Slashdot Mirror
Doomsday Virus Discovered?
quakeaddict writes "Pretty scary stuff.....makes ya want to go home and hug your kids. Here's the story." It's pretty obvious that sooner or later, by accident or on purpose, we'll create genetically-engineered bioweapons with as much destructive potential as nuclear weapons. So far, we've managed not to wipe ourselves out with nukes.
Excellent point. Today, it takes quite a bit of education, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment, to do this sort of thing.
But what about in the future? Will Wal-Mart sell "1-2-3 Genetic Engineering Kits(TM, as seen on TV)"? Then you'll have people doing molecular biology with no real understanding of the principles--the molecular biology equivalent of script kiddies ("gene kiddies?"). I can see it now..."i'm a 133t m013kv14r bi010je5t"
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
We're a long distance from understanding most of it. So until it's understood, completely, then the bioengineers ought to do us all a favor and slow down.
I count "modern" bioengineers efforts to be no more scientific than the efforts of alchemists. More technology is involved, but there is still the innate lack of understanding about the overall complexity of the problem.
Simpler experimentation is the answer. As in, if I toggle the 2**12 amino in this DNA chain from G to A, what happens? I think engaging in any experimentation where genocide, even if it is of mice, is a possible outcome, is a violation of any ethical code. Once the virus is in the wild, _why_ won't it mutate and infect other animals? Mad cow disease started off in sheep. HIV might've started in monkeys. Malaria takes 3 different hosts for its cycle. Some bioengineered corn has pollen fatal to monarch butterflies.
The whole bio thing is so far beyond modern scientific understanding that they need to stop the random experimentation, and go back to traditional, slow, foundation-building experimentation. Just because it worked in the lab doesn't mean it'll work in the real world, and doesn't mean that things won't mutate in the long term.
Everything around us is the result of eons of slow mutation and interaction. To suddenly introduce an organism to the wild that hasn't had a few hundred year debugging period is psychotic at best.
Because anyone with a bachelor's degree in biology or biochemistry could have figured that out anyway, given the rest of the details?
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
From a humane perspective sterilizing of pests is kind of controversial. The real reason for a sterilizing virus rather than a killing virus is this: a rapidly reproducing pest (like mice) can quickly compensate for a large population drop and is more likely to evolve resistant individuals. If even one mating pair escapes or resists infection, they will quickly bounce back to previous numbers, because they will have no competition and no infectious individuals. But a sterilizing virus leaves them alive for a while, making things more difficult for any escapees. First of all it creates competition for limited resources for a generation or so, and helps keep any predators active. Secondly, it prolongs and enhances exposure to infected individuals and therefore increases the possibility of infection to anyone that is not completely immune. Third, I'm not sure what the mating behavior for mice is but sterilized individuals may create competition there as well, and could even square the loss of reproduction. The net effect is that the entire population will be infected, be unable to reproduce for a time, and then die off quickly. cryptochrome
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
So "A. The process accidentally killed all mice, by creating a doomsday bug for them." is scarier.
--
Spelling by m-w.com.
Yeah! Hordes of teenagers having their own gene-kit creating deceases discovered by grey-hat doctors. Of course, you will find most of them documented on "gene-sec.com" as well. However, as everything happens so fast in genetic engineering, people that want to move around in public with other people must all read "gene-sec.com" to be aware of the latest exploits, and make sure to vaccinate themselves appropriately.
is that it was accidentally created in an experiment to create a real world product.
While the problem of small groups with moderate resources engineering viruses is indeed a serious one, I'm skeptical of claims that any virus or even set of viruses would be able to wipe out humanity.
Mainly this comes from circumstantial evidence: As far as we can tell, nothing like this has ever happened, despite random genetic crossovers happening fairly frequently with bacteria and viruses.
Not an iron-clad argument, and a super-virus would still be very bad, but I'm skeptical of most "doomsday" hype.
2. What were the numbers studied? If they were less than decent poulation sizes (n>10000, approx.) then the results may not be as horrible as first glance might suggest.
3. What form of carrier mechanism was used? If it was of a sort not readily found in nature, this may server as a mitigating factor.
4. Consider the information source.
Race purists and bigots take note: Genetic diversity is your only hope for long term survival of this sort of holocaust, whether man-made or natural. All life must be given a chance. Evolution is just the filter.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
or
I can't believe they were studying to sterilize mice. I mean, I'm okay with mouse traps, rat poison, cats, etc. But to significantly alter their biological functions just seems unethical to me. All movies we make where some alien race is coming to eradicate humanity, we do not suffer the aliens and happy endings means we kick them off our planet. But if we reverse the roles to be the ones doing the eradication, we call it pest control. No, sir, I don't like it!
Tired of sitting at that karma cap? Start a flame war today! See just how low you can go!
I suspect that the story may have been sensationalized somewhat ("Killer Virus Created! Extra Extra, Read All About It!"). But somehow I'm not surprised that Australians would be involved.
I guess it's their history of using biological agents to control pests (like rabbits), such as myxoma virus in the 50's. Or Rabbit Calicivirus Disease, which was released onto the mainland after escaping from a test facility on Wardang island, ripped through the rabbit population, and was later was smuggled into New Zealand by some farmers who thought it would be a good idea to let it loose and see what happened. I think it's a pretty safe bet that there are some folks over there who are seriously considering using it in the wild.
...all this "delivery by virus" stuff isn't as exacting as the biologists want us to beleive it is. You throw a message in a bottle into the sea of humanity, and hope it's only read by the correct recipients.
These guys should start fiddling with computer models more, and with live tissue less, before one of them picks his nose, gets contaminated, goes home, and kills us all.
I try not to be alarmist about stories like this, but no government - including bad-boy gov'ts like Iraq, North Korea, Libya and industrialized gov'ts like the US, UK, and Russia - is going to be able to keep themselves from experimenting with this. It would be unrealistic to think otherwise.
I think the answer (for the species, anyway) is pretty clear: extraterran colonization. Of course, nobody outside of /. and K5 seems to think that a serious space program is worth funding any more, so the species is probably screwed.
I will go now, and drink myself stupid.
OK,
- B
--
http://www.bradheintz.com/
- updated
To wit, it is easy for a human to use a virus to kill all the mice in a lab if the human is not susceptible to the virus. On the other hand, we have seen how difficult it is for a human to use a virus to kill other humans due to similar susceptibilities. Even something as simple as nerve gas requires special gear.
The one most famous case in which Europeans killed the natives of North America with smallpox was successful because the Europeans had a much lower susceptibility to smallpox. This is not the case for sarin, anthrax, or possibly genetically engineered smallpox. To handle such items, a proper protective infrastructure must exist which can increases the visibility of the to be warrior.
I feel much more threatened by super viruses created by the abuse of antibiotics. These agents exist. They already cause suffering. They move easily through the exisiting food chain to unsuspecting victim.
Computer models have to (obviously) be programmed. Therefore, the programmer must already know all of the factors that might come into play in the model, and what value each factor can have. Ecological computer models work decently enough because there are only a few hundred to a few thousand variables to be considered. In an organism, there are not only millions of variables, but we still don't know how a large percentage of the variables interact with one another.
Therefore, it's impossible for us to ask a program "What would happen if I introduced X into the organism?" and get consisitently accurate responses. To get answers, we still have to perform experiments.
4-star general in a one-man army.
The submitted link (pointing to Yahoo Asia) is actually a just a story reporting a story that appears on New Scientist magazine (Although their site seems to be down at this moment).
Anyway, just wanted to mention two things. One is that mouse IL-4 is inactive in humans, and vice versa.
The second is that many pathogens and parasites are thought to already manipulate cytokines to alter immune responses to their advantage, in a way perhaps similar to what the Mousepox w/ IL-4 is doing.
As long as the genetic diversity and population size are great enough, then probability is large that you will find the mouse that has the very strong resistance. They're the ones left moving.
*whup* "Get along, little electrons. Heeyah!"
And that's the scary part.
Basement nukes are hard. A group of grad students could probably build a working device from first principles, but without the fissionables for the core, they'd have nothing more than a job offer from the nearest defence contractor and a request to Please Not Port The Software To The Sony PS/2 from some well-dressed guys wearing really cool shades.
50 years from now, basement bioweapons may be a reality. You're made of all the materials you need to build 'em.
Someone else wrote that if they were in the scientists' shoes, they'd destroy the research and "hope nobody else ever figures it out."
I disagree - and give mad props to the scientists for letting this cat out of the bag. I'd rather have our bioweapons engineers aware of it and working on the fix now, not later.
Finally - is there really any fundamental difference between the "gene sequence for smallpox, patched with the human IL-4 equivalent" and the binary string used in the "Date:" buffer overflow in M$Outbreak?
Security through obscurity never works.
The mouse IL-4 virus may be inactive in humans, but comments by the scientists made me believe that there is a human equivalent to IL-4. One of them was quoted saying, "It would be safe to assume that if some idiot did put human IL-4 into human smallpox, they'd increase the lethality quite dramatically,".
(As a side note, why would any sane person make this statement? That's like saying, hey! I don't know if y'all know this, but if you put enough plutonium-239 together, you can create an explosive nuclear fisson chain. Oh, but don't do that, ok? Nuclear explosions bad, hmm'k.)
Now, we have a very good vaccine for smallpox, good enough that it has effectively been eliminated as a threat to humans. However, in mice, the addition of IL-4 decreased the effectiveness of mouse smallpox vaccine to around 50%. If the same decrease in effectiveness was seen with the human smallpox vaccine against smallpox+human IL-4, I'd say there is a cause for concern.
Remember, before the advent of the smallpox vaccine, millions died from the disease.
Eric