Symbiotic Bacteria

[belovelife]

do you think there is symbiotic bacteria that can:

 

A- help a human breath better, (like asthma )

 

B- allow night vision in humans

[CraigD]

do you think there is symbiotic bacteria that can:

 

A- help a human breath better, (like asthma )

I believe that beneficial bacteria found in and on nearly all of us humans strengthens our immune systems by “training” them to respond appropriately to chemically similar, disease-causing bacteria and other pathogens, and not respond inappropriately to allergens. Some respiratory diseases, such as atopic asthma, are caused partially by an inappropriate immune response to allergens, so in these cases, we could reasonably say that beneficial bacteria helped a human breathe better.

 

We acquire our beneficial bacteria early in life (though, interestingly, little or none of it before birth, as the mammalian embryotic sack contains a nearly sterile environment). Though we can gain and lose bacteria strains (such as when you drink local water, get sick for a while, then become able to tolerate it), most of it is with us for nearly our whole lives. So I don’t think you could, for example, effectively and repeatable treat asthma by inoculating a patient with a particular bacteria.

 

Notice I called such bacteria beneficial, rather than symbiotic. Though the words can be used somewhat interchangeably, I prefer to reserve the term “symbiotic” to describe relationships between organisms where the mutual benefit is so important that one or both would die without it. For example, lichens, which are not single organisms, but a symbiotic composite of a fungus and either an algae or a bacterium, in which one can’t live without the other.

 

Sometime, when a symbiosis is so profound that it’s hard to imagine either organism existing separately, and both organisms have evolved together so far that they’re hard to relate to any living organism not in a similar symbiosis, we tend not to call it symbiosis – “to symbiotic to be called symbionts”, we might say. Practically all multi-celled animals are in such symbiosis with their mitochondria. Our cells absolutely can’t live without our mitochondria, and mitochondria can’t live without our cells, but genetically, our cells and our mitochondria are separate species. Most evolutionary biologist accept the hypothesis, know as endosymbiotic theory, that, long ago, the ancestors of our cells and our mitochondria could live separately, but after hundreds of millions of years of symbiotic evolution, have long lost the ability.

 

B- allow night vision in humans

Well, we humans already have pretty good night vision, and vision in general compared to most animals, due to a large extent to our brains’ wonderful vision processing abilities, but I think you mean “improve night vision in humans.”

 

For our eyes to function at their best in low light, or any other situation, we need to have proper nutrition, including especially vitamins like beta-carotene and vitamin A. As our gut flora and fauna, which are mostly bacteria, help us digest food, they play a role in such nutrition. Some vitamins are actually synthesized by our gut flora, though, to the best of my knowledge, vitamins that can improve night vision aren’t.

 

I don’t think its possible to inoculate a person with some special bacteria that dramatically improves his night vision.

 

Forgetting about bacteria for a moment and just considering how a human eye could be made to work better in low light, what comes first to my mind in inserting genes for a tapetum lucidum – the reflective backing of the retinas that makes cats’ eyes glow, and, roughly doubling their light sensitivity. The tapetum lucidum is a very complicated tissue, so to do this, you’d have to find likely dozens of genes, then insert them somehow into a human – more advanced biotech than we have now.

 

There’s a downside to having a tapetum lucidium, too: it improves night vision, but makes images blurry. Unlike cats, dogs, and the many other animals with them, who don’t read or do fine mechanical work, we humans depend on very clear, focused vision. I don’t think too many of us would want to give that up – or, more feasibly, chose to give it up in our children – just to improve our night vision, when we can easily improve our night vision with light amplifiers, infrared cameras, etc.

[belovelife]

for the night vision i was thinking of seeing heat

[JMJones0424]

I'm not sure that animals that sense temperature differences with specialized organs do so in their eyes.

 

NOTE: Everything that follows is written by a person with an incomplete understanding of the topics covered and should be taken with a heavy dose of skepticism.

 

The infrared sensing organ in pit vipers is connected to the trigeminal nerve, not the optic nerve. The trigeminal nerve in humans is responsible for carrying signals of the sense of touch, pain, and self-position in the face. So rather than mucking about with our eyesight, if one wanted to dramatically increase our ability to detect temperature gradients at a distance, perhaps we should be looking more towards changing our cheeks?

 

Also, instead of using bacteria to change our anatomy, I think you'd be better off looking at using some type of retrovirus to change our DNA. While there are obvious dangers to consider, gene therapy using ervs is a promising area of development. Here is an example of an erv being used to introduce genetic code to replace a patient's genes and treat hemophilia B.

[CraigD]

For the night vision I was thinking of seeing heat.

It’s important, I think, not to confuse the fairly sharp images that are generated by infrared cameras, which convert infrared light, also known as heat, into visible light, with the ability of animals with unusually sensitivity to heat that allows them to, in a sense, “see” with it, such as the pit vipers JMJones mentions. These animals are able to use it to roughly locate warm objects (not necessarily in the dark), usually prey, not see nearly as well as a human using an infrared camera can.

 

It’s also important to note that there are two kinds of artificial infrared vision: passive, where, like a pit viper, the equipment can only detect object warmer or cooler than their surroundings, and thus can’t image such things as obstacles, terrain, and most inanimate objects, and active, where an infrared light source is used to illuminate the area being observed, which can produce views similar to ordinary vision, though with less detail.

 

In short, except for special situations, such as a soldier detecting enemy soldiers attempting to sneak up on him in the dark, or a snake finding a warm, furry meal, passive IR is of limited usefulness. Active IR, which to the best of my knowledge exist only in artificial devices, not in animals, isn’t really seeing in the dark, any more than illuminating the night with strong visible light sources, such as headlights, is. All IR imaging is, in most ways, less versatile than visible light amplification, which it the preferred technology for such things as telescopic sights for nighttime use on guns. Cats, dogs, cows, and other animals with the special reflective retinal tissue I mentioned in my previous post – tapeta lucida – have essentially biological light-amplification systems, though as I mentioned, these come at a cost of having less well-focused vision.

 

We humans have excellent vision of many different objects at many different distances in a wide range of light conditions, and furthermore, are excellent tool-users, able to use artifice to see in an even wider range of objects at very short and very great distances at very low light levels, in frequencies far above and below the visible range. I don’t see much advantage in tinkering with our unaided, natural vision, other than to correct defects (eg: eyeglasses, keratectomy, cataract/lens removal/replacement, etc).

[SaxonViolence]

If I were going to dramatically improve human vision.....

 

And I had the ability and knowledge to rewrite gene codes at will.....

 

First of all--Everyone knows about Parallax.

 

Thing is, Parallax is over-rated. I don't remember, but there are either 32 or 38 known methods that human's use to guesstimate distance.....

 

And only about 11 of them depend on having two eyes.

 

Anyway, Parallax only works out to about twenty feet.

 

One eyed people can navigate fairly well, their biggest handicap is the loss of peripheral vision on one side.

 

Ever noticed how things look sorta "Extra Real" through a pair of binoculars? The centers of the objectives is noticeably farther apart than your own pupils--thus greatly exaggerating the parallax effect.

 

Anyone remember the old "Viewmasters"? Or antique Stereo-opticons? They rely totally on synthetic parallax.....

 

Its a neat trick at first, but it does seem pretty fake when you look at it for awhile.

 

Anyway, our parallax is horizontal. It would seem that to a degree things appear more 3-D in the "X" axis than they would in the "Y" axis.

 

What if we had a third eye, right in the middle of our forehead like the Hindu Portraits portray?

 

The distance from the center of the right pupil, to the center of the left pupil determine's how much parallax you experience. Farther apart, and you would experience more parallax.

 

Lets draw a centerline between the center of each pupil. Let us measure the distance perpendicularly to the center of the forehead eye. Just for spits and giggles, lets make that distance at least a quarter inch or so, greater than the distance between the two lower eyes.

 

Not only do you now have three baselines to average together (Like triangle "ABC" Lines AB, BC and AC).....

 

But now you have both horizontal and vertical parallax.

 

A three eyed man should live in a very vibrantly 3-D World--though I can't quite picture it.

 

Would our three-eyed man be any better at seeing in the dark?

 

I can't prove it, but I believe that he would. The third eye gives him 50% more light-gathering ability...

 

But as we're really good at re-writing gene sequences.....

 

A Cat is supposed to see about eleven times as well in the dark as a man. Cats percieve blue and green fairly well, but have little or no sensitivity to red.

 

Well, lets start with Cat eyes. Eliminate the tapetum lucidum, but keep the vertical pupils Dogs supposedly see about 4 times as well as human's in the dark, but their acuity is about 20-70. If Dogs could drive, they still couldn't pass their Driving Eye Test!..

 

Boost the Cat's eye to full color sensitivity,

 

Anything better than 20-60 acuity is Protein, but since things in nature are very rarely optimum, maybe we can get 20-40, 20-30, even 20-20.

 

Go up one eye-separation distance, and put in Two Modified Cat's Eyes, then go up another 80% of another baseline measurement, and put in a Third Eye.

 

All else being equal, a bigger eye has more light gathering power than a small one--and on a human skull, there is room to upsize the modified Cat's eyes noticably.

 

Here is a Dude with two human eyes (Upgraded every way possible--even another 10%-15% light gathring or acuity would help.....)

 

Then two upsized Cat's eyes, with at least 6x the Light gathering power of regular human eyes and close range visual acuity of no worse than 20-35, then a third Cat's eye--a little smaller than a human eye, but somewhat larger than either of the "Cat's Eye's" beneath it.....

 

And beaucoup more Visual processing power than the old human brain.....

 

He would definately be a force to reckon with in Jungle Warfare....

 

The only drawback that I can see, is that it woud encourage those "Bare-Forehead" Hairstyles that look so doofus to me..... <_<

 

Of course, maybe you could get 1/4" long fur to grow from the hairline down to the eyebrow line--permanently hiding the eyesore.....

 

And imagine illiterate Billy-Bobs shaving their foreheads! :blink:

 

Saxon Violence