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.

Comments

The scary part of all this...

[spyrral]

is that it was accidentally created in an experiment to create a real world product.

A serious threat, but I'm skeptical of doomsday.

[Christopher Thomas]

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.

This is bad, but one wonders:

[human bean]

1. What sort of genetic pool these mice came from. Was there any variability, or were were they single strain types?
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.

I don't know what is scarier

[Geeky Frignit]

Which is scarier?

• A. The process accidentally killed all mice, by creating a
• doomsday bug for them.

or

• B. They were studying a process to sterilize mice.

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!

Egads...

[RareHeintz]

Well, it was only a matter of time.

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
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Re:Is it a threat?

[Black Parrot]

> It is a highly rational and informative article on the difficulties, both practical and psychological, or biological warfare. The high points is that most people find such acts repulsive, and therefore will not commit them.

"Most" isn't good enough.

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