Diseases from Outer Space — Our Cosmic Destiny

The following sections are included:

• Foreword
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements

In Diseases from Space we shall be presenting arguments and facts which support the idea that the viruses and bacteria responsible for the infectious diseases of plants and animals arrive at the Earth from space. Furthermore, we shall argue that apart from their harmful effect, these same viruses and bacteria have been responsible in the past for the origin and evolution of life on the Earth. In our view, all aspects of the basic biochemistry of life come from outside the Earth…

The journey for a bacterium or virus from the interior of a comet to the surface of the Earth is fraught with considerable hazard, and it is likely that only a small fraction of all bacteria and viruses would make the transfer safely. But because of its penchant for huge numbers, biology is well-geared to situations in which many perish, so long as the few survive…

We remarked in Chapter 2 that a successful attack on a terrestrial plant or animal establishes a reservoir for an invading pathogen. The reservoir may have long-term persistence, or it may be short-lived, depending on the survival characteristics of the particular bacterium or virus. Once they are exposed in naked form (i.e. without a surrounding protective matrix such as viruses and bacteria from space would need to have), the viruses of the common cold and of influenza quickly lose their ability to attack the respiratory tracts of their hosts. The smallpox virus, on the other hand, is able to persist in a free form for many years outside of any human, and can therefore remain lying around for an extended period waiting to renew its assault. Such persistence gives the smallpox virus an important advantage in maintaining itself, compared to the viruses of influenza and the common cold. Indeed, the latter cannot maintain themselves at all as reservoirs except through continuing incorporation within their hosts. Continuing presence within the host is by no means an unknown phenomenon — the herpes virus persists readily within humans. Neither influenza nor the common cold, however, has been shown to persist within humans, although influenza virus has been found in birds, and in certain other animal (cf. Table 4.2)…

The somewhat scattered and diverse facts concerning influenza that will be reviewed in this chapter first convinced us that the idea of diseases from space must be taken seriously. We shall also deal with influenza in the two following chapters, where we come to a more definitive discussion which we regard as proving the correctness of the main ideas of this book…

According to our theory, which is that bacteria and viruses are incident from space, some diseases will be infectious and others will not. On the usual view, however, which requires every disease to have a permanent pathogenic reservoir indigenous to the Earth, diseases are always ‘caught’, either through person-to-person transmission or through a transfer from animal to human. For influenza, there is no known permanent human reservoir, and so it is usual to postulate that one or more of the reservoirs existing in the animals of Table 4.2 can emerge from time to time in an assault on the human population. Emergence is thought to be associated with two different subtypes of virus coming together in an animal host cell, and with their genetic material becoming mixed during replication in a viable way, thereby producing a new active subtype of virus distinct from its two parents. It may happen that humans are susceptible to the new subtype. If so, it is argued, the new subtype bursts out of its animal host into the human population, like a snake breaking out from a hitherto closed box…

Our decision to investigate the 1978 influenza outbreaks in British schools was lucky from the beginning. Within a day or two of looking through the attendance ledgers of several schools in the Cardiff area we had at last begun to suspect the correctness of the usual claims for the importance of immunity. While a person’s immunological history is certainly relevant to whether an attack of influenza turns out to be mild or severe, it is not in our view the primary factor in deciding whether a person succumbs or escapes the disease during an epidemic. In Chapter 3 we have already given one reason why the attack of a respiratory pathogenic virus must be capricious. To reach the Earth and to settle down through the atmosphere, the influenza virus must be embedded within a protective matrix, probably of organic material, perhaps even consisting of a bacterium or other living cell. When such an embedded virus is breathed, there is the critical issue of whether the virus becomes free while the larger host particle remains within the respiratory tract. The drinking of a cup or glass of liquid may wash the particle down into the stomach, and it may well be more or less random events of this kind that decide the apparently capricious nature of attacks of influenza and of the common cold. This is why there are so many cases in which one spouse contracts influenza and the other escapes. The discriminations of the disease are not to be explained by variations of immunity. Indeed to a first approximation (for any reasonably coherent community) all people are to be taken as equally susceptible. In our view the effects of immunity appear only at second order…

A virus or bacterium incident on the Earth does not necessarily find itself a victim, and those that do will usually be restricted in their attack to a particular plant or animal. Yet there must be rarer cases where an attack spreads across two or more species. The influenza virus is particularly versatile in this respect, as will be seen from Table 4.2. As we expect, isolation of influenza virus from wild birds has been made frequently in recent years. Far-flying birds are especially subject to attack — they tend to find the patches of Figure 2.3…

Human diseases caused by bacteria and viruses must be as old as man himself. We have already pointed out that microbial invasions from space started about 3.5 billion years ago with the injection of cometary material on to the Earth. This process, which initially led to the origin of life on our planet, must have continued unabated ever since. With the evolution of plants and animals of ever-increasing complexity, some of these later microbial invasions must have been pathogenic. It is likely that microbes which had the potential of causing human disease began to arrive here well ahead of our emergence as a species. In our view, man must have evolved so as to adapt continually to invading microbes, even at times assimilating some into his genetic heritage. This scheme seems more likely to us than the usual view of microbes adapting to man…

Most people find the learning of mathematics difficult and boring, and it is not hard to understand why. In mathematical text everything is ordered like a tape-recording. Perhaps the best-known mathematical tape-recording is the geometry of Euclid, where every little bit of it must be there and always in the same place, otherwise the whole structure of the argument loses its meaning and validity. Yet among real mathematicians it is quite otherwise. Real mathematicians are perpetually seeing connections between diverse aspects of mathematics, a bit of algebra here, a pinch of geometry there, a remark on complex variable, a sudden flash of functional analysis. The thinking of real mathematicians is a complex multi-dimensional affair. The tape-recordings which students are required to wade through separately and sequentially have all become woven together into a kind of intellectual Jacob’s coat, whose wearing is by no means a bore…

In this penultimate chapter we shall consider how the acquisition of viruses from space may well be related to the evolution of plants and animals here on the Earth. The higher plants and animals carry a heredity with some one million genes, represented in detail by a 1000 million or more base-pairs arranged like ties along a rail track. The rails are not straight and parallel but are twisted into the Crick–Watson double helix. Presumably for convenience in packing within the living cell, the double helix is chopped into pieces, chromosomes, which number 46 in man — a typical number for higher plants and animals…

In this final chapter we begin with a brief synopsis and reappraisal of our main arguments. The starting point of our argument was based upon four observations…

The following sections are included:

• Bibliography
• Appendix 1: Organic Materials in Space
• Appendix 2: The Survival of Cometary Cells and Viruses in Passing to the Earth
• Appendix 3: The Interpretation of Genetic Material
• Appendix 4: COVID-19 Pandemic: A Challenge for Humanity
• Index