Slippery Surfaces

The obvious interpretation of a good cryptic crossword clue, taken at face value, should have nothing to do with the answer; in fact, the 'surface meaning' should deliberately lead you astray. This is in contrast to the non-cryptic kind where the solution is a synonym for the clue. Here are two good examples of such clever deception: 

Founder of business in Kentucky  (4 letters starting with S) by Tim Morey in The Week

Left-wingers, for instance, spouting Marxist doctrine (3 letters starting with I) by Jumbo in The Times

In one case the defining verb masquerades as a noun. In the other, what could be the defining noun is a key part of the word-play. 

Corrupting the Coronavirus Code

Inoculating with live attenuated (weakened) versions of deadly viruses has been a successful approach to eradicating viral disease. Two striking examples are: 

• The variola virus that causes smallpox.  Before smallpox was completely eradicated in 1977, an estimated 50 million cases worldwide led to 2 million deaths each year and left many survivors crippled and disfigured.
• The poliovirus that causes the sometimes-crippling disease of poliomyelitis. Protection is given with one or two doses of a vaccine delivered orally on a sugar lump. Through a concerted international campaign, the 350,000 annual cases of polio recorded worldwide in 1988 has been reduced to 179 cases in 2019, thanks to widespread inoculation with both the live attenuated and the inactivated versions of the virus.

More than 150 different vaccines are now being developed around the world to combat the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 that causes the severe respiratory disease Covid-19. A number of different immunological approaches are being tried, including several that use live attenuated viruses (LAV). Codagenix is a US company working on this approach in collaboration with with Serum Institute of India, a large-scale manufacturer of vaccines. A novel feature of their approach is the use of synthetic biology to weaken the virus strain. Whereas the process of creating LAVs previously took years to develop — requiring a patient search for naturally-occurring mutations in millions of generations of the virus hosted in animals — modern editing techniques can directly rebuild the virus genome in a matter of weeks in such a way that its replication mechanism is seriously impaired and its ability to cause bodily harm removed. Here are some of the advantages of Codagenix’s LAV approach:

• The vaccine can be administered via inexpensive nose drops. Its production scales up easily and no injections or refrigeration are required.
• A recipient’s body encounters and reacts to the entire virus rather than a just surface feature, thereby stimulating not just antibodies but also T-cells and other specialised forms of immunity that give longer-lasting and broader protection.
• The 3-letter words (codons) in the virus’s genome that specify its building blocks (amino acids) are replaced by suboptimal versions that can slow its speed of replication by a factor of 1000 and thus give the immune system more time to respond and marshal its forces to defeat the viral invasion.
• The attenuated form of the live poliovirus has only a small number of mutations and very occasionally (just once in 750,000 times) it reverts to its wild form and causes paralysis. But over 250 mutations have been introduced into Codagenix’s attenuated coronavirus so there is no chance of it mutating back to its original form. 

URGENT APPEAL: Covid-19 Symptom Study

With Covid-19 cases surging again in the UK, please download the Covid-19 Symptom Study app to your mobile phone. It takes a minute to make your daily symptom report and gives the King's College (London) team up-to-date information about new cases of coronavirus across the country; it also tells you about the current situation in your local area. 

Over four million have already signed up, but more are needed to increase the accuracy of the data, It is a quick download from the Apple and Android app stores.