My Hobby: Werewolfism

I haven't written about this before, but my main hobby is researching werewolfism.
A great majority of societies have a werewolf or shape-shifter type of legend, which is what sparks my interest.
Unfortunately, I don’t have the book I need to reference to write that blog with me at home, so you’ll have to wait until college starts up again and I return to my dorm.

Claro, being a fan, I have read a shameful amount of cheap werewolf paperbacks and rented far too many werewolf movies, but one thing continues to bother me throughout all of them. The science of the transformations and the 'allergy' to silver is never explained to my satisfaction. So after a couple years, I decided I'd figure out how to scientifically explain the phenomenon. As such, this is all a bunch of ‘what-if’ing and mad science, but it was fun to come up with.
As far as being progressive, I think the best I can hope for is that somebody learns something they can use on that upcoming Biology test. (If anything is wrong in my hypotheses, please, please, please (!) correct me, because the very last thing I'd want is to write a story and lose a reader because my explanation was wrong.)

Working off the legends that:

1 Certain ointments/charms/spells/phrases/trigger words cause the change from man to wolf
2 The werewolf can voluntarily cause the change
3 Sometimes the urge can become to great and the werewolf can lose control at inadvertent times
4 Werewolves are ‘allergic’ to silver
5 The ‘wolf’ form looks like a huge, muscular wolf, but is, in fact, something ‘else’
etc.

I’ve tried to work out a feasible explanation for mainly the transformation and the allergy, so here goes.

Werewolfism could be spread in the form of retrovirus, Lycanitis, transmitted through bodily fluids. (It’s an inside joke in my D&D group that ‘Lycanthropy’ is an STD) When bitten, or otherwise infected, the victim would experience what feels like the worst cold of their life for a week, during which Lycanitis is taking over cell after cell, planting its genetic material. The directions it plants tell the cell first to make more viruses, second, to rewire the cell slightly so that it will ‘change’ in response to the third ingredient, trigger proteins. That’s why the easiest way to transmit the disease would be a virus, because they can fundamentally change the cell by directly revising the blueprints (DNA).
Lycanitis would be vulnerable to the immune system like every other virus, so being exposed wouldn’t guarantee infection, but those that couldn’t fight it would be ticking time bombs. As the trigger proteins build up in the newbie’s system, the likelihood of one hitting a receptor site increases and they are at a severe risk of transforming without more warning than a little nausea. This explains why some werewolves think they cannot control the change; they just never learned how to trigger the change on their schedule.
The hope is that the new werewolf will be ‘adopted’ into the pack of the wolf that infected him/her, so experienced werewolves will be there to train the pup on how to control when and where they change.
If the werewolf can choose when to change, then transformation can be initiated psychologically (probably the same way you can scare yourself after watching a marathon of especially successful Ghost Hunters episodes and your body goes into the ‘fight or flight’ response over nothing) because the trigger proteins respond to hormonal changes (that’s some fun PMS), which is why using a charm or ointment believed to cause the change works. Each triggered cell would ‘read’ the virus’ directions on how to be a werewolf cell and change shape or function respectively, as well as deploy hormonal signals to trigger the change in nearby cells.
Cells work preposterously fast (it’s amazing, ya gotta love the little buggers), so the human is a ‘wolf’ in, say, less than a minute. Changing back to human form might work the same as changing to wolf form. Opposite trigger proteins direct the cells to read the human part of the DNA and the cells are rebuilt again. Possibly the trigger proteins are metabolized while in ‘wolf’ form, maybe into proteins that trigger the change back to a human form, or just into individual amino acids.
The ‘wolf’ form has no more mass that the human because, well, where would they get it? No giant wolf-monsters here; the biggest wolves can get up to 135 lbs, so werewolves would likely be the size of Great Danes, but not much bigger than real wolves. Still, given that a determined 40 lb. dog can kill a man, a determined 140 lb. dog would be terrifying to anyone with their head on straight.

If the change is physical, most of the mind stays intact in ‘wolf’ form; the werewolf just sees things a little differently. The filter of being in a highly sensitive, hungry, quadruped body will have an effect on the decisions of the person inside, but all the information is still going through the same mind. It may still think ‘Aww, what a cute bunny,’ but the next thought will be ‘I wonder what it tastes like?’ The change takes a lot of biological resources, so the werewolf is going to be ravenous and jittery; plus, many more options with be open to him/her physically, such as actually catching that snowshoe hare.
All of the social pack behavior is already present in humans. A werewolf pack is going to seem like it’s operating just like a wolf pack, but hierarchy building is something humans do naturally, just verbally and not physically.

Now that we all know how we turn into doggies, on to silver. :)

As you may know, silver kills bacteria. It does this by either disrupting the cell wall of a bacterium and causing it to explode, or by ripping apart the sulfide bond in the ‘breathing apparatus’ of the bacterium. Fun, huh? Anyhoo, armed with this information, I guessed that the trigger proteins in werewolves might have a sulfide bond, or maybe the silver destroys the Lycanitis RNA/DNA. Either effect would result in a return to human form and a rather painful death.
My friend was looking to find a cure to silver poisoning for her comic, so we starting researching. Silver can only cause all this trouble in ion form, so we looked for a way to bind it and found that Silver iodide(AgI) is insoluble, meaning it won’t separate into ions in water and that it’s highly unreactive, meaning it shouldn’t be poisonous itself (it is, in fact, used to cause rain. I don’t know how that works; Ask Wiki).
My first idea was iodine that is used a disinfectant, but that’s mixed with a mess of chemicals that could be poisonous on their own in sufficient amounts, however, elemental (alone, without bonds) iodine dissolves easily in ethanol. Essentially, the cure to silver poisoning in your pet werewolf is Iodine moonshine. It could be ingested, applied to a wound caused by a silver implement, or injected (this I’m not as sure about, but both can exist in the blood and ethanol hits your circulatory system the moment it hits your tongue).

I know that this is way too long, but you get cookies for reading. <)
If you have any questions, or would like more details on any part (yeah right), PLEASE post. : )
Thanks for reading!!