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New Virus Jumps From Monkeys To Lab Workers
sciencehabit writes "It started with a single monkey coming down with pneumonia at the California National Primate Research Center in Davis. Within weeks, 19 monkeys were dead and three humans were sick. Now, a new report confirms that the Davis outbreak was the first known case of an adenovirus jumping from monkeys to humans. The upside: the virus may one day be harnessed as a tool for gene therapy."
Why would it "wipe out the bulk of the human race"? We encounter new viruses every year and our immune systems adapt. The workers in question didn't die either. How do you make the leap from a simple virus in an ape jumping to a few isolated humans to it wiping out the human race? Been watching too many movies? How would this be different than say, avian or swine flu? Somehow because it comes from an ape suddenly we're all doomed? Grow up.
Worse than that.
If clever well funded scientists under careful observation do this there is a none zero chance of danger. However they will publish their findings and the state of the art will advance.
If you make it illegal to do this kind of research then someone somewhere will tinker with it.* They are much more likely to make mistakes and skip safety protocols.
Nothing significant will be learnt from their findings (because they can't publish) but we will face all the danger of their mistakes.
*They may be elite scientist working for military/uber-pharmaceutical company or they may be a less than fully talented fringe scientist in some less well funded/observed company/country - neither of those options are reassuring.
"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Nothing more than could go wrong with natural evolution over the the same course of time.
See, we have these things called DNA, that occurs naturally, and these things that happen to it called mutations, that occur naturally, and every time we wipe something out or solve a problem, we "force" the organism (indirectly) to move to a mutation that survives. In doing so, nature does the same things as we would do, except more efficiently, more quickly, more randomly and under far less control.
Wait 50 years. AIDS will be back, in a slightly different form. Bird flu will be back. Swine flu will be back (it is already, in various mutated forms that we can't treat). MRSA will be back (because MRSA is basically nothing more than an evolved bacteria).
30 years ago we hadn't even heard of MRSA or AIDS and today they are present most of the world. Guess what'll happen 30 years from now, especially if we eradicate either of those and leave lots more potential human hosts living for longer with freedom to copulate more than previously?
Nothing we do in genetics, or even huge tracts of biology, isn't happening too, now, around you, this second, under far, far less control. And guess what? If we don't tinker with it ourselves, we have no way to detect, understand, treat and cope with any of those natural changes that have a devastating effect on people (i.e. we'd be able to do fuck-all about AIDS, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, even just simple cancer). Cancer is a naturally-occurring mutation that makes a single cell out of billions in your body go ape-shit and not stop reproducing.
Despite all that, statistics show that people have NEVER lived as long as they do now (and cancer survival rates are phenomenal compared to even 10 years ago). All that's because of people tinkering.
Basically, your argument would make more sense reversed - why aren't we tinkering more? Tinkering helps, yet nature destroys and keeps coming back and back and back and attacking us with new things all the time that we take DECADES to understand.
The lab monkey as desease vector scenario bares far more resemblance to 28 Days Later than "The Last Man on Earth/Omega Man/I am Legend"
Who would weaponize it and how would weaponizing this virus generate "more desperate, enormous profits?" Governments aren't interested aside from maybe the North Koreans, but they don't have money. Corporations aren't interested since they are legally required to maximize return on investment, and weaponizing viruses is expensive, illegal, and the business plan to profit from it is the same as the Underpants Gnomes'. That leaves terrorist groups, and they're not going to sit around sending a lab with dozens of scientists and technicians millions of dollars a year for a fucking decade to weaponize a virus that isn't even known to be fatal to humans yet, never mind that there are viruses out there known to be both fatal to humans and have been weaponized in the past.
In summary, you're a fucking idiot.