UNA CRISIS DE LA AGRICULTURA (WENDELL BERRY)

 

One reason that an organization cannot properly enact our relationship to the world is that an organization cannot define that relationship except in general terms, and no matter how general may be a person’s attitude toward the world, his impact upon it must become specific and tangible at some point. Sooner or later in his behalf — whether he approves or understands or not —a strip-miner’s bulldozer tears into a mountainside, a stand of trees is clear-cut, a gully washes through a cornfield.

(...)

This collaboration of household and farm was never, in America, sufficiently thrifty or sufficiently careful of soil fertility. It is tempting to suppose that, given certain critical historical and cultural differences, they might have developed sufficient thrift and care. As it happened, however, the development went in the opposite direction. The collaborators purified their roles — the household became simply a house or residence, purely consumptive in its function; the farm ceased to be a place to live and a way of life and became a unit of production — and their once collaborative relationship became competitive. Between them the merchant, who had been only a supplier of raw materials, began to usurp the previous functions of both household and farm, becoming increasingly both a processor and producer. And so an enterprise that once had some susceptibility to qualitative standards — standards of personal taste and preference at one end and of good husbandry at the other — has come more and more under the influence of standards that are merely economic or quantitative. The consumer wants food to be as cheap as possible. The producer wants it to be as expensive as possible. Both want it to involve as little labor as possible. And so the standards of cheapness and convenience, which are irresistibly simplifying and therefore inevitably exploitive, have been substituted for the standard of health (of both people and land), which would enforce consideration of essential complexities.

Social fashion, delusion, and propaganda have combined to persuade the public that our agriculture is for the best of reasons the envy of the Modern World. American citizens are now ready to believe without question that it is entirely good, a grand accomplishment, that each American farmer now “feeds himself and 56 others.” They are willing to hear that “96 percent of America’s manpower is freed from food production” — without asking what it may have been “freed” for, or how many as a consequence have been “freed” from employment of any kind. The “climate of opinion” is now such that a recent assistant secretary of agriculture could condemn the principle of crop rotation without even an acknowledgment of the probable costs in soil depletion and erosion, and former Secretary of Agriculture Butz could say with approval that in 1974 “only 4 percent of all U.S. farms . . . produced almost 50 percent of all farm goods,” without acknowledging the human — and, indeed, the agricultural — penalties.

 What these men were praising — what such men have been praising for so long that the praise can be uttered without thought — is a disaster that is both agricultural and cultural: the generalization of the relationship between people and land. That one American farmer can now feed himself and fifty-six other people may be, within the narrow view of the specialist, a triumph of technology; by no stretch of reason can it be considered a triumph of agriculture or of culture. It has been made possible by the substitution of energy for knowledge, of methodology for care, of technology for morality. This “accomplishment” is not primarily the work of farmers — who have been, by and large, its victims — but of a collaboration of corporations, university specialists, and government agencies. It is therefore an agricultural development not motivated by agricultural aims or disciplines, but by the ambitions of merchants, industrialists, bureaucrats, and academic careerists. We should not be surprised to find that its effect on both the farmland and the farm people has been ruinous. It has divided all land into two kinds — that which permits the use of large equipment and that which does not. And it has divided all farmers into two kinds — those who have sufficient “business sense” and managerial ability to handle the large acreages necessary to finance large machines and those who do not.

Those lands that are too steep or stony or small-featured to be farmed with big equipment are increasingly not farmed at all, but are abandoned to weeds and bushes, often with the gullies of previous bad use unrepaired. That these lands can often be made highly productive with kindly use is simply of no interest; we now have neither the small technology nor the small economics nor the available work force necessary to make use of them. What might be the importance of these “marginal” lands, and of an agricultural technology and economy appropriate to them, in light of population growth is a question that the agriculture experts apparently would be embarrassed to consider, so entranced are they by the glamor of bigness.

As for the farm families who cannot “get bigger” and therefore have to “get out,” they are apparently written off as a reasonable, quite ordinary, and altogether bearable expense. Former Secretary Butz could praise the business acumen of the new big-time American farmer (“In all likelihood he knows as much about financing and business accountability as his banker”), evidently without wondering what may be the agricultural import or effect of such knowledge, or if somewhere there might not be an excellent farmer who is not more acute, in a business way, than his banker. But this is the catch in our almost religious dependence on experts: Mr. Butz is a farm expert, and a farm expert is by definition not a farmer; he has changed sides. I have at hand fifteen speeches by Mr. Butz and his assistant secretaries, all of which praise the productivity — that is, the business success — of the American farmer, and none of which mentions any problem of land maintenance or any problem of the small farmer.

A sampling of quotations from one of these speeches — one made by former Assistant Secretary Richard E. Bell — will give the gist and the manner of official agricultural thinking: 

 “ . . . true agripower . . . generates agridollars through agricultural exports.”

 “True agripower is the capacity of less than 5 percent of America’s population to feed itself and the remaining 95 percent with enough food left over to meet market demands of other nations and still provide food assistance for poor people throughout the world.”

 “Agripower should not be a political tool. Feeding people . . . is too serious a matter to be left to political manipulation.”

 “Once again growth in U.S. farm productivity . . . is on the rise. . . . We no longer have the acreage limitations which for so many years served to restrict grain and cotton production. . . .”

 “. . . the real measure [of agricultural strength] is productivity, combined with processing and marketing efficiency.”

 “Years ago, farm operations were highly diversified, but today, farmers are concentrating on fewer and much larger crop or livestock enterprises. Now, many one- or two-enterprise farms exist where there were formerly three to five enterprises.

 “And with the spread of sophisticated machinery, farm sizes have expanded as their numbers have declined — stretching from an average 195 acres in the 1940s to about 390 in the 1970s.

(...)

 “It is evident that U.S. agripower is a major force in the world’s exchange of goods and services. Agripower is, unquestionably, an even greater force than petropower in man’s survival in the future. Man can and has survived without petroleum, but he cannot live without food.”

 And that was the official line on agriculture during the Butz years. There is nothing in it that was not representative: the self-congratulation, the confusions of purpose, the complacency, the jargon, the sprains and ruptures of sense, the ignorance or ignoring of consequence, the social and economic prejudices ritualized in progressivist clichés. And nowhere that I have seen was the official line more complicated than this, more aware of costs or inequities or conflicts or problems.

 We would do well to examine these statements in more detail, for they are not just the political policies of ex-officials. They represent very well the prevalent assumptions of agricultural bureaucrats, academicians, and businessmen.

 “Agripower,” it will be noted, is not measured by the fertility or health of the soil, or the health, wisdom, thrift, or stewardship of the farming community. It is measured by its ability to produce a marketable surplus, which “generates agridollars.” It is to be measured by “productivity, combined with processing and marketing efficiency.” The income from this increased production, we are told, is spent by farmers not for soil maintenance or improvement, water conservation, or erosion control, but for “purchased inputs”: “household appliances, farm equipment, building supplies, and other capital and consumer goods.” I do not mean that we should necessarily begrudge the farmer these purchases; I am only noticing that, to Mr. Bell, the farmer does not prosper to become a better farmer, but to become a bigger spender. The assistant secretary was applying to farming a standard of judgment that is economic, not agricultural. Farming is defined here purely to suit the purposes of a businessman.

 Mr. Bell makes the benign assertion that this “agripower” feeds people, including the poor of the world, and is therefore too important to be put to political use. But when this subject is reverted to at the end of the speech, we find that “U.S. agripower” is a major force in world trade, a force intended to offset the “petropower” of other countries. And we have the assurance that, after all, “Less than 5 percent . . . of all grain moving between countries goes for food assistance” to the poor. (And, of course, all of this must be weighed against former Secretary Butz’s avowal that “Food is a weapon.”)*

(...) 

The giveaway is in the curiously pleased-sounding statement that “specialization and growth are aided by the ready availability of purchased inputs. . . .” This betrays, for one thing, how far we have abandoned the old ideal that the farm should aim at economic independence; that is, it should be far more productive than consumptive, more a source than a consumer of material goods. This old ideal sought to preserve the farmer on the farm; that was of necessity its first objective. But it also sought to keep the source of food independent of any but agricultural means — an aim that ought to recommend itself, it would seem, to a fairly ordinary intelligence. Its desirability becomes altogether clear when one considers that a farm — given the appropriate technology, the recovery and return of organic wastes to the soil, an economy that is not exploitive, and a sufficient human work force — can achieve a high measure of economic independence.

None of this was clear to the intellectuals of the Department of Agriculture, and no doubt they were thereby saved a good deal of worry. For one of the “purchased inputs,” on the “ready availability” of which our agriculture now absolutely depends, is petroleum — for which we are not only dependent on non-agricultural sources, but on other nations. That we should have an agriculture based as much on petroleum as on the soil — that we need petroleum exactly as much as we need food and must have it before we can eat — may seem absurd. It is absurd. It is nevertheless true. And it exposes the hollowness of Mr. Bell’s contention that “Agripower is, unquestionably, an even greater force than petropower in man’s survival in the future. Man can and has survived without petroleum, but he cannot live without food.” The two powers are now clearly the same. That the two are not only interdependent, but competitive as well, suggests more forcibly than Mr. Butz’s words that “Food is a weapon.”

(...)

Thus the estrangement of consumer and producer, their evolution from collaborators in food production to competitors in the food market, involves a process of oversimplification on both sides. The consumer withdraws from the problems of food production, hence becomes ignorant of them and often scornful of them; the producer no longer sees himself as intermediary between people and land — the people’s representative on the land — and becomes interested only in production. The consumer eats worse, and the producer farms worse. And, in their estrangement, waste is institutionalized. Without regret, with less and less interest in the disciplines of thrift and conservation, with, in fact, the assumption that this is the way of the world, our present agriculture wastes topsoil, water, fossil fuel, and human energy — to name only the most noticeable things. Consumers participate “innocently” or ignorantly in all these farm wastes and add to them wastes that are urban or consumptive in nature: mainly all the materials and energy that go into unnecessary processing and packaging, as well as tons of organic matter (highly valuable — and certainly, in the long run, necessary — as fertilizer) that they flush down their drains or throw out as garbage.

What this means for conservationists is that, as consumers, they may be using — and abusing — more land by proxy than they are conserving by the intervention of their organizations. We now have more people using the land (that is, living from it) and fewer thinking about it than ever before. We are eating thoughtlessly, as no other entire society ever has been able to do. We are eating — drawing our lives out of our land — thoughtlessly. If we study carefully the implications of that, we will see that the agricultural crisis is not merely a matter of supply and demand to be remedied by some change of government policy or some technological “breakthrough.” It is a crisis of culture.

WB

(The (Ecological) Crisis as Crisis of Agriculture; The Unsettling of America) 

 

 

UNA CRISIS DE CARÁCTER (WENDELL BERRY)

 

 

 

The disease of the modern character is specialization. Looked at from the standpoint of the social system, the aim of specialization may seem desirable enough. The aim is to see that the responsibilities of government, law, medi-cine, engineering, agriculture, education, etc., are given into the hands of the most skilled, best prepared people. The difficulties do not appear until we look at specialization from the opposite standpoint — that of individual persons. We then begin to see the grotesquery — indeed, the impossibility — of an idea of community wholeness that divorces itself from any idea of personal wholeness.

The first, and best known, hazard of the specialist system is that it produces specialists — people who are elaborately and expensively trained to do one thing. We get into absurdity very quickly here. There are, for instance, educators who have nothing to teach, communicators who have nothing to say, medical doctors skilled at expensive cures for diseases that they have no skill, and no interest, in preventing. More common, and more damaging, are the inventors, manufacturers, and salesmen of devices who have no concern for the possible effects of those devices. Specialization is thus seen to be a way o institutionalizing, justifying, and paying highly for a calamitous disintegration and scattering-out of the various functions of character: workmanship, care, conscience, responsibility.

Even worse, a system of specialization requires the abdication to specialists of various competences and responsibilities that were once personal and universal. Thus, the average — one is tempted to say, the ideal — American citizen now consigns the problem of food production to agriculturists and “agribusinessmen,” the problems of health to doctors and sanitation experts, the problems of education to school teachers and educators, the problems of conservation to conservationists, and so on. This supposedly fortunate citizen is therefore left with only two concerns: making money and entertaining himself. He earns money, typically, as a specialist, working an eight-hour day at a job for the quality or consequences of which somebody else — or, perhaps more typically, nobody else — will be responsible. And not surprisingly, since he can do so little else for himself, he is even unable to entertain himself, for there exists an enormous industry of exorbitantly expensive specialists whose purpose is to entertain him.

The beneficiary of this regime of specialists ought to be the happiest of mortals — or so we are expected to believe. All of his vital concerns are in the hands of certified experts. He is a certified expert himself and as such he earns more money in a year than all his great-grandparents put together. Between stints at his job he has nothing to do but mow his lawn with a sit-down lawn mower, or watch other certified experts on television. At suppertime he may eat a tray of ready-prepared food, which he and his wife (also a certified expert) procure at the cost only of money, transportation, and the pushing of a button. For a few minutes between supper and sleep he may catch a glimpse of his children, who since breakfast have been in the care of education experts, basketball or marching-band experts, or perhaps legal experts.

The fact is, however, that this is probably the most unhappy average citizen in the history of the world. He has not the power to provide himself with anything but money, and his money is inflating like a balloon and drifting away, subject to historical circumstances and the power of other people. From morning to night he does not touch anything that he has produced himself, in which he can take pride. For all his leisure and recreation, he feels bad, he looks bad he is overweight, his health is poor. His air, water, and food are all known to contain poisons. There is a fair chance that he will die of suffocation. He suspects that his love life is not as fulfilling as other people’s. He wishes that he had been born sooner, or later. He does not know why his children are the way they are. He does not understand what they say. He does not care much and does not know why he does not care. He does not know what his wife wants or what he wants. Certain advertisements and pictures in magazines make him suspect that he is basically unattractive. He feels that all his possessions are under threat of pillage. He does not know what he would do if he lost his job, if the economy failed, if the utility companies failed, if the police went on strike, if the truckers went on strike, if his wife left him, if his children ran away, if he should be found to be incurably ill. And for these anxieties, of course, he consults certified experts, who in turn consult certified experts about their anxieties.

It is rarely considered that this average citizen is anxious because he ought to be — because he still has some gumption that he has not yet given up in defer-ence to the experts. He ought to be anxious, because he is helpless. That he is dependent upon so many specialists, the beneficiary of so much expert help, can only mean that he is a captive, a potential victim. If he lives by the competence of so many other people, then he lives also by their indulgence; his own will and his own reasons to live are made subordinate to the mere tolerance of everybody else. He has one chance to live what he conceives to be his life: his own small specialty within a delicate, tense, everywhere-strained system of specialties.

From a public point of view, the specialist system is a failure because, though everything is done by an expert, very little is done well. Our typical industrial or professional product is both ingenious and shoddy. The specialist system fails from a personal point of view because a person who can do only one thing can do virtually nothing for himself. In living in the world by his own will and skill, the stupidest peasant or tribesman is more competent than the most intel-ligent worker or technician or intellectual in a society of specialists.

What happens under the rule of specialization is that, though society becomes more and more intricate, it has less and less structure. It becomes more and more organized, but less and less orderly. The community disinte-grates because it loses the necessary understandings, forms, and enactments of the relations among materials and processes, principles and actions, ideals and realities, past and present, present and future, men and women, body and spirit, city and country, civilization and wilderness, growth and decay, life and death — just as the individual character loses the sense of a responsible involvement in these relations. No longer does human life rise from the earth like a pyramid, broadly and considerately founded upon its sources. Now it scatters itself out in a reckless horizontal sprawl, like a disorderly city whose suburbs and pavements destroy the fields.

The concept of country, homeland, dwelling place becomes simplified as “the environment” — that is, what surrounds us. Once we see our place, our part of the world, as surrounding us, we have already made a profound division between it and ourselves. We have given up the understanding — dropped it out of our language and so out of our thought — that we and our country create one another, depend on one another, are literally part of one another; that our land passes in and out of our bodies just as our bodies pass in and out of our land; that as we and our land are part of one another, so all who are living as neighbors here, human and plant and animal, are part of one another, and so cannot possibly flourish alone; that, therefore, our culture must be our response to our place, our culture and our place are images of each other and inseparable from each other, and so neither can be better than the other.

Because by definition they lack any such sense of mutuality or wholeness, our specializations subsist on conflict with one another. The rule is never to cooperate, but rather to follow one’s own interest as far as possible. Checks and balances are all applied externally, by opposition, never by self-restraint. Labor, management, the military, the government, etc., never forbear until their excesses arouse enough opposition to force them to do so. The good of the whole of Creation, the world and all its creatures together, is never a consideration because it is never thought of; our culture now simply lacks the means for thinking of it.

It is for this reason that none of our basic problems is ever solved. Indeed, it is for this reason that our basic problems are getting worse. The specialists are profiting too well from the symptoms, evidently, to be concerned about cures — just as the myth of imminent cure (by some “breakthrough” of science or technology) is so lucrative and all-justifying as to foreclose any possibility of an interest in prevention. The problems thus become the stock in trade of specialists. The so-called professions survive by endlessly “processing” and talking about problems that they have neither the will nor the competence to solve. The doctor who is interested in disease but not in health is clearly in the same category with the conservationist who invests in the destruction of what he otherwise intends to preserve. They both have the comfort of “job security,” but at the cost of ultimate futility.

One of the most troubling characteristics of the specialist mentality is its use of money as a kind of proxy, its willingness to transmute the powers and functions of life into money. “Time is money” is one of its axioms and the source of many evils — among them the waste of both time and money. Akin to the idea that time is money is the concept, less spoken but as commonly assumed, that we may be adequately represented by money. The giving of money has thus become our characteristic virtue.

But to give is not to do. The money is given in lieu of action, thought, care, time. And it is no remedy for the fragmentation of character and consciousness that is the consequence of specialization. At the simplest, most practical level, it would be difficult for most of us to give enough in donations to good causes to compensate for, much less remedy, the damage done by the money that is taken from us and used destructively by various agencies of the government and by the corporations that hold us in captive dependence on their products. More important, even if we could give enough to overbalance the official and corporate misuse of our money, we would still not solve the problem: the willingness to be represented by money involves a submission to the modern divisions of character and community. The remedy safeguards the disease.

This has become, to some extent at least, an argument against institutional solutions. Such solutions necessarily fail to solve the problems to which they are addressed because, by definition, they cannot consider the real causes. The only real, practical, hope-giving way to remedy the fragmentation that is the disease of the modern spirit is a small and humble way — a way that a government or agency or organization or institution will never think of, though a person may think of it: one must begin in one’s own life the private solutions that can only in turn become public solutions.

(…)

Although responsible use may be defined, advocated, and to some extent required by organizations, it cannot be implemented or enacted by them. It cannot be effectively enforced by them. The use of the world is finally a personal matter, and the world can be preserved in health only by the forbearance and care of a multitude of persons. That is, the possibility of the world’s health will have to be defined in the characters of persons as clearly and as urgently as the possibility of personal “success” is now so defined. Organizations may promote this sort of forbearance and care, but they cannot provide it.

WB

(The (Ecological) Crisis as a Crisis of Character; The Unsettling of America)

 

 

 ("El amor siempre gana" se lee en el grafiti de la fuente. ¿Es equivalente, en un surtidor, a "Death supersedes life and life rises again from the dead and decayed"? ¿O también hay especialistas solo del amor y ajenos a la muerte?)

LIGHT WITHOUT INTENTION (II)

 

Mañana sin número y sin conocimiento de tales cosas

Viniendo antes de cualquier cosa a los ojos de los pájaros

Luz tenue antes de que el sol traiga los reflejos de

Sílabas

Instante frío cuando los colores yacen profundos en un aliento antes

Del sentido

Presencia nunca identificada dada entera de vuelta ahora

Desde la oscuridad no profanada y los destellos de las estrellas que no estaban

Allí

Tras la noche entera y desde su luz apareciste

Alzándote a través de ti misma en calma a la velocidad de la luz

Mientras la libélula sobrevuela el lago de cristal

Con sus alas de venas de cielo antes de la ocurrencia o mención

Mañana sin límite nunca aproximada o creída o

vista de nuevo

 

WSM (“Unspoken greeting”, The Pupil. Traducción Guillermo G. Ruiz)

29 de septiembre de 2021 (San Miguel)

LIGHT WITHOUT INTENTION (I)

 

NATURE AS MEASURE

We see how everything -the whole world- is belittled by the idea that all creation is moving or ought to move toward and end that some body, some human body, has thought up. To be free of that end and that ambition would be a delightful and precious thing.

Once free of it, we might again go about our work and our lives with a seriousness and pleasure denied to us when we merely submit to a fate already determined by gigantic politics, economics, and technology. 

Such freedom is implicit in the adoption of nature as the measure of economic life.

(...) 

When we adopt nature as measure, we require practice that is locally knowledgeable. The particular farm, that is, must not be treated as any farm. And the particular knowledge of particular places is beyond the competence of any centralized power or authority.Farming by the measure of nature, which is to say the nature of the particular place, means that farmers must tend farms that they know and love, farms small enough to know and love, using methods that they know and love, in the company of neighbors that they know and love.

WB 

(MANUEL DO MAZADEIRO, PENELAS,O INCIO, OURENSE;

FOTOGRAFÍA DE IAIN COLQUHOUN)

MANUEL DO MAZADEIRO Y SUS VACAS

 

The fact is that we have destroyed American farming, and in the process have nearly destroyed our country.

SETIEMBRE: BACH ES UNA ESTRUCTURA ESTABLE (19-09-2026)

Iris sibirica
 

https://x.com/Naturepathway/status/2101180972448497839?s=20IRIS SIBIRICA

Taxonomía

Iris De Siberia. Siberia Oriental

Iris sibirica, fue descrita por Carlos Linneo y publicado en Species Plantarum 1: 39. 1753.^[3]

 

Etimología

Iris: nombre genérico llamado así por Iris la diosa griega del arco iris.^[4]

sibirica: epíteto geográfico que alude a su localización en Siberia.

It was collected in Siberia by monks in the Middle Ages and grown in monasteries, later it was distributed around Europe, where there are now many cultivars.^[32] It has been cultivated in Britain since 1596.^[33]

^{"Bach era una ESTRUCTURA ESTABLE y permanecería eternamente, era como el ideal, como un cristal salido de un cuento, como la superficie de una gota de agua, de una estabilidad indescifrable,de una perfección indescifrable,y por supuesto se lo podía describir, pero no aferrar, porque su esencia elude el movimiento del intelecto que trata de captarla (...) pese a lo cual para poder decir que comprendemos por qué la perfección no tiene una esencia debemos decir que la perfección simplemente existe, pero si carece de esencia lo único que nos queda es el asombro"} 

^{(LK, traducción de Adan Kovacsics)} 

 

 

 

 "Setiembre debiera querer decir clemencia en el vocabulario que guarda los significados que  todavía no han adquirido las palabras.Como un fresco baño de tolerante, de tibio bienestar, setiembre puede dar la señal, en los más dilatados e inciertos calendarios, de esa piedad, que como la salud, el mundo pierde por inmensas, por bien medidas arrobas.Esos hombres que quedan- uno en cada pueblo catalán, en cada pueblo gallego, en cada pueblo castellano, en cada pueblo andaluz- insobornables a todo lo que no sea el acompasado latido de su propio corazón, saben bien cuánta razón asiste al tímido, al cauteloso defensor de setiembre: este mes que se inventó para predicar la moderación y para luchas, moderadamente, contra el desafuero.

(...) 

El mes de setiembre con su vuelo de mansedumbre, cae sobre el campo, sobre el mar, sobre la ciudad, como una invitación al sosiego, igual que un convite a la mesa -suculenta, por otra parte- de la ponderación y el equilibrio.

(...)

En setiembre se escuchan mejor los pulsos del mundo, la canción del mundo, el hondo respirar del mundo. Como si los oídos del alma se destapasen, de repente a todas las sorpresas, la orquesta de setiembre los invade con su cadencia, con esa melodía sosegada  que todos conocemos y que todos, como el príncipe de la fábula, olvidamos cada mañana.

(...)

Porque septiembre queremos decir, es la llave que guarda un manantial que no se agota.

CJC (3 setiembre 1950) 

"TRANSHUMANISMO": PAPOVIRUS SV-40

 

 

 

SV-40 es un acrónimo (en inglés) para virus 40 vacuolado del simio o virus simio 40, es un poliomavirus hallado tanto en monos como en humanos perteneciente a la especie Macaca mulatta polyomavirus 1. Su nombre proviene del efecto que provoca en las células de mono verde Chlorocebus infectadas, que desarrollaban un número inusual de vacuolas. Tal como otros poliomavirus, el "SV-40" es un virus ADN que tiene el potencial de causar tumores, aunque mayormente persiste como una infección latente.

El descubrimiento del SV-40 reveló que entre 1955 y 1963 en torno al 90% de los niños y al 60% de los adultos en EE. UU. se les había administrado vacunas contra la polio contaminadas con SV40.^[1]

Historia

El virus SV-40 fue identificado por primera vez en 1960 por Ben Sweet y Maurice Hilleman al descubrir que entre el 10-30% de las vacunas contra el poliovirus en EE. UU. estaban contaminadas por SV-40.^[2] Dos años después, el grupo de Bernice Eddy describió la función oncogénica del SV-40 al inducir sarcoma y ependimomas en hámsteres inoculados con células de mono infectadas con SV40.^[3] La secuencia completa de ADN del virus fue secuenciada por Walter Fiers y su equipo en la Universidad de Gante (Bélgica) en 1978.^[4]

Contaminación de la vacuna contra la Polio

Apenas descubierto, el SV40 se identificó en la forma inyectable de la vacuna de polio producida entre 1955 y 1961. Se cree que fue debido a células renales de monos infectados usados para amplificar al virus de la vacuna durante su producción. Tanto la vacuna oral de Sabin (oral, virus atenuado) y la de Salk (inyectable, virus muerto) estuvieron afectadas; y la técnica para inactivar el virus de la polio de la vacuna Salk, por medio del formaldehído, fue inútil para matar al SV40.

Fue difícil detectar pequeñas cantidades del virus hasta el advenimiento del test reacción en cadena de la polimerasa (PCR); por lo que las muestras almacenadas de vacuna hechas después de 1962 tienen el test negativo para SV40, pero en las muestras anteriores a 1962 pueden haber estado. Así, quizás más de 10 millones de personas recibieron lotes de vacuna potencialmente contaminada, y no hay manera de saber si fueron expuestos al virus, y si fue así, si la cantidad y la ruta llevarían a causar infección. También se desconoce cuanto se expandió el virus entre humanos antes de los 1950s. Hay un estudio donde el 12% de una muestra de estudiantes de medicina alemanes, en 1952 tenían anticuerpos SV40. Se desconoce si el virus se transmite entre humanos.

Un análisis presentado en la Conferencia de Sustratos de células para Vacunas en 2004 sugirió que las vacunas usadas en el bloque soviético, China, Japón, África, pudieron estar contaminadas aún en 1980, significando que centenares de millones más habían estado expuestos al virus, a sabiendas del mundo científico.

Virología

El SV-40 consiste en un virión icosaédrico desnudo con un genoma de ADN circular de doble cadena de aproximadamente 5kb. El virión se adhiere a la superficie celular en el Complejo mayor de histocompatibilidad clase I mediante la glicoproteína vírica VP1. La penetración a la célula es a través de una vesícula con caveolina. En el interior del núcleo de la célula, la ARN polimerasa II celular promueve la expresión de genes tempranos que dan lugar a un ARNm; que da origen a los antígenos T grande y pequeño.

El antígeno T grande tiene dos funciones: 5% irá a la membrana plasmática de la célula y el 95% volverá al núcleo. Una vez en el núcleo el antígeno T grande se une a tres sitios de ADN virales, I, II, y III. La unión de los sitios I y II autorregula la síntesis de ARN temprano. La unión al sitio II se lleva a cabo en cada ciclo celular. La unión al sitio I inicia la replicación del ADN en el origen de replicación. La transcripción temprana produce dos ARN empalmados, ambos de 19s. La transcripción tardía produce ARNm 16s más largo, que sintetiza la proteína viral VP1 de la cápside, y 19s más pequeños, que originan VP2 y VP3 mediante Leaky Scanning. Todas las proteínas, además del 5% de la T grande, vuelven al núcleo porque el ensamblado de la partícula viral ocurre allí. La eventual liberación de las partículas virales es citolítica y resulta en la muerte celular.^[5]

SV-40 en animales

El virus tiene dormancia y no muestra efectos visibles en monos Rhesus, ha sido hallado en muchas poblaciones de macacos libres, donde es rara causa de enfermedad. Sin embargo, en monos inmunodeficientes—debido, por ej., a infección con el virus de inmunodeficiencia en simios— el SV-40 actúa muy parecido a los poliomavirus virus JC y virus BK humanos, productores de enfermedad renal y a veces de una desmielinización similar a la leucoencefalopatía multifocal progresiva. En otras especies, particularmente hámsters, el SV-40 causa una variedad de tumores, generalmente sarcomas.^[6]

En ratas, el antígeno T SV40 grande se usó para establecer un modelo de tumor cerebral para los tumores primitivos neuroectodermales y meduloblastomas.^[7] Los mecanismos moleculares por el cual el virus se reproduce y altera funciones celulares eran previamente desconocidos, y la investigación sobre el SV-40 incrementó vastamente el entendimiento biológico de la expresión génica y la regulación del crecimiento celular.

Papel teórico en enfermedades humanas

No se ha probado que el SV40 sea causa de enfermedad en humanos, pero estudios sugieren un vínculo con el cáncer sobre la base de la presencia de relativamente grandes cantidades de algo parecido a fragmentos de ADN de SV-40 en algunos tejidos tumorales, particularmente mesoteliomas y linfomas no hodgkinianos, sin embargo otros estudios atribuyen esta relación a falsos positivos por contaminación de muestras en laboratorio con el virus.^[8] Aún no hay consenso sobre el significado de esos hallazgos.^[9]

El Instituto Nacional del Cáncer de Estados Unidos, anunció en 2004 que a pesar de que el SV-40 causa cáncer en algunos modelos animales, la "Se ha acumulado evidencia epidemiológica considerable para indicar que el SV40 probablemente no causa cáncer en los seres humanos".^[10] Este anuncio contrasta con un estudio de 2002 realizado por la Academia Nacional de Ciencias del comité de Revisión de Seguridad de Inmunización que declaró: "el Comité concluye que la evidencia biológica es moderada sobre que la exposición a SV-40 podría conducir cáncer en los seres humanos bajo condiciones naturales".^[11]

Daño en p53

Se cree que el SV40 suprime las propiedades transcripcionales del p53, supresor de tumores en humanos, a través del antígeno T SV40 grande y del antígeno T SV40 pequeño. p53 es responsable de iniciar la muerte celular [apoptosis], o la detención del ciclo celular cuando una célula es dañada. Un gen mutado p53 puede contribuir a la proliferación celular descontrolada, lo que deriva en un tumor.

Referencias

1. Shah K, Nathanson N (January 1976). «Human exposure to SV40: review and comment». Am. J. Epidemiol. 103 (1): 1-12. PMID 174424.
2. Sweet BH, Hilleman MR (November 1960). «The vacuolating virus, S.V. 40». Proc. Soc. Exp. Biol. Med. 105: 420-427. PMID 13774265.
3. Eddy, BE, Borman, GS, Grubbs, GE, Young, RD (May 1962). «Identification of the oncogenic substance in rhesus monkey kidney cell culture as simian virus 40». Virology 17: 65-75. PMID 13889129.
4. Fiers W, Contreras R, Haegemann G, Rogiers R, Van de Voorde A, Van Heuverswyn H, Van Herreweghe J, Volckaert G, Ysebaert M (May 1978). «Complete nucleotide sequence of SV40 DNA». Nature 273 (5658): 113-20. PMID 205802.
5. Kristina M. Giorda, Smita Raghava and Daniel N. Hebert (2012). The Simian Virus 40 Late Viral Protein VP4 Disrupts the Nuclear Envelope for Viral Release. J. Virol. March 2012 vol. 86 no. 6 3180-3192. Disponible en: http://jvi.asm.org/content/86/6/3180.full
6. BE Eddy, GS Borman, WH Berkeley, and RD Young (1961). "Tumors induced in hamsters by injection of rhesus monkey kidney cell extracts". Proceedings of the Society for Experimental Biology and Medicine, 107(1):191–197. " PMID 13725644.
7. Eibl RH, Kleihues P, Jat PS, Wiestler OD (1994) Un modelo para tumores primitivos neuroectodermales en trasplantes transgénicos neurales, con el antígeno SV40 grande T. Am J Pathol. 1994 mar;144(3):556-64
8. Poulin DL, DeCaprio JA (2006). "Is there a role for SV40 in human cancer?". J. Clin. Oncol. 24 (26): 4356–65. doi: 10.1200/JCO.2005.03.7101. PMID 16963733.
9. Lowe DB, Shearer MH, Jumper CA, Kennedy RC (2007). "SV40 association with human malignancies and mechanisms of tumor immunity by large tumor antigen". Cell. Mol. Life Sci. 64 (7–8): 803–14. doi:10.1007/s00018-007-6414-6. PMID 17260087.
10. National Cancer Institute (2004). Studies Find No Evidence That SV40 is Related to Human Cancer. http://www.cancer.gov/newscenter/newsfromnci/2004/sv40.
11. The National Academy of Sciences“Immunization Safety Review: SV40 Contamination of Polio Vaccine and Cancer (2002)" by Kathleen Stratton, Donna A. Almario, and Marie C. McCormick, Editors, Immunization Safety Review Committee.

Enlaces externos

• CDC.gov 'virus del simio 40 (SV40), vacuna Polio, Cáncer Q&A' Centro de EE.UU. de Control de Enfermedades
• FDA.gov 'virus del simio 40: un posible poliomavirus humano Workshop' (conferencia de 1997 de NIH sobre SV40 en humanos, parte 1), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• FDA.gov virus del simio 40: un posible poliomavirus humano Workshop' (conferencia de 1997 de NIH sobre SV40 en humanos, parte 2), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• FDA.gov virus del simio 40: un posible poliomavirus humano Workshop' (conferencia de 1997 de NIH sobre SV40 en humanos, parte 3), National Institutes of Health (NIH)
• SV40Foundation.org 'estánds de SV40 del virus del simio 40', Fundación SV40
• MeshName virus del simio 40

 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papovirus_SV-40