Re: (ReacTor) Five Futures Where the US Ended Not With a Bang But a Whimper

On 2025-07-22, Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:

Irrelevant.  Randolph was sick, possibly but not certainly from
syphilis.  Nothing heritable, at any rate.

 
But syphilis -is- heritable, and frequently was inherited in the 19th
century and the early part of the 20th before Dr. Ehrlich's cure.
 

As I understand it, the victim is contagious for a few years, but then,
though still infected, he no longer spreads the disease.

>
I mean heritable!

No you don't.  Or that word doesn't mean what you think it means.
Syphillis can be passed from mother to child (vertical transmission),
but that is just a case of the mother infecting her child.  Syphillis
is a bacterial infection.  It does not enter the genome, which is
what "heritable" would mean.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de