Post by kungfuzu on Jan 6, 2022 21:04:49 GMT -8
As I enjoyed Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther series so much, I decided to see what other titles by Kerr might be available at my public library.
I gazed through the website and came upon The Second Angel ,published in 1999. The only reason I checked out this book is that Kerr wrote it and some of the comments by readers and critics said that it was one of Kerr's better early novels.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the book and found out it is strangely applicable to our time.
A lengthy prologue involves some necessary action and then lays out the overall situation. The time is the later part of the 21st century. Early in the century, a virus-B 19, arose which infected red blood cells. Most people who contracted the virus were not seriously effected. Only those with vulnerable bone marrow had serious problems.
Somehow the B-19 virus mutated to a very serious virus, fast HPV2, which killed an estimated 500 million people from around 2019 to the later part of the century. The main treatment for this disease was blood transfusion. Unfortunately, many who gave blood had also been infected thus the extreme measures were taken to separate the good from the bad and the value of the good skyrocketed. The fast HPV2 evolved into a slow working, but still deadly virus P2. Instead of within days, the host will die in 10 to 15 years.
The author describes it thusly:
"societies everywhere ..have divided themselves into two unequal parts: a privileged minority who remain uninfected with P2 and are part of an autologous blood donation program (in practice they are coterminous ), and an unfortunate majority whose P2 infection permanently defers them from ever becoming part of any predeposit ABO program." In other words the poor are screwed.
The book is not an easy read. It gets highly technical at times. Kerr fills pages with footnotes as a way to fill in details about the world that he has created.
I am truly amazed at the information in the book and the subject matter covered. It couldn't be further from Bernie Gunther than Pluto is from the Earth.
In order to give some context, Kerr writes the following passages about blood, which I found excellent. I believe Brad might also like them.
It is certain that the mathematics of blood, the numbers inherent in its complex structure, provide perhaps the best evidence for the existence of some kind of Creator.
Take something like the process of coagulation, which requires the participation of several hemostatic proteins. As many as fifteen coagulation factors are activated via s stepwise series of reactions--each step having its corresponding regulatory anticoagulant factor---which culminate in the formation of a solid fibrin clot; protection against excessive clot formation, or thrombosis, is afforded by a second series of hemostatic proteins, of which plasmin is the most potent, and which form the fibrinolytic system (in its turn, the fibrinolytic system has its own inhibitors to prevent overactivity); plasmin itself needs to be activated from its inactive form--plasminogen--by yet another protein, plasminogen activator. It is hard not to understate the irreducibly complex nature of this system. The ratio of the probability that such a system might come into being by pure chance to the probability that it might not come into being is so enormous that it is almost impossible to find a number large enough to express the odds. However, I think it would be approximate to something like the number of red cells that a healthy adult male would produce in a lifetime; given that in one second he produces 2.3 x 10 to the 6th, this number, if represented as a number, would look like this: 70 x 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 x 2.3 to the 6th, or about 5 x 10 to the 15th power.
Philip Kerr has done his research.
I am about 60 pages into the book and will give further comments at a later date.
As a completely separate thought, the complexity of protein interactions was well known when the Human Genome Project was taking place. When they mapped the Human Genome, they acted surprised at the low number of actual genes which make up a human being. They immediately said that it appeared that solutions to genetic problems might prove more difficult to come up with as the complexity actually seemed to be in the interaction between proteins. The Human Genome Project's main phase was completed in 2003 so they certainly had the information Kerr had as regards the complexity of protein interaction.
As I told my friend in the vaccine business, they are going to gather a huge amount of information from history's biggest medical experiment. I suspect much of what they find out will have to do with proteins present in some people which reacted badly to the mRNA jab. They will figure out which react badly and move on to the next experiment.
I gazed through the website and came upon The Second Angel ,published in 1999. The only reason I checked out this book is that Kerr wrote it and some of the comments by readers and critics said that it was one of Kerr's better early novels.
Imagine my surprise when I opened the book and found out it is strangely applicable to our time.
A lengthy prologue involves some necessary action and then lays out the overall situation. The time is the later part of the 21st century. Early in the century, a virus-B 19, arose which infected red blood cells. Most people who contracted the virus were not seriously effected. Only those with vulnerable bone marrow had serious problems.
Somehow the B-19 virus mutated to a very serious virus, fast HPV2, which killed an estimated 500 million people from around 2019 to the later part of the century. The main treatment for this disease was blood transfusion. Unfortunately, many who gave blood had also been infected thus the extreme measures were taken to separate the good from the bad and the value of the good skyrocketed. The fast HPV2 evolved into a slow working, but still deadly virus P2. Instead of within days, the host will die in 10 to 15 years.
The author describes it thusly:
"societies everywhere ..have divided themselves into two unequal parts: a privileged minority who remain uninfected with P2 and are part of an autologous blood donation program (in practice they are coterminous ), and an unfortunate majority whose P2 infection permanently defers them from ever becoming part of any predeposit ABO program." In other words the poor are screwed.
The book is not an easy read. It gets highly technical at times. Kerr fills pages with footnotes as a way to fill in details about the world that he has created.
I am truly amazed at the information in the book and the subject matter covered. It couldn't be further from Bernie Gunther than Pluto is from the Earth.
In order to give some context, Kerr writes the following passages about blood, which I found excellent. I believe Brad might also like them.
It is certain that the mathematics of blood, the numbers inherent in its complex structure, provide perhaps the best evidence for the existence of some kind of Creator.
Take something like the process of coagulation, which requires the participation of several hemostatic proteins. As many as fifteen coagulation factors are activated via s stepwise series of reactions--each step having its corresponding regulatory anticoagulant factor---which culminate in the formation of a solid fibrin clot; protection against excessive clot formation, or thrombosis, is afforded by a second series of hemostatic proteins, of which plasmin is the most potent, and which form the fibrinolytic system (in its turn, the fibrinolytic system has its own inhibitors to prevent overactivity); plasmin itself needs to be activated from its inactive form--plasminogen--by yet another protein, plasminogen activator. It is hard not to understate the irreducibly complex nature of this system. The ratio of the probability that such a system might come into being by pure chance to the probability that it might not come into being is so enormous that it is almost impossible to find a number large enough to express the odds. However, I think it would be approximate to something like the number of red cells that a healthy adult male would produce in a lifetime; given that in one second he produces 2.3 x 10 to the 6th, this number, if represented as a number, would look like this: 70 x 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 x 2.3 to the 6th, or about 5 x 10 to the 15th power.
Philip Kerr has done his research.
I am about 60 pages into the book and will give further comments at a later date.
As a completely separate thought, the complexity of protein interactions was well known when the Human Genome Project was taking place. When they mapped the Human Genome, they acted surprised at the low number of actual genes which make up a human being. They immediately said that it appeared that solutions to genetic problems might prove more difficult to come up with as the complexity actually seemed to be in the interaction between proteins. The Human Genome Project's main phase was completed in 2003 so they certainly had the information Kerr had as regards the complexity of protein interaction.
As I told my friend in the vaccine business, they are going to gather a huge amount of information from history's biggest medical experiment. I suspect much of what they find out will have to do with proteins present in some people which reacted badly to the mRNA jab. They will figure out which react badly and move on to the next experiment.
