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The DNA Bomb
Anonymous Coward writes: "While the world is scrambling to nail down the 1972 treaty of biological and chemical weapons, scientists are bracing for GM weapons. Some top experts in the field speculate in an article about "genetic assassination," "lifestyle targeting," "superweeds" to kill GM crops, etc. This goes way beyond just beefing up known pathogens or splicing a couple of them together, even beyond the 1997 fears of an "ethnic bomb." All very over-the-horizon, but fascinating. I'm glad these scientists stuck their necks out to discuss these controversial topics. Especially the step-by-step instructions for making a virus with one person's name on it given by William Nierman, the director of research of the Institute for Genomic Research, and a "lifestyle" weapon conceived by a Harvard geneticist. There's comment from the White House and others, too. At very least a fun read." A little premature reading about this today, but give it a few years... Reading about nuclear weapons in 1940 would have seemed outrageous too.
As the risk rises in one asset base, invest in other unrelated investments to lower the overall level of risk. This is why me need to maintain a population in space - off the earth - a fully self supporting and growing ecosphere. Move out with everything, not just the fun animals like Lions & Tigers, don't be an idiot and forget the plants and bugs too. get off my f**ing cloud - 47
I have to admit i havent read the article, but "fun" about weapons seems a bit macabre to me.
Platy
...postulated a "race-specific" weapon (although a device rather than a chemical) for doing away with the "pan-asians". Check out Sixth Column , a.k.a. The Day After Tomorrow . More than slightly xenophobic, but consider when it was written. (My recollection of the book version of the 1941 serial, which was revised, expanded, and published in 1949.)
RU-486 usually kills the unborn child, after ten days of the mother waiting around for the miscarriage. It is also dangerous to the mother.
What nightmare scenario is VV imagining?
This One?
"In July of 1996, an FDA advisory panel recommended approval of RU-486 even though the American clinical trials were still not complete. Most shocking of all, this recommendation was made despite the unimpeachable testimony of Dr. Mark Louviere, a physician who treated a woman for a life-threatening hemorrhage two weeks after the RU-486 was administered. The woman had lost one-half to two-thirds of her blood. But what really bothered Dr. Louviere (but not the committee, apparently) was even though he reported the complication to the Planned Parenthood clinic which administered the experimental drug, a representative of the same Planned Parenthood clinic subsequently told the media that there had been "no complications among the 238 women" they aborted in this manner. "
What could possibly be done to make RU-486 more dangerous than it already is? Export it to poor brown people in third world countries.
As long as they make a bomb which kills off people who talk on their cellphone while driving - I'm OK with it.
...except that those people usually take care of themselves.
My friends, the most bestest show of all time, STTNG, contemplated such weapons! Those damn research universities need to fire their "professors," and hire some ST writers.
Apparently, Michael slept through his history classes because research on the Atom bomb (as it was called then) started before 1940.
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"In the land of the brave and the free, we defend our freedom with the GNU GPL."
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
By Frank Herbert, about a genetic bomb that kills only women. And he wrote it in 1982! (17 years ago...I guess if he got a patent on it, it wouldn't be valid anymore) ;)
It still is, isn't it?
mad cow, hoof-n-mouth...
Actually look at this from a non-humor type standpoint. If you genetically modify cannabis, you've got a fantastic paper supply, some of the strongest twine available, and a good supply of oils, but no THC. If they don't want people smoking weed, fine. But let's put such an amazing plant to good use. It's been proven that this is possible, THC production can be pushed up and down with the DNA. I think something like this would be good for industry. No?
Digitalunity strikes again.
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.
not only is the universe stranger than you imagine,
it's stranger than you are capable of imagining
What other Ford model should stock cars be based on? It's their main sedan, and that's what nascar's used forever.
:)
If rusty drives one, it's good enough for me.
-Chris
...More Powerful than Otto Preminger...
Forget grapes. Version 2.0 should grow Twinkies as its fruit. Imagine acres and acres of free weed and Twinkies. Mmmmm....
-B
You read "Rainbow Six", didn't you?
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To understand recursion, one must first understand recursion.
The first atomic explosion was in June, 1945, after Germany had surrendered. If they had existed in 1944, I suspect the "Iron Curtain" would never have existed.
Can't you see? There's a reason why "security by obscurity" is hated in some applications. It's because the thing they're hiding is very simple to follow through with--if one person figures it out, then it can be done easily by enough people to make a difference.
Consider nuclear bombs: if complete information was published, there would be enough parties capable of following through to make a BIG difference.
However, DNA bombing is NOT one of these subjects. The work and expertise involved is not enough to warrant concern as of yet.
Informative: 4 ? Puhleeze. Interesting, maybe, but definitely not worth 3.
Nuclear war is only less dangerous if you think of it as 1 bomb taking out a town as opposed to the reality of the situation: 1 Sub in our ballistic missle fleet has over 200 independant warheads. (aren't MIRV's a bitch ?). How many subs do we have ? How many silos do we have ? How many things do we have that the public doesn't even know about ?
According to this article in Scientific American Magazine, "In sum, the two nuclear superpowers remain ready to fire a total of more than 5,000 nuclear weapons at each other within half an hour." The other numbers in the article add up to somewhat more than this though.
Btw, you can find a nice abandoned missle silo tour at this site.
Acutally, if the attack mechanism is something thats "alive" or acts alive, then it can be killed or thwarted (eventually, and with enough research). While 95% of earths population might rot and spontaneously explode, there'd probably be enough people randomly unaffected to survive and figure out a "cure" or an antigen.
Perhaps, perhaps not. Some natural diseases like rabies kill higher percentages of some species infected. But if something kills even much less than 95% of humans at random, there would likely be a total collapse of civilization. Too many essential services and technologies would be lost. Not only the GM weapon, but natural diseases would become deadly as medicine regressed, aided by famine and civil violence.
On the other hand, short of a metric assload of lead sheilding, theres nothing you can do about a neutron bomb. You're just fucked if you happen to be nearby.
True. But enhanced neutron radiation weapons only kill over a small area. Inverse-square law assures isn't enough neutron flux at greater distances.
A fun excercize if we were allowed to know the numbers involved would be "how many nukes do we have per square mile of 1% or lower survivability fallout levels".
Good question. Probably an order of magnitude or two more than the number that exists. The Chernobyl explosion released an immensely larger amount than would be formed by a missle-mountable nuclear weapon, and few larger bombs exist. Cancer would be more common, but again most deaths would be caused by natural disease and other factors related to anarchy.
"I want a tailored germ that will only kill my hated identical twin!"
Am I the only one how still think nuclear weapon are outageous?
That would definately help fight the munchies:)
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
*shrug*
For a weapon, you wouldn't necessarily need to understand everything about cellular mechanics -- just enough to be able to identify, target, and irreparably damage.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
Er...
a) You'd need to figure out protein folding given an amino acid chain and the cellular environment. I'm under the impression that this is a non-trivial problem.
b) You'd need to figure out where to *put* the DNA strand, given a retrovirus that could deliver it. A fair part of DNA is thought to be inactive (introns).
c) Ultimately, you need to be able to go from "This is my objective" to "This is the protein that does this", could be bloody hard depending on the vagueness of your objective.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
If a virus killed its host quickly, and in such a manner that it was obvious that biohazard folks should handle it; or it was very difficult to spread, then it might not have a chance to spread beyond the intended victim and the mutation rate is less of a concern.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
You're very right. I am sorry for answering ignorance with misinformation.
I would still like to see failsafes built into GM products released into the environment. Maybe that would quiet its worst critics.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
This is your metamoderator. This is your metamoderator on drugs. Flamebait??? No ... Mangu's comment is a good comment. Think before you click.
:)
Unless of course the moderation itself was flamebait, in which case the metamoderator succeeded.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
One other comment to mangu though, I noticed you mention similarity of proteins. The prion that causes BSE spreads exactly because the scenario you mention is, unfortunately, not true.
Evolution is lazy. There is an economy of simplicity -- if it works it tends to not change. That's why we and yeast are still remarkably similar on the molecular level.
When you throw a "different" folded protein into the mix you get cross-species diseases like Scrapie and BSE, specifically because most of the proteins used for similar purposes by living organisms are identical. On the molecular level the wheel is seldom reinvented. The hemoglobin used by an earthworm is the virtually the same hemoglobin used by a lemur used by a human used by a parakeet.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Yes lipids and proteins are natural, but certain proteins do not occur within certain species, so for example a feline rhinovirus with an altered protein coat designed to infect human cells and insert the gene for, say, botilinus toxin would have no natural human defense, because such a thing had never before occured.
The human species did not evolve being infected by feline rhinoviruses, the feline rhinovirus infecting a human is not a natural occurance, and the human organism has no tolerance for large quantities of botulinus toxin being pumped into the body. The human host dies from a supercold against which he or she has no natural defense.
This is what I mean by an unnatural disease.
Remember that the mortality rate among some indigenous American people when confronted by common Old World diseases was also 100%, and these were not "new" diseases to the species.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
I agree with fleener. If a disease is a un-natural, it stands to reason that the only defense against it will also be un-natural. There are areas in any genome/proteome that can be targeted that would easily cause 100% mortality in the target species.
Barring the luck of having a completely isolated pocket of population, assuming such a disease is engineered to be easily transmissable I can foresee something being created that has a 100% mortality rate.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Kill the people!
:>
Where is the logic? Hopefully the superweeds are edible, or should everyone starve to placate the ELF?
Re: lifestyle diseases -- yes A.I.D.S. indeed attacks impoverished people, promiscuous people, and IV drug users. If you think it's a disease that somehow judiciously infects deviants, the majority of cases of AIDS worldwide occurs among heterosexuals. Shame on all of them.
Way back when A.I.D.S. was called G.R.I.D. (Gay Related Immune Deficiency) it was obvious that the hemophiliacs and transplant patients who were dying kinda missed out on the G.R. part.
New or crossover organisms thrive when they are able to successfully exploit available niches with no predation or controls. Disease organisms profit from the same mechanism that makes the zebra mussel the scourge of the American Great Lakes, and the American south a big blanket of kudzu.
Maybe kudzu and its effect on native species is something those who promote the release of any GM crop/weed should keep in mind. Perhaps when we engineer a new plant we should also have in the wings an effective control to prevent a designer SuperWheat(tm) from becoming the new American wild grass.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
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NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
remember the evil already done by that stinking fucking stupid xbox-loving butt-breath little dog... "YUM" my ass
<---[singularity sig]
Now that would be a good start.
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OTTERS RULE.
Targets specific lifestyles... Hmm, microsoft, email spamming... hmm
I love U!
How about a "lifestyle" pathogen that only kills people who work on genetic modification experiments?
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
I know that there was a Star Trek episode that brought this issue up.
One of Brian Stableford's novels, Architects of Emortality, has a murder committed using a bunch of genetically modified flowers which are tailored to kill a specific victim through (I think) the pollen. The novels are full of different ways genetic modification and nanotech could be used, including plagues and adding to longevity.
You can rent this space for $5 a week.
Well, it can be a weapon selectively killing people. Anybody remembers Arthur C. Clarke's Rama series? The spiders (octopods?) used a genetic weapon which kills only older people (over 40) to beat the humans while not causing a genocide. When they are objectioned because of ethics, their response was something like "every kind of war is unethical, but once you are forced to war, the method does not matter".
Donate free food to the hungry at The Hunger site.
What you say?
Who's watching? You mean nonconspiracy stuff, right? AFAIK, there isn't anyone. There are specific task forces set up to work with the Iraqis, and there used to be and may still exist a project to fund Russian scientists to work with American scientists rather than defect to the middle east (Hey, how'd this gigantic bowl for making anthrax wind up out here in the Iraqi desert?) Beyond that, I don't know.
I don't have any websites about this, all my references are paper journals. New Scientist had a lot of articles on these topics. If you're really serious about going and looking up the articles, I'll find my references and type them in.
The reason why _some_ people would be immune to it is because toxins work by fitting together two molecules, one being the toxin and the other some vital molecule in the attacked being. Given that no two human beings are alike, the probability that everyone would have exactly the same molecule shape is vanishingly small. Not to mention that the attacking virus would have to penetrate the skin and defeat the immune system in order to get access to the sensitive part of the victim.
Of course, as you say, an un-natural chemical would not have a natural defense. A small and simple toxic molecule, not a protein, may be deadly for everyone. Like chlorine, used in World War I, for instance. But chlorine cannot be delivered by viruses or bacteria, it's about as poisonous to microorganisms as it is to people.
The notion that not everyone would get killed by a genetic bomb provides little comfort. If it means living in a bad Kevin Costner movie, I might as well grab a hammer and bludgeon myself to death right now.
Ya, it's not like you can beta test a DNA bomb. Think about all of the unintended consequences (bugs) to be discovered once the bomb hits market.
With half the population dead from heart disease and the other half grossly overweight, it'll be a snap to enslave us or serve us on the dinner table.
The concept of a life style bomb becomes really scary if you know about Fred Phelps. It's clear that he would not even hesitate to use such a thing if he could get one. If you don't know about this guy then you should visit: This person is the most hate filled person I've ever heard of. He regularly goes to gay funerals to celebrate their being in hell, especially the funerals of folks murdered for because they were gay. Any time you look at genetically based weapons the first thing that comes to my mind is religious extremists, since there seems to be no place at which they draw the line in trying to force there views on the world. Zet
Just recently I read a story about a growing number of scientists demanding that journals make their contents freely available online for everyone to read/download. What is to stop a Kaczinski/unabomber-type individual working alone in his/her garage from using published data to concoct and unleash some life threatening biological agent into the world?
Ummm...his total loathing of modern technology?
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Freeper Logic
But can you come up with a virus that's triggered by trolling? I'd buy that for a dollar.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
In 1940 Philip Wylie, a futurist and SF writer, wrote a story about war in the far future with atomic bombs. He thought his concepts were really novel, until the FBI showed up at his door, demanding where he stole the information from. At first he was scared of going to prison. Then he started wondering why the FBI was there, and got really scared!
That was Cale Yarborough.
I think that this is impossible. After all, bacteria and viruses mutate at incredible rates, and a "targeted" virus could very easily change its target, or lose its targeting altogether. Remember learning about exponential math in school? If you have one super-bacterium that multiplies every five minutes, after 1 day you will have:
1 day = 24 hrs = 1440 min = 288 5-minute periods0 0,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000 bacteria (or 2.4866161820489332107769112407341 x 10^86 in sci. notation)
2^(288 - 1) = 248,661,618,204,893,321,077,691,124,073,410,000,0
Of course, only a extremely small number of those will actually survive in the limited growth medium, and multiplication will slow down and stop eventually. But on the other hand, it is probably possible to engineer a bacterium or virus with a much shorter multiplication period, and the out-of-growth-medium problem can be solved by deploying at many distant locations at once. Even with all of these unknowns, and assuming an error magnitude of a a trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion (10^60) or more either way, the sheer scale of that number gives a sense of how easily this could get out of control.
IANABiologist, and IANAMathematician either, so please correct me if I am wrong.
-- .sig are belong to us!
All your
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Sure, if one has the full genetic information on an individual plus the means and ability to engineer a bug of some sort - likely a virus - then one could devise a weapon that would affect an individual - for a bit - but after release, you lose all control.
The problem is that viruses replicate rapidly and invariably mutate faster than the cells they infect. Even if their DNA replication fidelity was as high as that of the cell they infect, the fact that they must replicate so rapidly means that they will mutate substantially faster than any cell they infect. This means that once you release your virus to nail person X, it will experience mutations, some of which will alter its affinity for this or that receptor. That means that it will develop a partial "interest" in someone with a similar, though different, receptor.
To make it specific for infecting a single person, you must choose a person-specific receptor, period. You COULD make the virus very promiscuous and able to infect anyone but have it engineered to produce a protein that attacks and destroys a specific, but critical, protein/enzyme in you target person alone...but the same problem arises. Viruses experience an accelerated evolution as a result of their rapid replication. If they don't replicate rapidly, they wont reproduce enough virus to do anything but irritate (slightly) your target...like a minor cold at worst. Their immune system would make quick work of the virus and any cells infected with it.
You must have a rapidly replicating virus that can spread too fast to do anything about. This means mutations - it is inevitable. These mutations WOULD lead to a change in host range from your one person to others with similar genetic characteristics to your target. Once that happens, it keeps going and you get a fast dispersal and less specificity of target.
Nothing can change this biological fact. To do any damage to your target, the virus must replicate rapidly. Replicating WILL lead to mutations. Some of those mutations, among the millions and millions of viruses produced, will lead to expanded host range. Once that happens, the cat is out of the bag.
Some nutbar might well try this sort of thing but it wont work as intended. It cannot. The moment it leaves their lab/hands, they lose all control of the future evolution of that virus. It will mutate and be acted upon by selection and that is well beyond their control. What was intended to kill one person would likely spread and then either soften up and become more benign (killing your host before you can infect a new one is NOT an evolutionarily stable strategy) or, if killing rapidly allows it to spread nontheless, then it will remain lethal - but lethal to non-targets.
Problems of targeting as well as control once released are some of the main reasons that biological warfare hasn't been used much in the past. For a weapon to be effective, you must be able to control where it goes and who it takes out. You cannot control the wind, you cannot control the vagaries of mutation, you cannot control a virus or bacteria once you release it from its laboratory-controlled environment.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
I'm not saying that a GM bomb isn't going to be possible, but there's lots of ways things might not go as planned.
/*drunk.. fix later*/
Wrong - it would probably have been at the Rhine.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
What you describe is already possible, and has been so for over a decade, using biological weapons. Anthrax especially could be used in this role. While it is possible to accinate against most bioweapons, dissemination of the virus, if done correctly, would be too fast to allow anyone who isn't vaccinated already, which is about 95% of the population, to be vaccinated. Culturing and distributing such a contagin would be much cheaper and easier than developing a genetic weapon. If anyone is interested, Tom Clancy's Executive Orders has a rather scary scenario along these lines. Also, my site has a paper I wrote on this subject a couple years ago.
thats plain stupid. on 02.12.1942 the first artificial chain reaction started in Chicago in a reactor built by Fermi. the bombs were built in 44/45. Thw whole things was theoretically dicovered around 40.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I.
People in Sweden still are affected by that fallout. People in the northern parts of Sweden, even.
There was a SciFi book (The Sea and Summer) by the australian writer George Turner, it is about the greenhouse effect, overpopulation, the splitting of the citizens in two classes (working class---people with jobs, living in normal houses and non-working class---people without jobs, living in big towerlike houses, fed by social care), and as a means to end overpopulation there is a virus in chewing-gum which makes men infertile. The heros manage to stop the spreading of this chewing gum. But in the end there is a sickness among women who could still bear children.
use Bielefeld.pm
Great post, thanks. I've loosely followed this subject for a while and have asked myself the question "why isn't biological warfare more common" (or terrorism...) many times but haven't come up with a good answer yet. I'm not sure it's because people don't realize how easy it is - I mean, all you need is to know one person who's taken at least 2 years of college bio ... it seems if one was interested in destruction a-la-terrorism one would pursue thier interests *at least* far enough to chat with someone who has taken the requisite bio.
I bring this up because it disturbs me that literally any day someone could upgrade from releasing poison gas on the Tokyo subway to releasing anthra-ebol-pox in the same subway. And I really don't want to be in the subway that day. Basically. Maybe it's just my cold-war nuclear-holocaust-is-a-day-away-kiss-your-ass-good bye 1980's childhood fear that has repositioned itself but this article, and many others I've read, seem to say the opposite - that making a biological weapon of nuclear-proporions is much, much easier than making, well, a nuclear weapon of nuclear-proportions. And when i think about it, I get a little afraid.
If anyone knows why I shouldn't be afraid, please feel free to share...
closed minded is as closed minded does
At the end of my 1/2 hour trip I have not found the kit yet but, as usual, I found a boatload of other cewl stuff. Has anyone else found it yet????
closed minded is as closed minded does
Sure, it's already being done, but the REALLY SCARY part is that those behind it aren't even people, but vast, shambling THINGS! Bob save us, and his divine minister Art Bell
John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up
GM organisms, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, designer drugs, eco-terrorism. One of the great visionary SF writers.
Blah, you're right.
My mistake, thanks...
Do you like German cars?
Most of our enemies would see it most efficient to use prions.
These are what scientists think are responsible for mad cow disease, as well as the Kuru disease from Africa. Supposedly, if used as a biological weapon (which is years away, if even possible), they could be targetted toward specific ethnic groups and people with certain attributes. (Yes, each word in the above is a link to a resource.)
Do you like German cars?
Heinlein
Someone hates these cans.
The people that report getting sick from these chemicals are either in direct contact with the crops and shouldnt have been there in the first place, or have been coerced by guerrilla troops, since it now widely known that guerrilla troops have taken over the drug business in Colombia and they have a HUGE propaganda program. 70% of guerrilla funding comes from illicit crops.
How do I know all this? I live down here and have worked on related projects.
The amount of fake news and general bullshit that comes from the guerrillas affects all kinds of news stories that come out of this country. You should read all of these reports with a lot of skepticism if its based on reports FROM here.
Im as CIA/NSA/FBI/??? paranoid as the next slashdotter, but the guerrillas are even worse (imagine that!) and Ill take Uncle Sams word over theirs any day.
I couldn't fail to disagree with you less.
We're the killer team of /. crackpots (slashpots)...
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
All your base pair are belong to us.
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The Cap is nigh. Time to get a fresh new account.
Have anybody read Gilgamesh II (comics). At the beggining of the novel they explain that a war has exterminated all kinds of primates in South America (gee, they were talking about me!)
Will us survive? It give me creeps!
Don't worry, I'm dumb [to|every]day
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I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Wasn't Rainbow Six about a DNA bomb type virus? I won't be surprised to see this being big in the future, with countries drafting a Biological Warfare treaty a lot like the Nuclear Weapons treaty that is all but being disregarded today.
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#!/usr/bin/perl -w
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And with that simple utterance, a renaissance began.
hey, that sounds a lot like Syphon Filter
erm, heh.
Of course, we also ignore that, genetically, there is no 'race of our country'. I doubt even you would claim that all citizens of US of A share a significant amount of genetic coding that is also significantly different form that of your potential or actual enemies. (I'm not from USA.) So when you unleash the genetically targeted weapons, you're looking at something that is quite likely to target more or less of your own population as 'hostiles'.
to make a nuke you need the entire tenessee valley authority at your disposal so you can churn enough uranium hexaflouride to get that good ol' 238 out of the 235... in other words, you need to be a nation-state.
to tinker with dna you need a couple of hundred dollars worth of equipment, some know how from some college textbooks, and a burning desire to do something nasty
the next terrorist cell to make a cnn "special report" anyone?
the hell with that, we're talking about just a jilted boyfriend scenario...
or maybe even the next columbine will be done with petri dishes *groan*
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Yes, they are. That's exactly the problem.
As long as any group (terrorist, nationalist, governments themselves) have reasons to deploy any weapons (chemical, GM, nuclear) they will. It doesn't matter if its illegal. It doesn't matter if its immoral. It doesn't matter someone has to take the fall for it.
If a group or government has (or thinks it has) a good enough reason, genetic weapons will...I repeat will be deployed. And hushed up (in the case of an offending government, most likely).
As far as the White House statements asking scientist to "hush up," this serves the government's goals and not the people's needs. Keeping it quiet makes it easier to deploy. It does not make it harder for other nations to find out. It will leak to other governmets via spies. This is inevitable. Keeping it secret allows governments to use GM weapons without letting their people know about it.
Yes, some of the ideas in this ideas are far-fetched, but for every seemingly silly idea there is someone willing to try it.
You have to admire the depth of human stupidity, though. We use our greatest achievements in the stupidest ways. Any invention that has the potential to save mankind is equally likely to destroy it.
Manipulating DNA to create the perfect woman,
-- If any of the above made sense, I assure it was purely by accident.
If such weapons are used in a war, generals and leaders cruel or desperate enough won't care about any "bugs". Friendly fire has always happened, and casualties on your own side is something that has always been accepted by warhawks all over the world. As long as it kills more of their guys than our guys, they think it's a success. Completely off-topic: Did yo know thar "Mother's day" was started in the 19th century, as a demonstration against war? Now over 100 years later, with more wars going on than ever, it's just a tool to sell Hallmark cards and cakes?
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
I have always believed that the government needs the most advanced weapons it can get. Violence (ie. war) will never go away, so we should be as efficient at it as possible. (Just one second - doning flame retardent clothing). If this can allow the government to wipe out an opposing army and no one else, great lets do it. The problem comes into play when you cannot ensure that only your target will be affected, therefore, there is a very real possiblity of harming your own forces. This is not a good thing.
As soon as the scientest have incontrovertable proof that they can target an arbitrary inidividual or group of individuals, I say do it. We will save alot of american (british, austrailian take your pick of the allies) lives by employing this technology.
Alot of the technophobes are going to have a problem with this, as well as those who tend to believe in the inherent goodness of man. but when the start bringing up the inherent goodness ploy I always point out, as a really good, well reasoned response Hienlens book Starship Troopers (The book, not that pitiful excuse for a movie).
I'm a programmer, I don't have to spell correctly; I just have to spell consistently
Thanks for discussing the article. When my editor told me that it was picked up by SlashDot, I was thrilled to know it would get intelligent feedback. Just a side note that was cut from the article. Fiction ran behind non-fiction in this case. Before "White Plague" was even a dark thought, the U.S. intelligence community was abuzz with rumors that the Soviets had created a "gender bomb," but one that killed men and boys, aka potential soldiers. Dr. Ken Alibek explains how that false rumor got started. In 1979 there was an accidental anthrax release from a secret Soviet weapons plant when a worker punched out in the middle of changing a ventillation filter. He took the spent one out, and failed to let the next shift know to put the new one in. When workers arriving on the scene started up the machinery, a plume of anthrax issued forth from the plant for some time. In the small town nearby, men began dying while women were largely unaffected. The Soviets of course denied that there was any bioweapon involved -- they said there was a natural outbreak of disease. But American spies sent back the hot tip that the accident may have revealed that the Soviets had created a strain of anthrax that kills only men. Well, the sexual division (redundant in Latin) was caused by sociology, not biology. The venting of spores occurred on a cool night when women and children were shut in their homes, leaving only graveyard shift factory workers, predominantly men, vulnerable. By morning most of the contamination had blown through. Just something I wanted to share even though it didn't make it into the Voice's limited space. Sincerely, Erik
Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms are single "bits" of DNA at which we each differ from each other (as opposed to the rest of it for which we are totally identical). For example:
Person1: ATGGCCGCTAGCTAGCTAG, vs
Person2: ATGGCCTCTAGCTAGCTAG.
See at the seventh one where there's a G or a T? It takes a great many of these to be certain you have targeted only one indiviual. Even so, you can't kill them biologcally with this information. As someone previosly suggested, retro-viral integration aimed at these sights could specifically target someone by a specific combination of SNPs. Too bad SNPs are not cluserted in a big pack of 50 all next to each other. Over the genome people differ in 1 out of 10^4 bases, while not equally spaced, they're not tightly packed either. Viral DNA (or RNA) is limited in length (has to fit into virus packaging) so it couldn't be long enough to target a single person based on SNPs. I don't think the integration machinery would take that large of an integration site either.
On the other hand, the "White Plague" which targets only women is much more possible (easy too for men-only) because women have none of the genes found on the Y chromosome (don't get too excited guys, the Y is quite gene-poor).
So single-person targeting: no way, race targeting: almost as impossible. Eliminating all of the men: "all too easy".
In The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes, he comments that the German Nuclear scientists still in Nazi Germany knew that the Americans and Brits were working on Atomic devices of some sort because all the papers that used to be in the scientific journals stopped showing up and previously published scientists stop publishing.
And you don't even begin to talk about viruses and prions.
Prions especially frighten me. There doesn't appear to be any bodily mechanism for combating them.
They also kind of appeal to my sense of irony. Here we humans are, thinking were about the most advanced damn organism to ever exist... and we could be easily wiped out by the most primitive quasi-lifeform that exists.
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
or worse, has a field that cannot be reused for some time.
Let's not bring Monsanto into this.
(That was a snide reference to the recent Canadian court decision.)
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Projecting the future has gotten a lot more difficult in the last few years. This is the continuation of a trend that may have started with writing.
The problem is, if you take one vector, say biological modification of DNA to create weapons, and project it forwards, you get one scenario. If you take another, say the projection of Moore's law forward to predict compute capacities, you get another scenario. And there are thousands (how many?) of the projections that need to be run and reconciled simultaneously. As the rate of change increases, the creation of new paths forwards also increases. And they are densely interconnected (e.g., the DNA manipulation would not have been possible without the increase in computation).
Nobody can make a reasonable, much less true, projection for several years. Nobody. We have to learn to live with it. This decrease in foreseability has been increasing. The rate of it's increase seems to be increasing. This is the essence of the Technological Singularity.
Try to imagine what a Schwartzhild Radius looks like as you approach it. Perhaps it's difficult to know which side of the barrier you are on. This is only an analogy, so it shouldn't be pushed too far, but don't trust any long term projection. And 5 years now qualifies as long term.
I expect all of the things projected to become possible, but by the time that they do, they may not matter. If direct neural connection to the computer becomes possible (one of the vectors that is being pushed forwards), we may all decide to move into our computers (partially or completely), and the death of the body may be only an inconvenience. What would be devastating is a computer crash with bad backups. Oops! Another kind of "bug" is evolving.
But if we move into a computer, will we still have the same drives and emotions? Or will they be but interesting subroutines, that can be debugged, de-prioritized, etc.?
We can't know.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
It's much worse than that.
The ideal weapon would spread more easily than a cold, but have no particular symptoms or effect except on it's choosen target. That makes it easy to deliver.
Unfortunately, that means that it's impossible to easily corral the critters afterwards. They'll just keep spreading. And they will mutate as they go.
Of course, they'll usually be harmless...
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Well, there are certain parts of the DNA that have been conserved since ... well, we share those parts with the bacteria. Perhaps an artifical disease could be designed that would attack those? Bingo. Clean planet.
... is academic the right word if there aren't any schools?
I can't think that anyone would want to do precisely that, but it's a possibility. (Probably. Perhaps there's only one way to do some things.)
However, there are certain features of DNA that all humans share. I don't think anyone even knows exactly how we differ from Chimps and Gorillas, so they might get caught along with us. But just as antibiotics can be designed to target particular organisims (I've heard reports of work aimed directly at staph aureaus [spelling?]), so there could be organisms aimed directly at H.Sap.
The problem is a question of will, effort, and time more than anything else. But it specialized weapons are targeted at a sub-population of people (say, a tailored e-coli), it is quite easy to believe that the artificial limitations placed on them might mutate. And e-coli can live in anyone. Now it might not be advantageous to e-coli for it to kill its host, but that might become
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
/.
I shall dismember your post. Observe:
I have always believed that the government needs the most advanced weapons it can get.
Which government? Just the Third Reich, or any old collection of yahoos that believes they can morally perform acts immoral for individuals to perform? Bush's government? Andy Jackson's?
It seems to me you have already given up your individuality, and spit upon the Declaration of Independence, in your first sentence.
Violence (ie. war) will never go away, so we should be as efficient at it as possible.
Pedophilia will never go away, but I don't wish to become efficient at it. Evil religions will probably never go away either, unfortunately.
(Just one second - doning flame retardent clothing).
It goes well with the troling rig.
If this can allow the government to wipe out an opposing army and no one else, great lets do it.
Yay! And since nobody's going to come invade us, we can go to their countries and play! US homeowners have enough munitions to repel any foreign invader, even if we don't count ESR, so we'll have to send our bugs abroad.
The problem comes into play when you cannot ensure that only your target will be affected, therefore, there is a very real possiblity of harming your own forces. This is not a good thing.
Hmm, nothing to criticize here but the grammar. Oh, wait, I guess I can point out that enemy civilians and third parties just got ignored.
As soon as the scientest have incontrovertable proof that they can target an arbitrary inidividual or group of individuals, I say do it.
Did anyone else hear a volunteer step forward?
I'd like to see incontrovertable proof that incontrovertable proof can exist. Kurt Godel might've liked to see it too. (Look it up.)
We will save alot of american (british, austrailian take your pick of the allies) lives by employing this technology.
I pick Canadians, they always get a bum rap. Of course we may have to write off those dirty immigrants (you know, those supposed "freedom seeking refugees" from non-allied countries) trying to sneak through the war zones.
A lot of the technophobes are going to have a problem with this, as well as those who tend to believe in the inherent goodness of man.
Not to mention people who think carefully.
but when the start bringing up the inherent goodness ploy I always point out, as a really good, well reasoned response Hienlens book Starship Troopers (The book, not that pitiful excuse for a movie).
OK, you got me on that one. The movie really was pitiful. The Dean was rolling over in his grave.
But I can argue that war is a good, effective, desirable means of population control when fought strictly with knives, spears, swords, and axes. The problem with warfare is the environmental damage of modern weapons... still, people will create immoral weapons, and people will use them. Do you still think I believe in the inherent goodness of man, that goodness you seem ready to assign to the government?
I'm not a Luddite by any means, but c'mon, don't kid yourself that all progress is inherently good.
--Charlie
A herbicide loaded with dioxin, you mean.
Nasty shit.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Wasn't this a Star Trek episode in 1989? Five years from now NASA will be warning us about the Borg.
Kevin Fox
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Kevin Fox
Back in 1976 Isaac Asmiov wrote a short story called 'The Winnowing' that basically talked about eliminating overpopulation by infecting food to starving nations with a virus that targetted only a certain percentage with a DNA match (so they couldn't tell that it was the food that was killing them).
Of course Asimov wrote about 10,000 stories, so one or two of them was bound to hit the mark...
This is closer to reality than you think. I wrote a fact-based novel about this in 1996, <i>SlateWiper</i> (http://www.slatewiper.com), in which a gene weapon could be quickly engineered to target specific ethnic groups and even micro-populations of people in small areas who have intermarried and thus share some of the repeat marker genes ... Slatewiper was recently bought by St. Martins Press and optioned for a movie by Carlsbad Pictures ... I am re-writing to update things given the past five years of genome and proteome research ... BTW, preventing a global disaster depends on the integrity of a dossier of high-ranking people compiled by the hero who has salted the data all over the web, encoded in .jpg files on porn sites and sex newsgroups... arrayed against him is a virus 'bot that spiders the web, looking for digital profiles of the dossier and deleting the files where it finds them.
So I post relevant information and I'm a conspiracy theorist? I wonder how that got tossed into the loop? FYI I recently watched a program on PBS about the effects of war on the environment about two weeks ago. I guess the guys who produced it must be conspirators as well.
If you take a quick look at the effects of war you would know that most countries break the Geneva convention with their weapons via way of the chemicals used to create the weapons, the aftereffects of explosions, and the overall aftereffects of simple things like residue created from smoke, intermixing with other toxins such as carbon monoxide, etc., to form other forms of deadly toxins that kill quite similar to this.
So excuse me for opening up someone's eyes with factual based information. Next time I'll dig really deep into bogus information like crop circle theories to post some unsubstantied bullshit information, this way next time you could _really_ call me a conspiracy theorist. Oh sure I see your point now, I hijacked the packets used by the New York Times to create that article, then using CIA MKUltra techniques, I implanted the thoughts of those who commented on the excerpts from what I posted, into their brains via methods only a conspirator would know.
You caught me red handed
Want Root?
What?! Seasonal winds and jetstreams have a HUGE impact on the spread of nuclear fallout. Did you know that people in Sweden were affected by the fallout from Chernobyl? So, yes, if "every nation within several hundred miles" is acceptable collateral damage, then we can heave megaton nukes around without issue.
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As someone else pointed out, "The White House official says she'd like to see scientists police themselves better regarding what they publish and with whom they share data."
The government's desire for this to be kept under wraps is twofold, and both reasons show the standard naivite that all government weapon technology discussions show. One, other countries shouldn't get the idea because it could be used against us. Two, we might find it to be a very effective weapon against other countries.
First, any sufficiently advanced army will definitely read the enemy's newspapers and put students in their schools to get a pulse on the enemy's weapon ideas. They don't need details, just the abstracts. We do it to them, they do it to us.
Second, developing a new class of weapon is a step in the arms race which is always reciprocal. When we develop Weapon A, we better design Defense A to go with it, because someone's going to deliver Weapon A to our enemy to use against us. Any undefendable weapon is a step towards Mutual Assured Destruction, just as we have faced with nukes and are tasting with cyber-warfare.
Our government isn't all naive, and they know these arguments well. It's not enough to stop the trend, though; new weapons are developed all the time, and defenses are shortchanged because it's not an effective use of those funds. In cases like nuclear detonation and super-infections, defenses are impossible or severely limited, yet the weapon still fits the political needs for detente or intimidation. The weapons are still developed, and their eventual use against their creators is nearly inevitable.
[
the fermi "reactor" was hardly a reactor.. he called it an "atomic pile". It was little more than a stack of radioisotype, with a few hand operated control rods. It was built under the bleachers at the squash courts at chicago uni, iirc.
You're right though. The bomb came later, in
44. June or July of 44, near Alamagordo NM.
It was suspended from a steel tower and detonated above ground.
I want to say it was June 22nd but I haven't read about it in quite a long time.
The two wartime nukes were August 6 and 9th, respectively, in 1945.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Heh.
:)
Did you forget about fallout ? Or how eating meat in europe was a bad idea for a few months post-Chernobyl ?
I make no argument with you about the ramifactions of genetic or even viral warfare - i've read "The Stand"
I just take issue with discounting the effects of radioactive fallout - especially to the extent that would be produced in an actual warfare.
There have been less than 10 (known) large-scale radioactive releases near populated areas in history.
Nuclear war is only less dangerous if you think of it as 1 bomb taking out a town as opposed to the reality of the situation: 1 Sub in our ballistic missle fleet has over 200 independant warheads. (aren't MIRV's a bitch ?). How many subs do we have ? How many silos do we have ? How many things do we have that the public doesn't even know about ?
Acutally, if the attack mechanism is something thats "alive" or acts alive, then it can be killed or thwarted (eventually, and with enough research). While 95% of earths population might rot and spontaneously explode, there'd probably be enough people randomly unaffected to survive and figure out a "cure" or an antigen.
On the other hand, short of a metric assload of lead sheilding, theres nothing you can do about a neutron bomb. You're just fucked if you happen to be nearby.
A fun excercize if we were allowed to know the numbers involved would be "how many nukes do we have per square mile of 1% or lower survivability fallout levels".
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
"But we're only as good as our intelligence. That's something we can never forget, and in this case our intelligence has always been lacking. If it were perfect, we'd never have outbreaks of disease or terrorism."
I'd argue that this has not so much to do with perfect intelligence, as it has with conformity OR compassion, tolerance and always striving for the common good when you have diversity. "Perfect intelligence" would here mean like an ant-colony, but we're not an ant colony! Our diversity is what makes it a challenge to be human in the first place. Take that away, and we're not humans any longer. The freedom to commit a crime or mistake, is more valuable than you think.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Just about any General Motors SVU, I'd guess...
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
Sorry, couldn't resist. This whole bio-digital-weapons nexus *is* in fact the actual subject of my nanoscopicly famous novel, so I am more or less on topic . . .
yr frn,
Ultimate Geek NanoNovel: Acts of the Apostles at www.wetmachine.com Fear the Future! Defrock the Infodruids!
Wouldn't it be nice if the easy answer was "quit pissing people off?" Too bad it doesn't work that way.
/. elsewhere, but currently to be successful in academics, you are almost required to publish constantly. Asking people not to publish their information would be the same as saying "don't do this research" and there are good reasons to do the research or it wouldn't get funded. Also, just becuase we're not doing the research doesn't mean Big Enemey Of The Day isn't doing research either (that's the logic we violated the BWTC under!)
Some citations:
Rogers, Paul, Simon Whitby, and Malcolm Dando. Biological Warfare Against Crops. Scientific American, June 1999, pgs 70-75.
Just found these two webpages, might help: The second one might be more what you're looking for.
http://www.brad.ac.uk/acad/sbtwc/
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~hsp/
Kleinter, Kurt. Operation Eradicate. New Scientist, Sept 11, 1999. pp 20-21.
Interesting article about braindrain from Russia:
Tucker, Jonathan B. Bioweapons from Russia: Stemming the Flow. Issues in Science and Technology, Spring 1999. pp34-38.
Interesting article about Iraq, commentary:
Seelos, Christian. Lessons from Iraq on Bioweapons. Nature, 398:187-188. March 18, 1999.
The AMA and the CDC have had a passing (?) interest in this topic. I ran into a person who claimed he'd worked on Biol. War projects in the CIA but I can't vouch for his credentials.
To answer the second question, I think jargon is what protects us now. How many people can really understand "Anthrax Lethal Factor Cleaves the N-Terminus of MAPKKs and Induces Tyrosine/Threonine Phosphorylation of MAPKs in Cultured Macrophages" without devoting too much time to it? That's just the *title* of a paper published in Biochemical and Biophysical Research Communications in 1998. Admittedly, you don't really need to know *how* anthrax works to use it. At the same time, you can use any introductory microbiology textbook to learn the basics of microbiological technique but my introductory textbooks certainly haven't gone out of their way to tell me how to use my powers for evil. It's possible there's something ala the anarchist's cookbook running around, but I don't know. In short, it would take a long dedication of time to figure out how to do this, the way things currently stand. On the other hand, high school students can have a lot of time.
Third question: disclaimer: I'm only a graduate student, but I identify as a scientist. I don't think we can ask scientists to anticipate all the future ramifications of their work. Wasn't Einstein pretty upset about his work being used as a weapon? Where do we draw the line? I'm sure Pasteur wasn't thinking "biological weapons!" when he isolated the causative agent of anthrax over a hundred years ago. Who can predict how some things can be used as a weapon? It's kind of like suing someone for making a hammer without a label reading "Warning! May cause bruises and trauma if beat on the head!". It would be nice if some international organization would take responsibility for this, but the 1972 BWTC that was supposed to halt biol. weapon research was signed and immediately violated by just about everyone, as near as I can tell - including the US. Also, please don't forget that currently, it's almost impossible to concoct diabolic biologic agents of evil de novo. You need a source. Think about smallpox - we quit vaccinating people for that before I was born. If someone got their hands on smallpox, they could wipe out everyone in their mid-20s or younger. IN THEORY there are only two vials of smallpox in the entire world, one in the CDC and one somewhere in russia. Good luck trying to get your hands on them.
Oh, and one more thought - this has been discussed on
Some techniques are already very cheap. If you merely want your own strain of anthrax, I think it could be done with some potatoes, a stove, a pot, some water, a flame, a needle, and a good microbiology textbook. Oh, and a source of anthrax. At the same time, I could isolate my own weak antibiotics using the same tools, but instead of a dead cow, I could use dirt for the source.
... which borders parts of Canada which grow nonTHC hemp... Poppies have been targetted, as well...the only major difference is that as near as I can tell (and I have done much research on this, for school), artificial genetic manipulation has not been done. So far people seem to be relying on the timehonored methods of crossbreeding to develop better strains.
I think depending on what type of genetics you're trying to do, cost would not be so prohibitive. There are ways around things. TAQ polymerase is pretty important for PCR (a quick way to amplify particular genes) but TAQ polymerase is mostly expensive becuase someone patented it. I don't have to buy an expensive gel electrophoresis machine if i know basic electronics.
As for crop targeting - When we first started poking around in Iraq's biological weapons program in the early 90's, we found they'd been doing research on wheat smut, a fungus to target wheat in Iran. The Germans in WWII reportedly had a beetle ready to deploy to hit British potato crops, but surrendered before the first spring they would have used it. Russia had an extensive crop targeting program before they collapsed. Some other poster already mentioned Columbia's pissiness at us and the same fungus mentioned in that post is the same fungus people want to (possibly have obtained permission to?) test in Montana on hemp
Finally, yes, things can backfire if you don't target well. I don't know a lot about Iraq, but I get the impression that the wheat smut was selected becuase Iran has lots of wheat and Iraq doesn't. This gets back to the lifestyle targetting mentioned before. Pick something your neighbor has but you don't. Pick a weapon that doens't tend to jump species. Modify the fsck out of 'em. Right now, we have bacteria that won't survive out of the lab becuase they need something, a nutrient perhaps, that isn't easily found in nature. It's the same kind of thinking.
Finally, I think the only reason biological warfare isn't *more* common is becuase most people don't realize how easy biology is.
Please forgive my longwindedness, I just gave a talk on this topic less than a week ago.
This article is the same "Boo! Look! A Genetically Modified being!" sort that the media is publishing now that the Cold War is over and we don't need to feel scared about The Bomb anymore.
And the first reactor was a true reactor, that is, it was a device to produce nuclear reactions. It had a crazy sort of safety device: a bunch of students held jars of neutron absorbing substances over the reactor. If the experiment went out of control producing much more radiation than expected, the students would be killed by the radiation, and the jars would drop over the reactor, quenching the reaction.
From the story:
More realistic, argues Dr. George M. Church, director of the Lipper Center, would be a pathogen that targeted people with shared lifestyle traits.
*cough*AIDS*cough*
question: is control controlled by its need to control?
answer: yes
This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."
There is one mechanism that comes to mind to target a specific individual DNA sequence. It doesn't rely on functional differences between individuals, just genetic differences. Make a retrovirus that can integrate itself into the human genome (not an uncommon thing for viruses to do), but make the integration site tagged to the individual you want to target. Then make the virulent part of the virus (the warhead) coupled to genomic integration, so that integration triggers virulence.
Another way to accomplish the same thing might be to have a toxin that is activated upon DNA binding, but only to specific sequences. You can then choose the binding sequence to the particular target you're aiming for.
All of this is hard, but probably not impossible. However, you have to wonder if it wouldn't be just easier to use a strike with one of those fancy GPS guided munitions the US has. It's not clear to me why to go to all this trouble to kill a single person when there are probably easier ways to do it.
On the other hand, developing designer pathogens against a specific crop seems both easy and likely. People have already proposed it for use in the war against drugs, as a previous poster pointed out.
Actually, Ebola isn't that infective if common preventative measures are taken. How do you think the health workers who finally make it to infected areas survive and eliminate the outbreak? The problem is simply that the areas Ebola exists in are the same ones lacking in appropriate medical experience and understanding or ability. Check what the CDC has to say about it.
Once again, this is one of those science fiction articles based on someone with a minimum of knowledge in the field and a vivid imagination. Pipe dream doesn't even begin to describe what is proposed in the article. Having a genome != knowing biological effects, relevance or disruptability. If DNA codons are the letters of life, the genome is simply a list of all the words used. Because I have a copy of webster's on my desk does not mean I have a copy of every book published. Ugh.
People do become immune to flu; it didn't help
Sure it did. The epidemic ended and we are still here.
-Ted
-=-=- Quantum physics - the dreams stuff are made of.
I think that's what it was called. It was about a virus that only killed... well, you should read the book. Hint: it wasn't white people, as you might expect from the title. Excellent writing, not set in the Dune universe. I highly recommend it.
Bryguy
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
The question is, will it still work if they change their name?
"Others argue the Earth's crisis is severe enough that they'll battle corporate America by any means necessary. "Ethics, schmethics," writes New York-based techno-artist and researcher Natalie Jeremijenko, who develops biotech hobbyist kits and supports Bunting's efforts with Irational.org. "There is not an 'ethics' that is separate from the motivation for doing something in the first place and the accountability or responsibility one feels for it. "
Biotech Hobbyist Kits?!! WTF?! How do you cram all the necessary tools, viral samples, cultures, microscopes, etc... into a KIT?
Boy, I sure hope those don't fall into the hands of the local Aryan Nation/Nation of Islam chapter. A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. In this case, I think it would be the *most* dangerous thing...
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
Hi! This is the Sig, blatantly attached to the end of this comment.
Thanks for the info. Do you (or anybody) have good links to websites, government or otherwise regarding this stuff. Any info on who is watching over the spread of biological technology would be helpful.
Ten or twenty years ago I would not be so worried. Now with the global internet, knowledge is bound to skyrocket. Anytime a new communication technology is introduced that multiplies interactions between peoples things start moving really fast. And with knowledge comes all the dangers associated with it. The problem is that, this time around, the lives of millions if not billions of people may be at stake. Haysoos Martinez! I need to get off this planet!
In a world where everybody hates everybody, maybe it's better to be ignorant. But then again, I keep holding on to the wisdom that knowledge is better than ignorance in the end. I hope I'm right.
Did not some weird guy with a beard predict this stuff about 2000 years ago? Did he not also say that the love of many would grow cold? I guess that if one country (or terrorist organization) is at war with one another, what's to stop them from targetting the other's population via genetically modified viruses. Heck why not target their food supply with a virus that destroys their crops? That would starve them to death! Problem is, this stuff can backfire and become a real nightmare for everybody, friend and foe alike.
What's really scary is that the technology behind all this biological stuff may become so easy to duplicate or so cheap to acquire that your average Beavis and Butthead may think it's cool to fool around with it. Brave new world, indeed!
Makes me wonder... Maybe M$ could take this and make an "Alternative OS bomb"... anyone that uses a Linux, Unix, etc... would melt... or better yet, get the undeniable drive to buy overpriced M$ software...
Ok, maybe not... but it could happen. Maybe.
"rm -rf /"... what does that do again?
I don't worry about prions; they require bad farming practices (like feeing animal-derived feed back to animals) to spread them. They are also ineffective for terrorism; they take years or decades to become evident, and biotech may find cures long before the majority of the infected develop symptoms. No terrorist is going to bother working with prions when bacteria and viruses have so much more promise.
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Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
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Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
What's kept us safe from diseases like Ebola is the sheer geographic isolation of the places where it is endemic, the rarity with which people encounter the animal vectors and the route of infection going through (easily-avoided) bodily fluids. If someone engineered a virus which had the gene for the Ebola toxin but was spread by sneezing and blew it around an international airport, the entire world would be gefukt.
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Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
It's never seemed that plausible to me, but there are definitely conspiracy theory pundits out there who claim that A.I.D.S. is a 'lifestyle weapon' purposefully released.
They were actually using [b]mousepox[/b], not smallpox. Experimenting with smallpox would be a tad more dangerous.
Rick's World
Recently I heard a NPR broadcast regarding some scientists that were able to create a roadmap based upon the known mutations that HIV has undergone. They used powerful computers and created a computer model of HIV they then had this model mutate forward. Later they compared their results with HIV from the period they mutated their model to.
Once they proved that they could determine what HIV would mutate into next they turned the computer model on a reverse course. They went back at least as far as the 50's. Then they took samples of virus fossils from hospitals in Africa.
They determined that these samples from some unknown disease in the 50's was indeed early HIV. It is possible that HIV existed for many years prior to that. They could only locate the samples as far back as the 50's.
I believe the show that I heard that on was the Todd Mundt show. It aired about 2 months ago.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Once we can debug DNA reliably, these science fiction fantasies will become real. Isn't that what molecular biology is doing? I see lots of reasons to be fearful of the future. Is it realistic? Currently, it appears that no one knows, but lots of people are working on the problem, which is scary.
is exactly what you state. Things don't work as expected. We'll be trying to cure baldness and we may inadvertently sterilize the whole human race. Most discoveries are made by accident. The good AND the bad ones...
I'm making a cowboyneal pathogen
A little premature reading about this today
That is ridiculous. It is essential to think of tomorrow's problems today.
"The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker."
- Albert Einstein.
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www.blackant.net
This ultimately is more dangerous than nuclear war, because in something like thind, with the relatively low costs, what are the odds that someone is ghoing to want to purify the earth of the scourge and polution of humanity? this would look very weird in the archeological record when the next big civilization comes along in 50 - 75 million years.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I had read Szilard's satirical sf novel The Voice of the Dolphins in 1961, and his sf short stories, and from him heard the story, famous in the genre, of how in the spring of 1944 Cleve Cartmill published a clear description of how an atomic bomb worked in Astounding SF, titled "Deadline." Szilard mentioned to me that Cartmill's bomb would not have worked, but the story did stress that the key problem was separating non-fissionable isotopes from the crucial Uranium 235.
This story became legend, proudly by fans touted after the war as proof of sf's predictive powers. It was a tale of an evil alliance called theAxis---oops, no, the Sixa---who are prevented from dropping the A-bomb, while their opponents, the Allies---no, oops, that's the Seilla---refrain from using the weapon, fearing its implications.
As Campbell never tired of telling, in March 1944 a captain in the Intelligence and Security Division and the Manhattan Project called for an investigation of Cartmill."
There is a lot more in the article, so go check it out. There are plenty of links if you do a common web search for the author's name, etc. The story in question has been in a number of anthologies, but I haven't found it online as far as downloading it goes.
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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Having 50 karma is an itchy feeling; I know I'll get
Scientists restrict study to entire physical universe; creationist
Some problems -
It will probably be possible to make a virus which would require the presence of certain specific DNA elements in order to replicate i.e. to infect a host.
What will be distinctly trickier is to make such a virus and prevent it from mutating, perhaps so as to no longer require such specific DNA elements before replicating. Unlike humans (and complex organisms) which have elaborate machineries for detecting and fixing errors in DNA replication, viruses have none.
The first moral - analogies from computer science only apply to DNA up to a point. After that point they break down badly. Organisms are not Turing machines.
The second moral - the genetically engineered anti-[insert your pet hate group here]-virus is quite likely to turn around and exterminate you.
Before building your bio-weapon read something like Paul Ewald's book on 'The Evolution of Infectious Disease' or this article. Better yet, don't.
-- Anthony Staines
Two or three years ago, Israel admitted to working on biological agents that would target Iraqi people because of some unique genetic trait.
I don't know how much progress they made, or even if they are still trying but the work was being done.
-You can cry, but you'll still die. There'll be no tears in the end.
From the story- "The White House official says she'd like to see scientists police themselves better regarding what they publish and with whom they share data." Of course. Keep it all wrapped up. Leave it to the government to think of secrecy as an answer.
Chris Kuivenhoven is a thief, beware
Genetically combine the best Thai cannabis with Kudzu and unleash it on the world! Bonus!!! It is possible, and while we are at this task, let us make this cannakudzu bear strawberries and grapes too!
What would that be? A LeSabre dropped from a plane? A Taurus launched by a large catapult?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Government has been doing things like this for years via most of their wars. Happened in Bosnia where a lot of their water is contaminated, and their food crops are expected to suffer unless the US intervenes to pay for the clean ups. Happened in Columbia too with their (*cough*bullshit*cough*) war on drugs.
Read on
There are many instances of these outbreaks of shit going on in everyday life except their quickly hushed, or many people just don't have a strong enough voice to be heard.
Want Root?
It's pretty intense that they can target you directly according to how your genes are. I wonder how accurate you could be, especially since all of our genes are pretty much the same.. I can see some disturbing results where attempts to assassinate someone specific person through a supposedly "individual" virus ends up killing everyone with a similar gene sequence.
2002 -"George W. Bush dies of unknown causes"
2017 -"SAT scores at record highs!"
(ok ok I'm just kidding about W.)
-PYves