BoPrP

The Botello-Provodnikov Pathogen (BoPrP) is a 1992-agnostic unclassified disease, possibly the most contagious, virulent, and fast-acting yet discovered. Its name is a potential misnomer, as it is unknown whether the disease is transmitted by a pathogen.

## Discovery

BoPrP was first observed by biologists Jane M. Botello and Cannellodicci P. Provodnikov, while studying the spleens of mice in a lab in upper Uen Kombecture. The mice had originally been part of an unrelated experiment concerning the long-term effects of Hot Chip on rodents, but were abandoned by their previous researchers due to an extended lunch break.

Three weeks after being moved to Botello’s personal laboratory, one of the twenty-five mice suffered an unexpected instantaneous death while under observation. An autopsy was performed which initially revealed nothing within the mice beyond what was expected (mouse guts). However, upon carefully opening the skull, a highly unusual brain structure was revealed. The density of folds appeared to have almost tripled, and the brain matter itself had thinned and solidified into a cartilage-like beige substance. Botello and Provodnikov were hesitant to report this finding without further investigation, and so began to search for similar events.

Soon enough, Provodnikov located a record in an obscure collection of Ottoman Turkish documents: the death of a man of unknown name in 1762, in what is now Israel. Provodnikov enlisted the help of a friend familiar with such documents to translate:

“...[he] was of thin flesh, wan from hunger and stringy as a dog’s hind leg, but with no signs of death about him save that he was dead. Until it was, that they grasped him and began to lift, the back of the skull not coming up with the rest. Inside the man’s head a nest of dense folds sat firm and tightly wound, like a jar packed with lamb gut.”

Botello contacted the institute whose archive contained the document, and it was revealed that the man’s brain had been removed, dried, and sold as a curiosity by those that found him. In 1943 it resurfaced in an antique store in Utrecht alongside a meticulously carved wooden replica. Currently, Botello was informed, the whereabouts of the brain are unknown, but the replica survives with a nearby collector. Having previously lived in the Netherlands, Provodnikov agreed to visit.

## Prevalence

With the help of chemist Hubert H. Preppenpepper, the cause of the abnormal brain structure was identified: a protein produced by certain neural cells with no obvious special characteristics. Preppenpepper's major contribution came down to his experience with machine learning. Rather than play a large game of Spot The Similarity himself, why not simply feed *all* available data into a neural network, and allow it to settle on factors that maximally split the cells into "produce the bad" and "do not produce the bad".

Preppenpepper's algorithm is a Black Box, and as such the criteria it uses are simply vast arrays of numbers with little physical meaning. However, it is able to successfully identify whether a cell is "bad" with 98% accuracy. Such an accuracy means these cells must truly be different from those around them. With this success, Preppenpepper turned his algorithm to his own brain, scanned via MRI.

"...the active neural cells appeared to be present within my own brain at exactly the same rate as for the mouse brain. Jane volunteered to be scanned as well, and I found the same. Dicci couldn't help but jump on the boat, and after that we tried a cat, a small parrot, a much larger parrot, two other mice, and an easily persuasible janitor. Every time it was the same. 7% of the brain's cells were poised, as it were, to being producing the protein..."

Over the next year 527 willing volunteers and 1465 animals were scanned from as wide a range of places as feasible, with no change in outcome. The conclusion was forced: **BoPrP is in effect in all creatures**.

## Controversy

The paper released by Botello, Provodnikov, and Preppenpepper has received much criticism, chiefly aimed at its small sample size and lack of testing on entities other than humans and animals. Preppenpepper later commented on this:

"How many is enough? If we test 1000 more, people will still claim there's too much room for error. We started by saying 'ok, 100 people should be enough'. Then it wasn't, so we went up to 200. 500. 1500. Where do you stop? We can't very well test the entirety of living creation. Once you've seen *exactly the same result* almost 2000 times, it becomes pretty clear you're not going to find what you're after."

Controversy also exists around the importance of the discovery. The science editor for the Daily Crust, Vincent Ploughe, stated:

"I can think up about a dozen different diseases do you in as quick as a slap and no warning. Why's this one so special? The way I see it, there's this thing inside you might kill you any second, *if* some one in one trillion chance goes off which they don't even know what it is. Yeah, that's called life, mate."