apollosdrunkenmixup

basically: these are viruses that can infect one particular group of bacteria - and oftentimes it's highly specific. like "this virus will only infect this one species of mycobacteria and nothing else." which is helpful if you want to kill only that bacteria - highly useful in medicine, for instance, if someone has an infection from a really bad, antibiotic-resistant bacteria. leprosy is part of this group. tuberculosis is, too. the idea is that phages will eat up the problem bacteria and then fuck off, leaving you, the human patient, disease-free.

so in this field of study, the scientists are trying to be as collaborative as possible. they're pushing to share everything they find, because the benefits for human health are huge. it should be as easy as writing someone a letter politely requesting a sample of a new virus, and then you can build upon their existing work. this is how things happen for a lot of labs - they reach out to someone else in the field, ask for help, and people are happy to oblige.

but there's one PI who's not interested in playing ball. he doesn't want to be "scooped", he wants to publish his own groundbreaking findings, etc etc etc. he's known for being a dick for this reason. and someone writes him a letter.

it's really key, here, that i've been saying "writes a letter." this happened decades ago before personal computers and email, so everything is done by traditional mail, and you've got a physical piece of paper that you're reading on your desk. and naturally the polite way to reply to a letter is to write your own back.

the rogue PI gets this letter asking to please, if he could, share one of the important bacteriophages that he just found. i like to imagine that he's sitting at his desk in his lab, turning the letter over in his hands and thinking to himself, all while smoking a cigarette and eating a sandwich - things we aren't allowed to do in labs anymore, for obvious reasons. he gets out his own stationery and pens a letter back to the requester, saying No, you can't have my virus.

the letter goes back to the requester, who opens it and reads it.

something that should be said about phages, being viruses, is that they're very...sticky. they stick to surfaces and can hang out for a very long time depending on what they are, and it's somewhat known that once you have a phage in your lab, it's very, very difficult to completely eliminate that phage from just, everywhere. and this was the wild west of science research where people were still pipetting things using mouth suction, no single-use plastics, no wearing gloves, and, of course, they were eating and smoking and writing letters in their lab. right next to their bench where their important research happened.

the requester receives this denial letter, and he says, "fuck it."

he shreds the letter into tiny pieces, and he treats those pieces of paper in solution.

he filters the solution from the moist letter pieces and processes the filters to get a clear liquid.

he grows plates and plates of the bacteria he wants to kill, and he drops the shredded letter liquid on them.

SHE LIVES 35 HOURS AWAY IN A DIFFERENT COUNTRY

And like. I can, but my skull collection is out by Chicago

I FOUND TGE BONES THEY WERE UNDER THE TOWEL

on the continent the things existed alongside nobility and kingship, and the kings could act as enforcers--but iceland was a migration of landowners and their households, many fleeing political consolidation, so it had a very flat social structure (at least above the rung of "free landholder;" very different if you weren't a landowner or you were a slave). frontier honor cultures with no central authority do fine with decentralized dispute resolution mechanisms when there's a lot of room for expansion and/or the social hierarchy is flat--still with a shockingly high background rate of violence by modern standards (icelandic law didn't *prevent* violence so much as *contain* it), but importantly mostly at a small scale. when there are no towns, your society is relatively poor, and there simply don't exist the resources to organize large-scale violence, the system is stable. nobody can accrue enough wealth or status to achieve impunity. but of course it was the power and wealth imbalance which were the proximate cause of the violence of the sturlung era--the big clan leaders were powerful enough to ignore legal institutions with no independent enforcement mechanism, and could only be dealt with by force by other big clan leaders. the libertarian stateless utopia rapidly becomes Hobbesian anarchy when that relative egalitarianism evaporates, and under anarchic conditions there is overwhelming pressure towards consolidation--you join the big fish, or you get eaten yourself.

Medieval ladies in medieval literature:

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This could've been us