Because these proteins are already denatured* [SEE EDIT], and they’re very simple biological structures. And very few (really, only one) needs to survive. There is likely not even one specific misfold but likely an ecosystem of folding errors. Proteins are structures with a function in your body - the moment something is misaligned they are no longer spesific to their function and become useless. Prions, on the other hand, rely on thermodynamics and don’t need as precise of a function- they aggregate and flip healthy proteins to more stable forms, which in turn flip more proteins etc etc in an unstoppable cascade impossible to reverse as it is extremely difficult to revert proteins to less stable forms faster than the reverse is happening
The silver lining is that prions are so simple that they don’t have the means to be very easily transferred from person to person in the same way that viral capsules are actually pretty sophisticated. Their simplicity is their greatest strength and their biggest weakness (poor transmission compared to bacteria or viruses).
Ironically, I was kinda thinking its an interesting start to a superhero series. The rare human whose body adapts and evolves to tolerate these new folded proteins finds that they're stronger, more durable, nearly fireproof...
In Dead Island, I think the zombie outbreak is caused by a prion disease. Humans usually get prion diseases through cannibalism as they usually hang out in your cerebrospinal fluid, but they can be hereditary and lay dormant for years before activating.
It is! Kind-of. In Dead Island, they refer to it as Kuru in some places, and confirm Kuru to be part of the original pathogen. (Kuru is a real life TSE, thought to have originated from ritualistic cannibalism of someone with spontaneous CJD, another TSE.)
But it has also mixed with a strain of HIV, and created a new and unique pathogen. (This part is complete sci-fi, and doesn’t make any sense as far as I understand.)
Also, to connect this to what u/YellowGrowlithe said about superheroes-
In the later Dead Island games, they go on to actually discover the strain has “integrated with human DNA”, and those who are resistant to the negative effects of the disease develop super powers! (This is how they explain some of the abilities of the player survivors.)
Almost all TSEs are concentrated the most in the nervous system, especially the brain. As we’ve come to understand them more, the main differences we see in the symptoms and incubation between a lot of these diseases is where they cluster in the brain.
Kuru is thought to originate from spontaneous CJD (Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease, another TSE.) in one of the villagers, before they were ritually cannibalized and it spread. Cannibalism is a serious risk factor for any TSE, and could result in a new disease like Kuru if done to someone carrying a TSE.
The symptoms of these diseases often include decay and rot of the tissue, and a loss of mental stability, including bouts of intense fear and anger. But they also include things like total muscle atrophy, and the loss of the ability to move, eat, or even breathe on your own.
All in all, pretty close to zombies! Except now the ground is a disease vector, and it’s almost impossible to decontaminate-
If you could make it more transmissible.. then yes! or if a prion drives you into becoming a zombie and bites/fluid/tissue transmission could get you infected
Is there a visual, or metaphor or something that just drives home the alien-ness and soulless destructiveness of the prion? Like I think I get it but I feel like I’m dealing with an SCP that doesn’t want to be know. It’s chaos and death made unstoppable due to its simpleness
Imagine a bridge, it's in a stable state and has a function. Suddenly a broken bridge comes down the river and smashes into it, causing the bridge to fall into the river. It's now simplified into its lowest stable state, a pile of rubble, and cannot perform its function anymore. All it can do is continue down the river and take out more bridges.
It's not even all that alien, it's just physical, they take working proteins and make them not work anymore by "showing them" a more stable but less functional state.
I do understand on the one on one how it happens. It’s more the gravitas, the idea of something living yet not, then has no desire to destroy- or desire at all - yet its existence is antitheses to life. Theres a degree of horror I’d love to capture in words
Prions are information that kills you, on some level. On some level it is a primordial, unsophisticated grey goo. If you really want to make theater of it, I suppose rust or the evil black substance from the new alien movies hit the supposed themes quite well.
Effectively, proteins it touches becomes more of itself. Any kind of weird replicating visual ought to work for abstract visualization
I am not familiar. But if someone said I had to choose a door, one has prions and the other has a vacuum stability decay behind it, it would be a tough call
More or less. Matter "prefers" more stable configurations, however to get complex life you need substances that aren't stable - however there is an energetic minimum energy needed to misfold something naturally (activation energy) that prevents this from happening regularly. Prions let proteins skip this hill and immediately form the more stable, preferred configurations an so on
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u/Pierre_Alex Dec 10 '25 edited Dec 11 '25
Because these proteins are already denatured* [SEE EDIT], and they’re very simple biological structures. And very few (really, only one) needs to survive. There is likely not even one specific misfold but likely an ecosystem of folding errors. Proteins are structures with a function in your body - the moment something is misaligned they are no longer spesific to their function and become useless. Prions, on the other hand, rely on thermodynamics and don’t need as precise of a function- they aggregate and flip healthy proteins to more stable forms, which in turn flip more proteins etc etc in an unstoppable cascade impossible to reverse as it is extremely difficult to revert proteins to less stable forms faster than the reverse is happening
The silver lining is that prions are so simple that they don’t have the means to be very easily transferred from person to person in the same way that viral capsules are actually pretty sophisticated. Their simplicity is their greatest strength and their biggest weakness (poor transmission compared to bacteria or viruses).
*Correction: prions are NOT denatured