is really just a spirochetal infection... then you would think that SOMEBODY would've already discovered by now that AIDS is curable with antibiotics. I find it very hard to believe that nobody has ever done this "experiment" yet, especially since AIDS started appearing at just about the same time as Lyme (i.e., why would they discover that Lyme is spirochetal, but not AIDS?).
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Carol in PA
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What I considered to be earthshaking was that both the Syphilis and the Borrelia bacteria have just enough DNA to live inside our cells and let our cells do the rest.
They become symbionts, dependent on our cells. They are in our cells, part of us, and they cannot be eradicated.
Therefore, the spirochetes survive in the host, which is us, for as long as we live.
Shocking.
[ 10-11-2011, 07:40 AM: Message edited by: Carol in PA ]
Posts: 6947 | From Lancaster, PA | Registered: Feb 2004
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James1979
Unregistered
posted
An interesting thing I just thought of: Pamela Weintraub (sp?), author of "Cure Unknown" and science journalist, is a senior editor of Discover Magazine, correct? Then you would assume that she agrees with the science of the article, right?
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Carol in PA
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An editor does not have to agree with an article to publish it.
This scientist is considered controversial...Western medicine does not consider Syphilis or Borrelia to be symbiotic with the human body.
I certainly hope that Ms. Weintraub does NOT agree with everything in the magazine. The August issue had an appallingly condescending article about hypochondria. (The patient had symptoms of Lyme.)
Posts: 6947 | From Lancaster, PA | Registered: Feb 2004
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