Cold Virus

[Cyjack]

Hi all -

I need to keep a cold virus alive for a while, but I am not exactly sure how to. My instinct tells me to collect some mucus, perhaps in water, and place it in the fridge... Any ideas? It does not seem a popular exercise so google hasnt helped me. ...

[mescalito]

You'd have to first isolate the virus from the phlegm and the airborne contaminants in collecting the sample.Then feed it whatever it lives on in an aseptic environment at the correct incubation temp.

More importantly though wtf for?

edit:you could always infect someone else I guess ;-)

[jasemateau]

tricked me i thought it was a tread on how to gett better from a cold.

as soon as i feel a cold coming on i stock up on veg, quickly stir fried with buckets of garlic, chilli, and ginger.

but keep it alive????

um............

yes i too have people i find very difficult to like, but ummm diliberate contamination sounds like they would have to deserve it man...........

at least i got a smile out of it. cheeky fucker

sorry dunno

[Torsten]

the virus is cultivated on raw eggs for vaccine production

[Rev]

A Virus is not alive

its an inanimate structure - protein coat

enveloping a short nucleic acid script

"Then feed it whatever it lives on"

humans

The common cold is Rhinovirus if that helps

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhinovirus

[ballzac]

A Virus is not alive

Well...It depends on what definition of life you use. Viruses do not move under their own power, and they reauire a host to survive, but they multiply, utilize a food source, and adapt.

"Virtually all authors who have considered life from the point of view of molecular biology have regarded the property of self-reproduction as the most fundamental aspect of a living organism." —John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle

"What is the characteristic feature of life? When is a piece of matter said to be alive? When it goes on "doing something," moving, exchanging material with its environment, and so forth, and that for a much longer period than we would expect an inanimate piece of matter to "keep going" under similar circumstances. When a system that is not alive is isolated or placed in a uniform environment, all motion usually comes to a standstill very soon as a result of various kinds of friction; differences of electric or chemical potential are equalized, substances which tend to form a chemical compound do so, temperature becomes uniform by heat conduction. After that the whole system fades away into a dead, inert lump of matter. A permanent state is reached, in which no observable events occur. The physicist calls this the state of thermodynamical equilibrium, or of "maximum entropy." —Erwin Schrodinger, What is Life?"

I don't think Schroedinger's definition in anyway rules out viruses, but that again is a matter of opinion.

The scientific community is still very much divided on whether a virus is alive or not, but it is all just a matter of semantics. We know what a virus IS, we just differ on definition. That is, it is various peoples opinions on the definition of life that differs, not their opinions on the mechanics/biology of the virus itself.

As for the question of keeping a cold alive. I have no idea. Try smoking lots of cigarettes, eating poorly, and living on the street.

[Cyjack]

I have read that viruses arent exactly alive either - http://freespace.virgin.net/ahcare.qua/lit...ce/viruses.html

But I want to be able to 'recatch' this particular strain of cold/flu again... let me explain.

Years ago I caught a strong flu virus that seemed to come on full blown through the course of a single night (3-5 hours) and lasted 2-3 days. During the experience, i hallucinated and dreamt about a blue alien with multiple eyes that explained all manner of things about mans evolution to me... a hallucination - obviously.

Christmas night this year, I felt a similar strain coming on - and in a matter of hours I was feeling the effects. That night I hallucinated and suffered (I am certain I actually experienced slow ego loss/dissolving) and when I came out of it a couple of days later, I felt like a new person - just as if I had experienced an 'ordeal' poison.

Last night when I met up with my friend Mary, i realised how clear my mind was and I feel like I reached a new level of enlightenment - which I put down to the virus, so it occured to me that if I could 'take' this virus like an 'experience' every now and then, it might be of benefit.... sounds crazy doesnt it? And yet it occurs to me that these types of things that dont kill us, really do make us stronger. Perhaps we have mistaken these things for something else? Too much thinking? Not enough?

[ballzac]

I personally would not put up with the negative effects of a cold, even for a spiritual experience, but if it is worth it for you, then there is nothing wrong with it. Even the most enjoyable entheogens have negative side effects. Are you sure it was JUST a cold. Maybe your immune system was lowered by a flu virus, thus enabling the cold to come on so quickly. You would still experience the cold, but another virus might be responsible for an hallucination inducing fever. Just a thought.

-Zac

[Cyjack]

True - I am not certain of anything. This is 'blind' work from what ever angle I look at it, so there could be (prob are) many unseen factors at play here.... and I would rate this particular flu experience harder to handle than a 12 HBWR seed experience, so it is not something I would pick for a weekends 'getaway'.

Its just that my intuition sees more in this than I can explain, and unfortunately I can only try to make the best of it. The first experience with a hallucination that I remember was with this type of strong-fast acting strain, and in that 'trip', the alien explained that it was an evolutionary tool - and now to have a similar experience with a noticable 'evolving' effect, I am left grasping at what ever metaphysical or scientific straws I can get my hands and eyes on. This feels important - it feels real. And yet I know it sounds wierd.

[ballzac]

BTW, most of the information in that link is incorrect (as far as I know). Here is a link that I think is a lot more accurate http://library.thinkquest.org/C003763/pdf/origin06.pdf I think requiring cells is a fairly arbitrary difinition and it is the only one according to this source that viruses don't posess. Like it says, it is a matter of great debate and a grey area. If we met concious beings from other solar systems, whose bodies were not made up of cells, I would like it if we still considered them lifeforms. I would also like to think that any machine that displays all of these traits apart from being made up of cells would eventually be thought of as living.

-Zac

[Cyjack]

Well - Great layout, pictures and words, simple and clear - thats a great PDF ballzac - thanks. Its funny, because I consider most self animated objects as 'alive' or at least in some way dynamic. Words limit our understanding sometimes I think, so perhaps there is a way around them.

Good news - I was able to contact an old friend of mine who works for a forensics lab and he suggested that I google 'virus transportation' - and I found this -

http://www.mass.gov/dph/cdc/epii/flu/testing_swab.pdf

which verifies to my satisfaction that the virus can be frozen, although I will have to experiment with my own home made culture..

I wonder though, if I am able to keep this thing alive, and then re-infect myself in the future - with positive results, would anyone else venture into something like this?

[ballzac]

Yeah. Post me some frozen mucus and...On second thoughts I think I'll stick with the alkaloids. I don't think many are going to be interested in experimenting with this possiblity, but that makes you a pioneer. Maybe you'll be the first person to isolate/develope a psychedelic virus.

I'm not sure how long your immunity for the virus will last after your body defeats it. Maybe you will never be able to reinfect. If you could find enough people who were interested, you could send it on to the next person, who would infect themselves and then send it on to the next person and so on and so forth, untill it has mutated enough that when the last person sends it back to you, you can infect yourself with it.

[Legba]

Personal Growth: Book Excerpt of 'The Healing Path...' - Illness As An Inward Journey

By Marc Ian Barasch

Illness As An Inward Journey

by Marc Ian Barasch ([email protected])

The Healing Path begins with an event that changed my life as violently as an earthquake wrenches a river from its course. Its medical label, "cancer," means little. Like other words that try to describe deep human experience--- love, hatred, joy, grief---it only hides the enormity it signifies. Our most personal moments are immune to language. And disease is so ineffably ours, so much part of our own irreproducable tale, that we are almost obliged to call it by our own proper name.

But like most people, when I became ill I felt as if I had been invaded by some alien It, a Thing with little relation to the "real me." I was shocked when sickness reached into me and summoned up every unresolved emotional issue, every still-fertile hope and smoldering fear, every power of the body-mind to hurt and to heal. Cancer seemed to plunge me into an altered state, a separate reality which, despite years of inner exploring, was as unfamiliar as the dark side of the moon.

At the time, ironically, I had thought myself quite knowledgeable about the realms of healing. As the editor of 'New Age Journal', I could recite the holistic canon chapter and verse. I knew that mind and body were powerful influences on each other, that brain, glands and organs engaged in mysterious commerce, that thoughts and feelings ricocheted off cell walls. But such formulations---now grouped under headings like "psychoneuroimmunology" and bristling with the terms and tools of molecular biology---were of little help. They failed utterly to explain how a condition of the flesh could also be a dilemma of the spirit.

For the past five years, through research, interviews with other patients, and self-inquiry, I have attempted to broaden my understanding of the role that the psyche plays in disease and healing. Not as an academic pursuit, but as a survival exercise: It was the only way I found to ride out the after- shocks of my own catastrophe, to fit back the pieces of a life unexpectedly scattered. Along the way, I began to realize a map was emerging, crude but unmistakeable, of what might called the Healing Journey.

In the course of my own quest, I have visited what, before the world shrank, used to be called "faraway lands;" crisscrossed this country to talk with some forty people who experienced unusual recoveries; been driven, a very amateur researcher, into medical libraries and sometimes out of doctor's offices. I heard answers that moved and amazed me, some prosaic, others giddily dislocating. But strangest of all were the forays---by turns comforting, agonzing, illuminating, and baffling--into my own still-dark and unknown Interior.

In our usual schema, sickness can only be seen as implacably evil; we, the hero must be unswervingly good. We fear that to make any relationship with disease carries the danger of appeasement of capitulation to the enemy. To "listen" to illness, to ask whether it might have something to say to us, even be a part of us, we fear risks sapping our will to fight. But, as psychologist Meredith Sabini has observed, the combative attitude can work at crosspurposes to the healing process:

"Often the reaction to the diagnosis of cancer is a fierce ossification of the defences and a determination to fight the disease at any cost rather than be its 'victim.' The imagery surrounding cancer reveals much about this process. One does not simply have an illness, one 'fights the big C;' one does not simply die, one 'succumbs after a valiant battle.'.... "

From this standpoint she says illness becomes "a frantic duel of opposites... a battle for selfhood." for what is at stake is our freedom to maintain old strategies of existence without changing our relationship to body of psyche; our right---the right of ego-self---to march with habits attitudes, and agendas intact without ever breaking stride.

This approach---like any attempt to plant the flag of invulnerable selfhood on life's ever-shifting ground---is ultimately unworkable. As Jungian John Sanford notes,

"We are all of us wounded people. The is no such thing as a person who is free from illness, incompleteness, and injury to his or her personality. Some of us can simply hide from our woundedness better than others. When we can no longer hide from our woundedness, we are ready for individuation.

According to many patients I talked to, the struggle to maintain the "old self" began to seem like one of the lynchpins of illness, and surrender the beginning of the recovery of health. Many said that simply acknowledging their own pain felt strangely healing. Said Carol Boss, an improbable long-term survivor of terminal metastatic breast disease, "We cancer folk are not just shepards of our strengths, but the custodians of our frailties."

Our fear is understandable. Illness is an awful summons, a hellish grinding between millstones. The road to healing has its own stations of the cross. The model common in traditional societies that a sojourn in the Underworld might also gestate healing strikes us an alien and even a dangerous notion. Spiritually, particularly as repackaged for the New Age, is often a confection of love and light, purified of pilgrimage and penance, of defeat and descent, of harrowing humility. But most journeyers I interviewed seemed to find that healing begins where country music lyrics have always insisted: Deep, Down. Inside. (Or as the Taoists would have it, the low, the dark, and the small.) In the broken place.

The archetypal stories seem to tell us that the path of healing is not back from where we have come, but beginning a new cycle of life. Though we go move through the cycle from illness to health, we do not return to where we began, but to a place of new, open potential. At the end of the story, the person who arrives at the destination is not the same one who departed. "Man is born a Spector," said poet William Blake, "and requires a new Selfhood constantly."

Those on the healing journey learn to surrender to the process of change, for as the Chinese proverb has it, "Changelessness is death." Sometimes the things that go wrong in our lives, even including physical illness, may come when we have refused change when it is most called for---when we ignore a killing job; a toxic relationship; a self-harming habit; when we refuse to stop what we're doing even when we do not feel well doing it; when we neglect to ask ourselves, 'What's the matter?'. The story disease tells, if we listen, may be as much one of the self as the cells---a story may have forgotten or perhaps never really heard. These stories, which in their extremity enlarge the proscenium of the human drama, are hard to hear--- they are too awful, too odd. But I believe they pertain not just to the ill, but to anyone who has ever collided with their own soul and there encountered a stranger. They show that what people do to make peace with their bodies may sometimes be startlingly similar to what they do to heal their deepest heart.

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Personal_Growth/id/34921

thanks for bringin this idea to my attention.

[Amulte]

i seam to recall from biology, i could be wrong and im scetchy on this right now, but a petri dish with a strong gelatin substance was swaped with bacteria and placed into a humidicrib and haverested when needed. i know that for certain but i seam to recall the same solution with blood mixed in virii.

this was about 6 - 8 years ago so go easy on me if im mistaken.

[Amulte]

Its an Agar solution and it CAN be used to grow a virus IF you have contaminated tissue.

Finding plenty of info on bacteria. This is all i could find on google. not the most helpful but his observations may be of assissstance.

[Cyjack]

Yeah. Post me some frozen mucus and...On second thoughts I think I'll stick with the alkaloids.

Heh - I know it sounds awefully distastefull. I am wondering if the virus doesnt mutate into an ebola or something and I end up with new limbs, or fewer ones. Its rather a rash dream, but its the end of the year, the family is away on holiday, I have an ounce of herb at my disposal, every day I am closer to the end - Damn me if I am going to ignore a hunch like this.

I don't think many are going to be interested in experimenting with this possiblity, but that makes you a pioneer. Maybe you'll be the first person to isolate/develope a psychedelic virus.

Well if the virus itself is in some way conscious and I am able to extract more usefull information from it, I will run through the streets naked. Otherwise I suspect it might be a mixture of my own psyche's lingering wishes, and the bodies action in fighting the imbalance. Perhaps the melee creates more white blood cells that play some weird role in consciousness as well as having biochemical abilities. Perhaps the fever damages some neurons in the brain, which are then replaced/re-routed which then creates new perspectives and ideas? Perhaps the imagination has something to do with it - hence the hallucination and the after effects of seemingly coherent metaphores. I havent been in a lab for a while - now I can become one!

I'm not sure how long your immunity for the virus will last after your body defeats it. Maybe you will never be able to reinfect.

I had not considered this at all =- thanks. I was not thinking as much as intuiting... and sometimes reason and intuition come together at cross roads. It will be some time before I can coax myself into trying to catch this thing again. Untill then, I am looking for a petri dish...

[Cyjack]

http://www.experiencefestival.com/a/Personal_Growth/id/34921[/url]

thanks for bringin this idea to my attention.

Thankyou too mate - that felt like honest work.

I must admit that before the virus took over me, I was feeling down about the season, about the time, about the world etc. After the virus let go, I felt new and happy - without needing a reason. This could be associated with the ordeal of the experience, but it might be more also. The reasons I had for disliking xmas and presents etc are no longer with me - and yet I dont remember reasoning them away. Its as if my mind was flushed - which would explain the dissolving I felt happening at the height of the fever and hallucinations. I mean - its not cancer - but when I was lying in my bed filling my jammies with sweat while shivering from the cold and mumbling "God help me, God help me"-= it really felt like I was going to die. There is too much to say about this, and so little internet space...

[Cyjack]

i seam to recall from biology, i could be wrong and im scetchy on this right now, but a petri dish with a strong gelatin substance was swaped with bacteria and placed into a humidicrib and haverested when needed. i know that for certain but i seam to recall the same solution with blood mixed in virii.

this was about 6 - 8 years ago so go easy on me if im mistaken.

I remember this too - thanks Amulte. I am waiting for a friend to 'locate' these items if possible. I have grown different types of crystals before, but this should be interesting.

The contamination risk will obviously be high.... but to give up without trying is not a road I want to find myself on.

On further thought, theoretically, the virus is already inside me - just back into balance with the rest of my system. If I can shift that balance back towards the virus, it should start the whole cycle again. Perhaps I wont need the external sample afterall. Now I just need a hump-backed assistant with an Eastern European accent, and I will be on my way... ^_^

[ballzac]

I was thinking about agar before, but I didn't think a virus would grow in it because it requires a host, so I kept silent. It's interesting to learn that it can. I'm not that interested in biology, but I might do some research on that, because it sounds interesting.

-Zac

[indigo264nm]

I wonder though, if I am able to keep this thing alive, and then re-infect myself in the future

By memory you can't catch the same strain twice... but you're bound to always know at least one person with a cold or the flu, so just hunt them down and kiss them.

[Cyjack]

Heh - it might be safer this way... rather than trying to cultivate a dangerous influenza type monster. By seeing someones reaction to a strain, one might also be able to estimate its strength.. almost used that word, guesstimate... hmm.

[Hagakure]

this is the best thread i have read in a while. harnessing viruses to hallucinate. classic