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The Dangers of Being A Microbiologist
Anonymous Coward writes "Globe and Mail is running a story for all the paranoid conspiracy theorists among us: "Eleven microbiologists mysteriously dead over the span of just five months.... Throw in a few Russian defectors, a few nervy U.S. biotech companies, a deranged assassin or two, a bit of Elvis, a couple of Satanists, a subtle hint of espionage, a big whack of imagination, and the plot is complete, if a bit reminiscent of James Bond.""
They died from using stupid M$ products. All microbiologists worth their weight in salt should know to use clusters of Linux machines!
heh.. "pagan" comes from the greek "paganos" - meaning "countryman."
It refers (rather, used to) to the folk religions of the people, rather than the state-organized fun.
There were 103,632 other deaths in this timeframe - how do they fit into the conspiracy? I mean the grandma, the backalley bum, and the construction worker must have had something to do with it...
oh really, you do do you. well you should write to Mike Huppard at Cop V Cia and let him know. A brief stroll through all your other comments posted to slashdot does not indicate you know shit about microbiologists.
- It's genetic engineering, not DNA genetic engineering
- You don't typically use "DNA gene splicing" to generate agents... the most powerfull agents are already there...
- The method to generate a vaccine is often dramatically different than the method to generate a new anti-biotic agent
- Pigs, sheep, and rabits are used normally in immunoligical research because their immune systems are relatively similar to humans (not because their circulatory system and respiratory system are similar)
I'll stop there... while some of the points he raises are definetly worth going into, he should really consider becomming better informed of the technical details behind his assertions. It would also be userfull if he would site his sources in true academic style, rather than just asserting them to be so.http://www.donarmstrong.com
Divide the possibility of a moon hit by it's age.
:)
Then divide the possiblity of many promenent biologists dying mysteriously (and almost all unconventionally) by what...... 5 months?
Scoff, but if you refuse to even slghtly question the cable news channels view of reality, you are much more unintelligent than you give yourself credit for.
Unless you are omnipotent and can be everywhere at once, you must have trust in someone else's information (or view of reality). If you were a giant corporate news station, do yoou think you would have the money to fabricate something like this??
Yes. And, although I'm sure a few deaths will occur to cover up the coverage of the one before it, no one will notice, and this will all be laughed at again as another "conspiracy".
Wonderful, isn't it?
Cool! Amazing Toys.
Or, perhaps, it's just what Carl Sagan calls our "baloney detection kit". The essence of science -- and the reason it has lead to four hundred years of success, versus millenia of stagnation before -- is that it makes things rest on proof, not faith. What we can talk about, scientifically, may be a miniscule part of what's Out There. But what we say, can be said with confidence.
Maybe geeks and techheads are more doubting because (a) they are more trained in scientific ways; (b) they are in fields that require judicious doubt and problem-solving skills to look for the simplest explanation; and (c) they are disproportionately likely to have gotten their fantasy fix by actually reading (honest) fantasy and sci fi, so the mystical worlds spouted by paranormal believers -- worlds which IMHO are much less transcendant than the fiction I read, let alone the actual Universe as revealed through science -- simply do not offer anything worthwhile.
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
Damn. What a death. "He entered an airlocked storage lab and died from exposure to nitrogen." Those unreactive gases sure are dangerous.
Surely those who write articles on such topics could do a little research. The author most likely saw that he died in a nitrogen environment and concluded that he died from the nitrogen. Silly writers. Nitrogen isn't a deadly gas! It comprises a huge portion of our atmosphere. It's the lack of oxygen that killed him. Next they're going to run a story about the deadly effect of H20 in our tapwater.
...were probability (in high school and University) and atmospheric photochemistry. And people often find themselves in a poisonous fog in both cases.
In brief, you are confusing statistical results after the fact with results before the fact. Lets use the "betting fallacy" on which Los Vegas continues to enrich itself: If I flip a coin twice, both times getting heads, the probability of that after two coin tosses is 1/2 x 1/2 or 1/4. But the chances of getting another head as a result remains 1/2, even though that outcome occurs only 1/2 x 1/2 x 1/2 or 1/8 of the time that I make three flips, because the outcome of the first two flips has already occurred.
If the result only occurs 0.02% of the time, then it will almost always occur so long as I select 50,000 events (0.02% = 1/50,000). Here, the statistical cluster involved microbiologists. If it had involved firefighters, would we have thought arsonists were getting rid of the opposition?
Statistically unlikely events occur all the time. Being able to pick and choose among them after the fact doesn't in themselves give them any significance.
Let's act like true Slashdotters: "Gee, I had no idea that Micro$oft was getting into biotech!"