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[Borza]

Their clones come without an immune system as a necessity of the process. It is generated on the basis of the customers stem cells, a process which should* be necessary, since the new grown brain is a 1:1 copy of the old one, which means that they have the same surface cell epitopes fitting to the old immune system.

Actually the brain is an immune privileged tissue partly due to the blood-brain barrier.

[Desiderya]

Thanks, I knew I forgot something.

[Kazzzi]

Our knowledge of how viruses work is 21st century stuffs. In the future with the cloning and spacecars and sex robots and quantum physics, there's bound to be more ways to make viruses nasty. I see no reason there couldn't be clone-resistant vitoxin nastyness.

Brain scans could copy brain cells that are carrying/producing toxins, or something.

[Mizhara]

Our knowledge of how viruses work is 21st century stuffs. In the future with the cloning and spacecars and sex robots and quantum physics, there's bound to be more ways to make viruses nasty. I see no reason there couldn't be clone-resistant vitoxin nastyness.

Brain scans could copy brain cells that are carrying/producing toxins, or something.

This, really. I don't see PF saying it's clone-resistant, but nor do I see any that says it isn't.
An engineered infection would most likely have been adapted to cloning tech by now...

If it wasn't, the insane amounts of resources going into Insorum would probably have been less.

[Borza]

No future-sci-fi tech needed. Retroviruses would indeed be transmitted between clones if the sample cell(s) used to create the clones from had the viral DNA integrated in the genome. e.g. if a person infected with HIV were cloned from a cell harbouring the viral genes then the clone would have the disease.

Of course, why they don't (or wouldn't) have effective treatments for retroviruses in EVE PF is another matter.

[Matariki Rain]

Borza, you seem to be assuming that your clones (meat puppets) are clones (genetic duplicates).

While you could infect a meat-puppet with the diseases and genetic peculiarities of some other tissue sample -- and we know that one cloning company routinely does -- we don't currently have an indication that it's necessary to do so.

[Borza]

Borza, you seem to be assuming that your clones (meat puppets) are clones (genetic duplicates).

While you could infect a meat-puppet with the diseases and genetic peculiarities of some other tissue sample -- and we know that one cloning company routinely does -- we don't currently have an indication that it's necessary to do so.

I'm not assuming anything. If you read my post carefully you'll see that I used the word "if". I'm saying that even given current scientific knowledge there are a range of circumstances under which diseases could readily be passed on to a clone at a genetic level. There are other circumstances when this could not happen and cloning methodologies which could prevent it.

[Sinjin Mokk]

If the virus were combinant with a prion...

Just had a scary thought. It's a virus? Like real viruses, it mutates. It mutates so much, that scientists have a hard time keeping up with it right?

So what happens when it mutates into a more standard example of a bloodborne pathogen? What happens if it mutates into something airborne? Basic epidemiology would suggest that not only should this be possible, but eventual.

So what happens if a terrorist decides to not wait for nature and starts developing his own strains of Vitoxin? "If the unabomber had been a biologist instead..."

Then consider how many people travel how many light years in a given week to how many different worlds. How many stations or planets have decontamination as a part of the docking proceedure? How many have lax practices due to greed, malfeasance or apathy?

"If those things get loose, it's gonna make the Lacerta Plague look like a fucking square dance!"  -Annalee Call, Alien Resurrection. 

[Saede Riordan]

Sinjin: the virus is specially engineered to only mutate in specific programmed ways. It took some massive particle bombardment to get it to mutate at all, and then the resulting virus was so far from the initial vitoxin it couldn't be used in research.

Also, Vitoxin has a very short incubation period, barely 48 hours at most, before the subject needs to be on vitoc before they start suffering things like organ failure. A virus with that short of an incubatory period will never spread very far. It would burn like a wildfire across one station, but before it could really spread to other stations, that station would be quarantined, the virus is rather overt and obvious. Its not insidious. A truly horrifying virus would have a gestation period of weeks the longer you can be infected by it, and have it be infectous, without noticing, the more people you can spread it to. That's part of the reason HIV is so nasty. Its symptoms don't manifest right away, they take weeks, sometimes months, to be correctly diagnosed.

[Victoria Stecker]

Hrm. I guess we don’t have any really solid PF on the subject. Bugger.

Anyhow, my thoughts on the subject. Note that these are based on a modern understanding of what a virus is and how it works. Any and all of it might go out the window due to things working a little differently in EVE.

In the process of reproducing, viruses destroy the host cell. This then spits out more little viruses that go after the adjacent cells, infecting them, altering them to make more virus, and then killing them to release the newly manufactured baddies. Generally, what makes you sick is this ongoing cell death. What makes a virus dangerous depends on which cells specifically in the body that it attacks.

What this means for Vitoc: Yes, viruses alter the genetic makeup of the infected cell in order to make more virus. However, they don’t automatically change the genetic makeup of every cell in your body – only the ones which have been infected. By the time the virus has reproduced enough times to infect all those billions (trillions?) of cells in the body, it should have killed enough of them that you’re dead anyways.

Therefore, it should be possible, even in the most extreme cases of vitoxin infection and vitoc dependence, to find at least a handful of uninfected cells in the body from which to make a clone. Now, this doesn’t do any good for the psychological dependence upon vitoc (apparently it’s a hell of a high) which in turn requires vitoxin infection to be effective, leading to some potentially really fucked up cases of people being freed from vitoxin only to be voluntarily infected again so they can get their vitoc fix.

Again, that’s based on the rather detailed description of Vitoxin as a virus and the way viruses work. They don’t infect every single cell in the body – you’re dead long before that can occur. But this is EVE, so who knows? Not even CCP.

[Lyn Farel]

It totally depends if vitoxin works like the HIV positive but dormant form of the virus, or if the vitoxin actually eventually end to infect ALL the cells of the bodies after a certain amount of time (for people under vitoc). The latter sounds possible to me if you start to feed the infected people with vitoc treatment : either it stops the infection from spreading, leading to case 1, or either it just neutralize it for a bit but does not stop it from spreading, leading to case 2.

[Seriphyn]

Hey, that Vitoxin article is pretty sweet. And it's sister article the Vitoxin Cure as well.

[lallara zhuul]

Personally I believe that the scientific or medical authorities are not sure exactly how the mechanism works that allows the capsuleers to avoid mindlock.

Therefore any kind of tampering of the individual (including extensive bodymods through cybernetics and genetic modifications) is avoided.

Of course with people that are not capsuleers the restrictions are lifted, because the scientists nor the medical people have any need to be careful about anything. Someone has enough money to turn their body into an inside out vagina then let them, someone wants their clone to look like the non-trademarked holovid star, they will do it.

Problem for me personally with extensive modification of a person is their self image, how they perceive themselves and how it will affect that persons psyche in short term and long term.

So in short, avoiding Vitoxin through transferring your brains into a meatpuppet that has 'generic' DNA that is not infected is fine and dandy for a baseliner, but not for a capsuleer.

Broker is a baseliner, so is the guy whose clone was stolen as means of trying an identity theft in the chrons. So was the Holder who was going to be transferred to the body of his son.

Capsuleers are a rarity, even most of the canon characters might not be actual capsuleers, even though they are treated as such. They may be in capsules while they are in their ships, using it as a interface to help control the ship, to keep them safe from death when the ship is destroyed, but their brains are not part of the hardware of the ship itself.

[Mithfindel]

There is a certain book written by TonyG that actually mentions that at least some of the Broker's meat puppets had capsuleer implants (such as the one that went to the Armor Forge, or the one that posed as Admiral Noir). Therefore, the Broker is either capsule compatible or can otherwise avoid the mind lock. Though most of his tech is pretty close to magic anyway.

[Ava Starfire]

I have always played under the assumption that if one were infected with the disease prior to clone data being stored, the person's clones will suffer from the ailment; Avlynka was infected with Vitoxin more than 10 years prior to become a capsuleer, so the disease had plenty of time to thoroughly spread itself through her body prior to any DNA sample being taken.

It's a part of the character, but really, a rather small one; she takes her dose and refrains from flying for a few hours. She dosent do it to get high, nor as an excuse to try and kill every Amarrian she meets. It is a character hook, and one I am quite sure everyone who knows me will agree, isnt one I "shove" into relevance in RP channels. Yeah, some odd RP storylines pop up from time to time involving people and Vitoxin... meh, it's their RP. No stranger than some of the other stuff people cook up from time to time.