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U.S. Continues Biological Warfare Research
merryprankster writes "Researchers at Saint Louis University
have engineered a strain of mouse-pox virus which kills 100% of
animals it infects - even when the mice have been treated with vaccination
and anti-virals. The deadliness of the virus is related to the addition of a
protein IL-4 which shuts down cell-mediated immune response. The engineered
virus is not contagious and does not affect humans but the research has drawn
some condemnation as being dangerous and
unnecessary."
Seriously, what is the point of engineering something like this?
If it was another country's research team we'd probably be invading by now...
evil adrian
And not only will we kell the enemy, but a virulent strain of smallpox could wipe us all out.
Bravo to these fellows, now how about working on a cure for cancer!
Yeah, don't worry, it doesn't infect humans.
Er, wait.
The work has not stopped there. The cowpox virus, which infects a range of animals including humans, has been genetically altered in a similar way.
Uh-oh.
Don't worry folks, viruses never mutate. There's no chance that a non-contageous virus could become airborne or bloodborne, and there's absolutely no way it could start affecting people. The fact that the US military has created a vaccine proof superbug with a 100% kill rate shouldn't bother anyone.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
But it seems like they haven't a cure for your "shit-in-place-of-the-brain" disease. Sorry.
RIP Slashdot. I used to love you. dead account - but slashdot wont let me delete it.
It's one thing to experiment and end up going somewhere with it accidently, and it's another thing to research such directions in order to make vaccines and better treatments if one fears that one's enemies will attack with such, but creating something like this just seems stupid. Even if this particular agent doesn't strike humans, what's to say that the next one won't be capable?
We've use two nuclear weapons in the course of history, and we've never needed to use them again. I don't want us to use something worse. This definitely strikes me as worse, and a lot harder to store safely than even all of the nuclear weapons that we have.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
did you even read the blurb at the top of the page? and I quote: "The engineered virus is not contagious and does not affect humans"
even so..... lets say we did not work on this stuff at all.... sooner or later Osama or some Osama wannabe will get around to making something like this. I would rather we research it before he or anyone else does, so we might be able to counteract the effects. You create anti-venom from venom you know... same with vaccines against things like this.
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The deadliness of the virus is related to the addition of a protein IL-4 which shuts down cell-mediated immune response.
Wow, just wow! I can't believe people don't realize how useful this is, and how off base the news poster really is. It was not developed to become a means to kill people. Being able to deactivate the entire immune system with a virus is such a huge leap forward. Now we can see how various biological processes work in the absence of the immune system. We have never been able to supress the immune system on this level. We can learn what functions definately need the immune system, gain new insight into autoimmune disease, and so on. Science always advances by altering or eliminating a variable and observing what happens to the others. I'm sure this sounds awfully familiar to all you CS people who spend hours debugging. Next time think before jumping to the OMG DEY R TEH Ev1L!!!11 conclusion.
Actually the US was the first nation to outlaw germ warfare. Even when the USSR would not agree to a ban the US stopped all production and destoried it's stockpiles.
The US does continue to do development for defense. The reason that they would do such research is to see what is possible and to try to develop was to stop it.
Good grief people the US has been a world leader in trying to outlaw germ warfare and was one of the first to ban it. Give at least a little credit.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
This isn't about creating deadly viruses for the sake of creating deadly viruses. Viruses can get deadly on their own. Terrorists or other governments might do the same work as well.
What this is really about is to figure out how stuff works. How viruses work. How these super viruses work. Because when you know how a thing works, you're that much closer to being able to prevent it. If this IL-4 makes a virus super deadly, then it's a damn good idea to know exactly how that protein works and come up with a way to prevent it from working in case of an outbreak (through whatever causes).
Only by knowing the mechanisms behind such killers can they be stopped. It's disingenious to think that if he hadn't created it it would have never existed. Mankind can't really play god, because all those parts we use to create such things already exist somewhere. By knowing how they work, we can hopefully prevent them from working when/if it ever becomes necessary to do so.
More power to these researchers, I say.
Is it just me, or is the US acting more and more like a rogue nation? Who draws the line, and when?
Despite the concerns, work on lethal new pox viruses seems likely to continue in the US. When members of the audience in Geneva questioned the need for such experiments, an American voice in the back boomed out: "Nine-eleven". There were murmurs of agreement.
What has 9/11 to do with this? Could this virus have prevented the attack? Or any biological/chemical weapon for that matter?
9/11 has been used as an excuse for too long now to have any real meaning.
Americans have given up alot of privacy for nothing (as most allready know). The rest of the world has been ordered by the USA to change identification documents or face economical consequences, hand over flight information (including information which has nothing to do with the possibility of being a terrorist), Iraq have been invaded with this as an excuse whil everyone and their mother know right now that there has been no evidence of Iraq being involved with 9/11 and people are still being bombarded with laws and organisations that are supposedly to stop another attack.
This is simply another case where the US can do whatever in the hell it pleases, and the rest of the world can do nothing about it.
We are now guilty of illegally invading a foreign country without any direct threat of war or attack or in assistance to another country, but simply based on political agenda, public ignorance, public fear mongering, and propoganda about WMD. Yet, the US is still able to produce WMD as freely as it wishes and can use them to threaten foreign powers. The same with nuclear weapons. The two reasons the US is at war right now to begin with.
The US is not a world democracy, but a world hypocrisy. We can do it, but NOBODY else can. And there is NOTHING you can do about it.
Do we need ANOTHER WMD? The answer is, we don't.
By some measures, the U.S. government is the most violent that has ever existed in the world.
The writer of this is an American who is very concerned about his government's participation in violence. In his opinion, a person doesn't really love his or her country unless he or she is willing to look at and understand areas where the country needs improvement. The same principle applies elsewhere. A man doesn't really love his wife if he turns his back when she is having serious, difficult-to-understand problems. And, a person doesn't really love himself or herself unless he or she tries to understand and resolve his or her own inner conflict.
Strictly speaking, it is the U.S. government that is responsible for the violence, not the people of the United States. Very, very few Americans understand the facts presented here. There are many Americans who support violence, and who angrily reject these facts, but even those probably would not want their money being spent on violence if they fully understood the financial and social impact on their lives.
The U.S. government has directly killed about 3,000,000 people since the beginning of the Vietnam war. Most of those, an estimated more than 2,000,000, were in Vietnam, a very poor country that did not threaten the United States.
Historians say that the number of people indirectly killed by the U.S. government is at least another 3,000,000, for a total of 6,000,000. For example, U.S. bombing of Cambodia left that country destabilized, and the forces of violence controlled Cambodia for years after the U.S. bombing.
The U.S. government has bombed 24 countries in the 58 years since the Second World War. The list below includes only countries bombed, not countries in which the U.S. government was responsible for other violence. The list includes only violence since the Second World War, not the extensive violence before the war. Most U.S. citizens are surprised and skeptical when they see the list, so a few links have been provided to supporting information. For more information, try the Google search engine or see the links below.
From the article:
Ramshaw's team made its initial discovery while developing contraceptive vaccines for sterilising mice and rabbits without killing them. The researchers modified the mousepox virus by adding a gene for a natural immunosuppressant called IL-4, expecting this would boost antibody production.
Instead, the modified mousepox virus was far more lethal, killing 60 per cent of vaccinated mice. The addition of IL-4 seems to switch off a key part of the immune system called the cell-mediated response.
Okay. For all of you going on and on about how useful this research for preventing bioterrorism, keep in mind that this is not at all the original intent of the researchers.
They were trying to make an contagious but non-lethal virus whose sole function was to serve as a contraceptive. Instead, they ended up creating a highly lethal, non contagious virus.
Granted, it is difficult to know exactly what the effect of mutating or altering viruses will be on the animals they're introduced into, but this is sort of my point.
If you try modifying a virus to make it non-lethal, and it turns out to be lethal for most of your test subjects, it is not a good idea to to say, "Wow! Let's see what happens when we try that in *another* virus!"
Since they don't know why the introduction of IL-4 made the viruses non-transferable, they probably don't know enough about this virus modification to assume that other strains won't be contagious when it's introduced.
Karma: Chevy Kavalierma.
You guys keep voting for the idiots that fund this stuff.
Vote third party.
I don't know--sounds like it might be really useful to know what tricks can be used to decrease the infectiousness of diseases. What biochemical pathway does IL-4 screw up that limits transmission? Can we make drugs that interfere in the same way? Why does IL-4 make the virus more potent? Can we interfere with that?
Sometimes it's necessary to work with apparently dangerous materials to perform useful research. In general, it's difficult to develop new drugs when you avoid working with infectious agents. Moreover, you can extract a great deal of information about the nature of infection itself by adding or removing single genes (for single proteins like IL-4) from a pathogen.
~Idarubicin
That was a very well written post and I agree with you that most Americans do not understand the facts. But then, neither do the French, the Russians, the Chinese, heck, the entire human race's ability for objectivism and rationality could be seriously questioned. Which is the point of my response.
While I as an American certainly do not want to let my government and my society (including myself) off the hook, laying the guilt of 3,000,000 or 6,000,000 deaths soley on the heads of America is an abuse of the facts. Violence is a global failure, not a localized one. Aggressors should be identified and appropriately dealt with (US included) -- but to excuse all other parties is to participate in a witch hunt.
I leave you with one question: Suppose the US had not killed all those people. Suppose the US had never gotten involved anywhere. Can you confidently conclude that the gross level of violence and death in the world would be any less?
There is more than one player in the world. And we ALL share in these iniquities. The violence of the US, Rwanda, Palestinians and Jews is violence of humanity and we each share in the failure.
Who said Freedom was Fair?
OLD NEWS: http://www.csis.org/tech/ssi/sonsw/s_shenk.pdf http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sci_tech/highlig hts/010117_mousepox.shtml
Do some research before you announce to the world that the US is continuing 'BIOWARFARE RESEARCH'.
This was originally done in Australia, and nobody accused THEM of biowarfare research.
My first reply was to those who scream about the US violating this or that law, etc. It is NOT illegal to do bioweapon research for the purpose of defense (protective vaccines, treatment drugs, protective clothing). Weaponization and largescale production would be a violation. That said, this particular research was happenstance. Sheer good/bad luck. Trying something totally unrelated to bioweapons research and simply in the realm of bioremediation to try to control populations of rodents. Piff! A rather logical argument for adding IL-4 to increase antibody production instead leads to making the minor virus about as deadly (for rodents) as Marburg virus is for humans (60% fatality rate). Wasn't intended for weapons, wasn't even predicted. Shit happens and it is interesting.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
First I agree that the U.S. has made serious mistakes during the cold war trying to establish friendly "hopefully democratic" allies across the globe. These mistakes were mostly due to the US fear of the Soviets and the Soviets fear of the West. Everyone else was caught up choosing sides and the world went to hell. We are both now catching the well deserved grief for those years.
However since the mid-1980's we have been trying to do damage control on the backlash. If this is not the means to estabishing a better world and rectifying past wrongs, What is?
IMHO
-First we have to abolish the use of trade sanctions against non-military goods. The UN report on Iraqi deaths due to sanctions proves that, as does sanctions effects on Cuba, Libya, and a host of other "vacation spots" around the globe. Frankly they suck and cause more harm to the US reputation then good against the dictator.
-Second remove dictators we put in place and help the countries rebuild. Tell the public "We fucked up in the past, now we have to go fix this mess in order to let others live better lives.
Personally I think we had better do this "Monroe docterine style" at first trying to help places we have screwed close to home like the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Nicaragua, Columbia, etc all under UN sanction and without violence (other then the drug pedelling cartels and para-military groups in Columbia). Help thier economies and help the US's at the same time.
Any idea's?
--"Sorry for the inconvience." Gods Last Words to his Creation
DNA, So Long and Thanks for all the Fish
You are right, the US is powerful, and pursuing their self interest with extreme prejudice. That's what powerful states do.
Some of us hope for more than that from Homo Sapiens, perhaps naiively. What the rest of the world also hopes for (I am not American and therefore much better informed on US foreign policy than most Americans) is for the population of the US to wake up and manage their goverment like a real democracy.
At the heart of 9/11 is a people feeling like their culture and way of life is being consumed by a more powerful culture. They are reacting the only way they feel they can - using violence.
No, I'm not condoning it. I don't condone violence like you have just done. If you can rationalise your governments behaviour as "we are powerful, you can't do anything about it, so tough", then I would imagine that is what the hijackers might have said to the flight attendants before cutting their throats. And with your argument we should just accept that.
You are welcome to such a world my friend. The rest of us strive for what we can become, not what we have become.