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JASON Proposes a 'Library of Congress' For Pathogens
An anonymous reader sends this excerpt from a blog at the Federation of American Scientists' website:
"In order to help determine the origins of microbial threats in terrorist incidents or epidemics, it would be useful to have a deep archive of various strains of lethal bacteria, the JASON defense advisory panel told the National Counterproliferation Center in a newly released 2009 report (PDF). ... 'This library would consist of strains collected worldwide by methods that preserve sample properties, and capture all relevant data (e.g. geolocation, local environmental conditions). It should include laboratory isolates, natural isolates, and DNA sequence data.'"
That library should have an awesome security around it. It's one thing to keep data secure, that's difficult enough, keeping a collection of biological weapons secure is an entirely different thing.
Biological weapons have the problem that they are self-reproducing, the release of *one* sample is enough to cause mass destruction.
That's all the world needs, the great expansionistic empire-building nation of the modern world to have a complete palette of nasties.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Bruce Willis visits it in Die Hard 5? From the article I'm assuming there's no actual sample stored though?
Epidemics, sure, but maybe I missed the wave of bioterrorism that prompted this orgy of spending. If they can find a way to tie in pedophilia and intellectual property rights, they'll be swimming in cash.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I thought we had that already and it's called the CDC.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...but what do FREDDY KRUEGER and MICHAEL MYERS think about this matter?
Circumcision is child abuse.
I think a library of congress implies pathogens.
There is obviously no way this could ever possibly end badly. Let's get this ball rolling!
(This post brought to you by Lysol)
Let's just hope a terrorist never infiltrates this library using our own system to get in. Talk about a hayday!
So we can go and bomb the hell out off some innocent country where the baddies found the stuff.
How about using that data to create vaccine in advance?
I know I'm not the only geek that read "JSON" when first skimming this title.
Nobody knows why they felt the need to capitalize their group name JASON, since according to the WP article, it is a reference to the mythological Greek character Jason.
How about a Facebook For Pathogens? Way better way to get the kids involved in science.
Did you see that Streptococcus poked E. Coli?
After all, it's a library of congress
The original mythological Jason was undone when he left the alliance that had supported him for another alliance, hoping for a better deal, out of a presumable fear of scarcity in not having enough political power. It is the engineers, scientists, artists, farmers, machinists, and so on who have brought great wealth to our society, while others then have tried to forge that wealth into power, often through creating artificial scarcity through war and commercial competition and passing laws against cooperation (endless copyrights, broad patents, centralizing corporate control, barriers to entry, etc.). The scientists and engineers making up JASON needs to help our society transition to a post-scarcity economic model in order to ensure true security (with mutual security and intrinsic security). But they can only do that by realizing that we need to build a society based on the idea of abundance based on their original alliance to learning and knowledge sharing and not get so caught up in an outdated "war is a racket" kind of economic-driven militarism inappropriate for our exponentially increasing technical powers. In such a society based on the paradigm of abundance, widespread knowledge about pathogens will not be as much of a problem as it might be in today's society that emphasizes competition, unilateral security, and extrinsic soldier-defended security, where such biotech information might be used to build ethically-targeted plagues as opposed to just enabling people change their skin color at will. :-) Social movements towards a basic income, a gift economy, local subsistence, and democratic resource-based planning are all ways to encourage an abundance paradigm. JASON needs to see those sorts of social innovations as part of their mandate to accompany technicla progress.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Let's not forget that the 2001 anthrax attacks were actually caused by a strain the came from US labs, it has been widely speculated that this was done by the CIA. They couldn't pin it on anyone except a researcher who was actually working a cure Dr. Steven Jay Hatfill. There was no proof that he was behind the attacks, only that he had been working on the strand. As we all know American investigations often make someone guilty until proven innocent, this caused his friends and family to alienate him which eventually lead him to commit suicide. Having a lab like this will just make it easy for the CIA to start any plague of its choosing when they need support to start a war with any entity.
I've seen you post this stuff about a post scarcity society on every damn story on Slashdot from ones dealing with space exploration to ones dealing with corporate drama in the computer world. I get that you read a book, or went to a lecture or something that pimped the benefits of, "transitioning our society to one of abundance." I get that, whatever your source for these ideas was, it inspired you to tell anyone who would listen about it. I understand that you are trying to fight a cause for the betterment of our world and such.
But honestly, do you have to post the same 3 - 4 ideas and sentences to every damn story posted to slashdot? We've heard it already. We know there is an alternate society structure out there being thought about. We don't need every single freakin' science story hijacked to become some sociology discussion. This story is about the benefits vs. the risks of documenting, cataloging, and preserving all known microbial agents in the world. Can you please post on-topic for once and add something interesting to the discussion? Or, alternatively, if you don't have anything interesting or insightful to say about the matter at hand, can you please just not click the, "Post Comment," button?
So we are living in a post-scarcity society. Thanks for that. But stop evangelizing your position on how to fix everything at every opportunity. Believe it or not, there is not a single social pill that will fix all the problems that humans face nowadays. Stop pretending your idea is one. This is getting to the point where you sound like one of the wide-eyed religious freaks who answer, "God and Jesus," every time any topic is mentioned around them. Any topic. It's annoying. Please take it down a notch.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
Certainly! What could possibly go wrong?
That is all.
If you can sequence the pathogen, maybe you can avoid storing a living or livable (spore, etc.) copy of it and minimize the risk of escape.
Isn't there a movie plot that started like this? I can't remember what it is, but I do remember that it didn't end well.
Let's let the CDC do its thing, we don't need more repositories of invisible Armageddon bringers, then again, 2012 is around the corner and we're all supposed to die anyways... oooh... perhaps because of this?
~Syberz
isn't this the premise of a michael crichton book? or did they stop watching movies in japan after godzilla?
There has been a lot of pathogen-specific research in the last decade, most of that data is public and is available in GenBank, which also happens to be where all the other genetic data resides. There's a European one and a Japanese one too, as well as various topic-specific and private ones, but the GenBank is the biggest. It's a whole lot to sift through, a previous employer has a great graphic for making sense of it all.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -