scientific theory

[Usdom]

[nighthawke]

I'm gonna kick this thread in the pants again with another hypothesis: prions and how they interact with the cellular DNA.
I did some time idling through the wiki and stumbled on BSE (mad cow disease) and how it affects them, and it set me thinking; why even consider a virus that might be destructive to a person, why not a prion? When a person's infected, the prions immediately head for the person's bone marrow, infecting and changing the red and yellow marrow to produce more prions, using red blood cells as non-destructive carriers Once the marrow was recoded, the prions would be carried by the red blood cells rapidly through the body and converting the person's genetic makeup.

If this is true, then dealing with a prion-level infection is impossible to cure with the current tech, not without shaving years off their lifespan, or killing them.

[Black_Mantha]

Prions don't alter DNA, though. They're much simpler than even viruses, just misfolded protein that by coincidence catalyses the original protein to refold into another copy of itself. They can be caused by genetic mutation, but can't cause it themselves. That being said, a really powerful prion might sit in the bone marrow (or anywhere else) and alter protein as fast as it's produced.

Prions are really hard to detect directly, so they might seem like a good choice for the were-vector/-factor. And you don't need to have genetic alteration if any mother infects their children. However, it's hard to imagine a single altered protein, or even a set of altered protein to have such complex results. At least a virus can alter entire sections of DNA.