The Virome and the Vitality of the Genome

NOTE: We at FW, do not share Thomas' assumption of a viral zoonosis as the causative event for the hypothetical Sars CoV-2. But as a general expostion of the place of viruses in the global ecology and human terrain, this interview is indispensable.

Luogo Comune, February 23, 2021

Dr. Thomas Hardtmuth was a surgeon at Heidenheim hospital for many years. Since 2015, he has devoted himself entirely to the study of microorganisms. Talking to him opens up a new perspective on viruses, frequently reviled as mere pathogens.

How does a surgeon get to deal so intensely with microorganisms and especially with viruses?

THOMAS HARDTMUTH: The initial spark was the Deepwater Horizon disaster in 2010. The oil rig of the same name in the Gulf of Mexico burned and sank. Crude oil spilled into the sea for three months, totalling 800 million litres. In the course of the reports, I had read that the oil was broken down by bacteria called Alcanivorax borkumensis. They were discovered near Borkum, hence the name. They scarcely occur in clean seawater, but as crude oil spreads there, they suddenly make up 90% of the water's bacterial population, after which they disappear again. Microorganisms could be defined as a kind of immune system of the oceans or the biosphere. Their job is to bring everything back to natural cycles. This is what Alcanivorax did in the Gulf of Mexico. People don't think about how these material cycles work so wonderfully. Almost nothing was read about this in the case of that oil catastrophe, only horror stories. For me, this was a reason to take a closer look at microorganisms as beneficial beings in the world. The composition of germs in the oceans, rivers, lakes and soil - it's like an orchestra playing together in a masterly way.

What did you find out about viruses?

TH: Viruses are involved in the regulation of population dynamics. Wherever there is a surplus, too much mass, viruses come to balance, regulate and correct; create a balance in the biosphere. This also applies to us humans. Evolutionary biologist Wolfgang Schad once said that viruses are the original substance of physical life. Modern science sees it similarly. The "virus first" hypothesis or the concept of the "RNA world" simply means that the first things that existed in the living world were viruses. But without stable structures, it was all a single fluid, without direction, just "creative chaos". There is much scientific evidence today for the fact that the basic elements of life, such as nucleic bases and amino acids, from which viruses are also made, came to earth from the cosmos. Having no metabolism of their own, viruses are completely dependent on the environmental context. But viruses carry genetic information into the cell, what is done with this information is not decided by the virus, but by the cell or organism. The central mistake that prevails today is that viruses are seen as acting agents, as subjects acting autonomously. This is also the elementary error of thought in the Corona crisis. It is not the viruses themselves that change something, but the organism that changes something with the help of viruses as a basic physical substance.

Could you clarify this a little?

TH: The spiritual roots of this problem go back to the mid-19th century, when the whole theory of infection was born. This concerned the great historical dispute between Robert Koch (1843-1910) and Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) on the one hand, and Max von Pettenkofer (1818-1901) and some French researchers such as Claude Bernard (1813- 1878) on the other. Koch and Pasteur were of the opinion that any infectious disease was caused solely by bacteria or viruses, while Pettenkofer and his fellow researchers believed that the decisive factor was the environment that pathogens encounter, the living conditions and external circumstances. To prove that germs alone do not cause disease, Pettenkofer and some of his students drank half a litre of water contaminated with cholera bacteria. None of them got cholera. Some had some diarrhea and that was it. But all this did nothing. Koch and Pasteur emerged as victors from this dispute, even if both worked with unfair methods. However, since then the dominant opinion has been that everything bad comes from microorganisms, and if these were destroyed, there would be no more disease.

How did they cheat?

TH: Koch didn't exactly cover himself in glory with his tuberculin scandal. Pasteur left about 100 notebooks on his experiments and decreed that those notes were never to be published. But a great-grandson of his made them available, and the American medical historian Gerald Geison (1943-2001) analysed them and published them in his book "The Private Science of Louis Pasteur". It shows a notable contradiction between what has been written about his experiments in his notebooks and what he had published. Anything that didn't fit, he simply omitted. But to this day, his reputation has not suffered. Science deliberately ignores this.

But bacteria and viruses can be contagious...

TH: Yes, of course, but they are not the only factor that determines whether you get sick or not. This is illustrated by an example from the time of the Spanish flu. This flu epidemic did not start in Spain, but rather in about 20 military camps in the United States. The Spaniards were only the first to make this fact public. These camps were the 'hotspots', hopelessly overcrowded with soldiers, and in these extremely cramped conditions and under the stress of the First World War, this epidemic then broke out, and in fact, in all camps almost simultaneously. It was not possible to trace any chain of infection between the individual camps. Therefore, some rather brutal attempts were made to induce infection: prisoners from military prisons were recruited as guinea pigs and were promised pardons if they became available for these experiments. They then brushed secretions from seriously ill people with the flu and sprayed them into the mouth and nose of the test subjects. This is a method that no ethics committee would approve of today. In the first batch of experiments in Boston, none of the 60 subjects became infected, not even one! Then the experiments were repeated in San Francisco, but there was no contagion there either. All this can be read in the book "Influenza" by Gina Kolata, an American molecular biologist and science journalist. It can be seen from this that viruses are not the main actors, but the organism itself, which in a healthy condition prevents viruses from entering its cells. This does not depend on the virus, but above all on the state of the organism! But even if a virus is welcomed into a cell, there are still many different ways the body copes with it. The radical fixation on microbes as the cause of all evil is creating all this chaos that we have today. This is where fear arises because human beings seem to have no power to influence what is happening and are powerless in the face of the viral threat. And fear is worse than the virus, because it weakens the immune system.

Why is the other aspect, the environment, so ignored?

TH: All standardised medicine and large-scale drug industry is based on Koch and Pasteur. We stopped looking at the individual person and his living conditions, in order to stare down the microscope. We were completely fixated on the elimination of pathogens and no importance was given to the human being and his condition. We decared that everything could be done in the laboratory. This was a paradigm shift in medicine that is still in effect today. From the times of Hippocrates (c. 460-730 BC) and Galen (c. 129-199 AD), lifestyle was considered the basis of all health. But this has largely been eliminated from medical thinking and the focus has been solely on fighting germs. Without this enemy image of viruses, a corona crisis and global panic would not even be possible. These fear patterns have become deeply rooted in thinking habits, and are being nurtured again and again by the media. Furthermore, the definition of the term pandemic was changed in 2009 in the context of swine flu. Previously, a pandemic was defined by three criteria: 1) it had to be a new virus, which 2) it had to spread rapidly, and 3) it had to cause severe disease symptoms and many deaths. They simply deleted point 3 at that time. This has made it possible to declare every wave of flu, such as the recent swine flu, as a pandemic. That one was the most harmless wave of many years, but it brought gigantic revenues to the pharmaceutical industry. If you look closely, the cause of pandemics is always found in living conditions. It's never just bacteria or viruses, it's always the environment too. 

Do you also mean the ecological side?

TH: Yes, this is expressed today in the "One Health" movement: Health is no longer conceivable without ecology. Take schistosomiasis, for example, which kills hundreds of thousands of people every year, mostly in Asia and Africa. Schistosomiasis is a worm disease transmitted by water snails. The worm larvae pierce the person's skin and migrate to the internal organs where they develop into pairs of adult worms whose eggs are expelled through the bladder or intestine and in turn reach the water and snails as intermediate hosts. In the past, schistosomiasis was less of a problem because snails were eaten by crayfish. However, since more dams have been built in Asia and also, for example, in Egypt in Aswan, crayfish no longer find adequate living conditions, snails multiply en masse and with them the pathogens of schistosomiasis. The situation is similar in the case of malaria. A study in Brazil showed that the number of malaria cases increases by 50% if only 4% of a region's rainforest is cleared. If you want to study epidemics, you have to search: Where do inhuman conditions reign? Where is nature not in balance? Where there is fear, terror, hunger and malnutrition and, above all, cramped and inadequate living conditions for humans and animals? Where are the spheres of autonomy of living beings disturbed? That's where epidemics break out. Wars are the best subject of study for epidemics. In purely biological terms, an epidemic is a microbial monoculture. Monocultures are always linked to pathologies - in agriculture and forestry as in industrial farming, but also in the social sphere, then we speak of conformity or totalitarianism.

Where did this happen in the Corona case?

TH: Changes in ecology are always accompanied by viral infections. And humans have massively changed the ecology and knocked it out of balance in many places, with industrial agriculture and industrialization and many other measures. When living conditions change, the genome of organisms must also adapt accordingly, and viruses have always been a kind of material in this sense. Because rewriting genomes is complicated. If you look at the flu virus family tree, they go back to ducks in China. In the 17th century, they started putting ducks in rice fields. They ate snails and weeds and fertilized the fields with their excrement. This was a wonderful ecological-economic symbiosis between the rice culture and the ducks. In the 1980s, the Chinese began building American-style poultry farms, especially in Guangdong in the south. Today, numerous pathogenic viruses originate there, which are mutants of the original paddy ducks, but in which they did not produce any disease. Farms are real hotspots for pathological germs. Personally, I don't think we're really dealing with a completely new virus in the case of Corona, but with a mutation that comes from one of these meat factories. The interesting question is: why a virus in an animal that through humans undergoes stress turns into a pathogenic form for humans?

It almost seems like nature's revenge...

TH: This is where the biology of morality begins! Whenever we intervene martially in natural conditions and act insensitively and destructively, debris is created, and these fly around our ears like epidemics. Viruses and bacteria, which have reached these conditions of total equilibrium over millions of years, suddenly become homeless and turn into refugees. And then they enter situations to which they don't really belong. This is precisely the most typical phenomenon, that only a virus' change of host is connected to the disease. This is why microbiome research is so exciting. There are about 50 trillion microorganisms that colonise us, mainly in the intestine, and their composition is highly individual for each person. The bacteria-to-virus ratio is about 1:10, so we harbor far more viruses than bacteria. Among them there are also many so-called pathogens, which however are in a balanced quantity ratio with each other - they only become pathogens in the form of monoculture, when a species takes over. Today it is assumed that the ecological balance of our individual intestinal flora is regulated through viruses. And an individually balanced gut microbiome has a lot to do with our soul-spiritual health. Rudolf Steiner once spoke this strange phrase: "We take thoughts from the intestinal flora". It took me a long time to understand that.

Can you explain it?

TH: These microorganisms in us represent a kind of memory of the primordial past. We all emerged from it and have preserved an extract of the primal biosphere in our intestines. Steiner repeatedly speaks of man as a contracted and individualized world being. One could talk at length about it, this ancient philosophical approach of microcosm and macrocosm. If we take this literally and think of all of nature in its germinal state in us as a microbiome, then no further evolution can take place. And the microorganisms must remain in this original state, otherwise they become pathological. If they start to evolve, then we are dealing with infections. And when Steiner thinks we are taking thoughts from them, it is precisely these formative forces that normally condition the further evolution of microbes into higher and multicellular life forms. We take this creative potential from the microorganisms and use it for ourselves in the formation of thoughts. Modern research has long been aware of this gut-brain axis. The vitality of the soul-spiritual element in man strongly depends on the integrity of this microscopic world. Man constantly overcomes the inherent laws of microorganisms so that they do not develop further. Here it is above all a question of forces; and less one of chemistry. When a person becomes depressed or suffers from anxiety disorders, it is a problem with the balance of these forces, not a brain disorder. We have to get out of these biochemical thinking patterns. We can no longer biochemically analyse these millions of different microbial species that interact in us; we go hopelessly against the wall with our conventional methods of study . We have to think differently, no longer in terms of substances, but dynamically, in terms of forces. Here I envision us upon the threshold of a new medicine.

Let's go back to the Coronavirus again. Is SARS-CoV-2 a reality?

TH: Yes, sure. But these Corona viruses are everywhere. If a person gets pneumonia today, they often find it because they are looking for nothing else. If you look closely, you will find hundreds of different viruses and their mutants - highly individual in each person - behaving differently in such an infection. This viral world must be forced into visibility with an enormous technical effort to be able to perceive it; this is only possible in the electron microscope. There you see a still snapshot of something that is actually a highly dynamic process.

And in your opinion, what are these serious developments due to?

TH: Not to viruses, but to conditions. Why should the same virus cause different serious diseases in different countries? That does not make sense. Severe courses affect people who are either very old, are in situations of high load or under permanent stress, or who already have several diseases and a weak immune system. You always have to look closely and analyse the conditions. There are countless different ways to make people immunologically weak. Loneliness, for example, being left alone is one of them. We now know that loneliness is one of the most potent disease factors of all, and many people have died of loneliness in nursing homes and nursing homes after the lockdown - with or without the virus. In Italy, there were many Polish geriatric assistants who rushed home at the start of the lockdown, many elderly people were suddenly left without sufficient assistance and left alone. In addition, hospital beds are very scarce in Italy, Spain and even France in the countryside due to austerity measures, which leads to the decompensation of care facilities and overcrowded wards every year in the context of flu waves. There are always many factors that lead to a change in mortality in various countries; it cannot be explained by the virus alone.

Do you think the SARS-CoV-2 PCR test is useful?

TH: It's very debatable, to say the least. I don't know what is actually being measured. Of course, it can be said that it is the genome of the virus. But you start to think if you know the dynamics of viruses and know how viruses treat their genetic material - there is a constant shredding and shifting back and forth. Viruses are "world champions in splicing", as noted virologist Karin Mölling puts it. Splicing is the genetic plasticity with which gene transcripts adapt to their respective situational environmental context. The PCR test represents extremely narrow tunnel vision. A tiny genetic particle is chosen from the smear among countless microorganisms and it is declared that this is the causal origin of a disease, in this case of Covid-19. I can't understand this. The more you study the PCR test, the more questionable it becomes. If everyone was made aware of the reliability and lack of validity of this test, the pandemic would probably be over quickly. It can truly be defined as gross, even criminal, and misleading when constantly talking about new infections. These are just test results, which in the first place say nothing about a person's health status. But the whole pandemic argument is based on this test. However, we are constantly populated by tens of thousands of viruses. There are always new ones, just as there are always new things in the world that we welcome and process - in this, the biological and spiritual levels are very similar. Some things cause a crisis, others overwork us and we get sick. But most are simply integrated as an experience - without disease. 99% of all viral infections pass without symptoms of disease. We keep reworking our genome with the help of these viruses. More and more we discover that our genome is composed of viruses.

Excuse me?

TH: We know this from retroviruses, whose genes are integrated directly into the genome of the host cell and then - when this happens in the germ cells - it leads to a genetic change in the species with new characteristics. In the human genome, there are thousands of so-called endogenous retroviruses that can be traced to previous "infections". Whenever something new happens in evolution, when organisms genetically change, it is related to viruses. They are the physical substratum of all innovation and biodiversity, in a sense the "original fertilisers". We have recovered the vitality of the genome from the viral world, that is, we owe it to them. All the flexibility and genetic vitality is made possible by viruses. They represent biodiversity on earth. They are highly labile; they constantly decompose and recompose. The so-called virosphere is the earth's dynamic gene pool, from which organisms help each other to make new properties. The time has come to look at viruses with different eyes.

 

 

Source: https://luogocomune.net/21-medicina-salute/5720-dobbiamo-la-vitalit%C3%A0-del-genoma-al-mondo-dei-virus