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Paper On Super Flu Strain May Be Banned From Publication
Pierre Bezukhov writes with this excerpt from an article at Doctor Tipster: "A Dutch researcher has created a virus with the potential to kill half of the planet's population. Now, researchers and experts in bioterrorism debate whether it is a good idea to publish the virus creation 'recipe'. However, several voices argue that such research should have not happened in the first place. The virus is a strain of avian influenza H5N1 genetically modified to be extremely contagious ... created by researcher Ron Fouchier of the Erasmus Medical Center Rotterdam, Netherlands. The work was first presented at a conference dedicated to influenza that took place in September in Malta."
Someone has probably already crafted a similar version in a distant private or military research lab anyway. Its better that it got out and fixes are prepared.
Read radical news here
...that is what will happen to the 99%
Dr. Fouchier could not be reached at his volcano-based research facility for comment.
The zombie apocalypse awaits.
That spells life imitating art!
If it was done, the information's out there. If the work's already been presented at a conference, it's pretty much a guarantee the black-hats have it. And if they don't already, they know it can be done and they've got enough clues to know where to go looking. So the question isn't whether we give the black-hats the information or not, it's whether only the black-hats get the information or whether the white-hats get it too. I'd rather have the information circulated so doctors and public health systems know what to look for and how to treat it when it shows up.
"Whatever doesn't kill us, makes us stronger..."
Whatever kills us, makes us dead.
Unless it cripples us. People always forget about the cripples.
I can just imagine the practal jokes in that lab.
My god! the seal on the container has come undone - the virus has excaped!!
Ha - got you! that's just the box my lunch came in
Now I don't wanna go to work tomorrow (I work there). :)
A few years back some researchers (Australian?) accidentally made an infector much much more dangerous. That's why the scientist need to share this data. It's so they can understand this process and use that knowledge to defeat diseases. It's like getting over a canyon a persistent but ignorant person can eventually succeed by throwing rocks at it till it fills up, but an engineer can design and build a bridge in a fraction of the time and resources.
With regards to the fears of terrorists, it's not a high probability, most of them wouldn't have the vaguest idea what to do with that information, the few that are left know enough to not be stupid enough to release a superplague on the planet. Your biggest worry should be the Military making a superplague, and being stupid enough to let someone dumb enough to use it actually get access to some of it.
If you stop research because you are afraid that terrorists might use it, you would have to stop all research of any kind.
Looks like I'm moving to Madagascar.
Lynn Enquist, quoted in the article, reminds me of GLaDOS:
I find it really, really hard to think about telling people not to do science.
Who says the world hates scientists? That's news to me.
We hope your rules and wisdom choke you / Now we are one in everlasting peace
Exactly. The important info was that the strain can be made to be transmissible by air in mammals.
That was an open question, and some felt that it was unlikely. Now, it's known that it can be done.
If you know that it can be done, there are only a limited number of ways it could have been done. Now, you just have to figure out which. They even outline the basic idea in several places.
It looks like it was a pretty standard method of passing the virus repeatedly through ferrets to select for those variants best adapted.
There may be a few nuances, but now that it's been done just about any lab that works on that strain with ferrets for test animals can probably repeat the work even without further info.
"A genetic study showed that new virus strain presented five mutations, and all could be also observed in nature - but only separately, not all five combined."
With this sentence, they have practically gave it away already. All one has to do now is to scan the scientific literature for the appropriate five mutations that confer increased airborne transmissibility, perform site directed mutagenesis and voila.
They should follow the footsteps of Australian researches (who inserted IL4 gene into the mousepox creating a very lethal strain) and publish this anyway.
Stephen King is probably rolling in his grave.
Shut up brain or I'll stab you with a Q-Tip. - Homer Simpson
Turn in that computer you're posting to slashdot with, lad. That's scientist product too.
At this very moment, there are thousands transmitting "I hate science" and "Math is hard" on their pocket communication devices. If clay tablets were good enough for the Egyptians, an advanced civilization of their day, what more do we need?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
mod parent up. I can guarantee that the virus could not have been created without a computer.
new sig
Its better that it got out and fixes are prepared.
Sure - AS LONG AS the "fixes" (e.g. antidote or vaccine) are engineered, produced and ready for distribution BEFORE such info gets out.
Moreover, if you're going to take the prerogative of developing a bioweapon with the capability of causing mass casualties, it's also your responsibility to secure funding for inoculating or treating everyone affected. Just recently there was an outcry here about the government spending $433M on smallpox treatment in the event of an outbreak. If this is as dangerous as they claim, the treatment cost would be orders of magnitude higher than that. The UN will inevitably come to Washington cap in hand, but we're broke. Who's going to pay for it?
And in the same ten years, scientists will have already made this stuff harmless. Precisely because this kind of research and knowledge is not banned.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Someone has probably already crafted a similar version in a distant private or military research lab anyway. Its better that it got out and fixes are prepared.
Actually various independently crafted versions may be different enough that a "cure" for one is ineffective against another.
Don't see why they *need* to publish this work, but if it is done can they atleast wait until they have administered 200 million or so vaccinations?
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
"Whatever doesn't kill you, only delays the inevitable..."
Actually, that would be the NIH ( http://www.nih.gov/ ), who requested that this research be done, funded it, etc.;
http://news.sciencemag.org/scienceinsider/2011/11/scientists-brace-for-media-storm.html
And really, I'd rather they do research it and find some manner of defense against it than that some actual 'asshats' figure it out and use it as a weapon first, or nature finds its own way to such a 'killer virus', without a defense in place.
The only particularly troubling time is when these findings are made public, because among the "ZOMG WE'RE DOOMED" people like you there's always the chance that there's one complete nutcase who goes to such a research facility to try and disrupt the work - and inadvertently releases things into the wild with far worse consequences.
That's not to say it shouldn't be made public - just that the designation of risk is often misplaced.
Besides, the world doesn't hate scientists - if they did, the world should be largely Amish (actually, they don't even hate scientists, but their lifestyle would come close to one in which a society does hate scientists).
Until we're fitted with bio-mechanical replacements that give us near super-powers...
Ok, only partly kidding: I lost my hearing - spinal meningitis - but I do alright, now, with a cochlear implant. Could be worse...
So not only did a civilian institution create a MWD, it has *civilian* security guarding it...? Does this worry anyone else?
Obviously the responsible thing to do is to give the vendor time to fix the vulnerability. I propose the researcher submit his findings to God and wait 5-7 days for a response before full disclosure.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
I know half of you are screaming at your monitors that "security through obscurity is no security at all", but security in biological information is not like that of computer code and hardware.
It all comes down the the breadth and transparency of the ecosystem, in my layman's opinion. It's entirely plausible with, for example, Adobe software running on Windows operating systems to say that if White Hat A found it then certainly Grey Hat B and Mustache Twirling Russian Mafioso Black Hat C will find it or have already found and exploited it. Those are specific, limited, and completely knowable ecosystems invented entirely by humans, however. Of course someone else will find it; the universe in which "it" lives isn't terribly large, when you really look at the situation.
Biology, on the other hand, is much bigger and much more mysterious; we're far stupider in biology than in any other science. We certainly didn't invent, do not control, and do not understand the ecosystems involved. You know far less from the sentence "I found five mutations that transform a particular H5N1 into a global killer." than you do from the sentence "I found a stack overflow hack in Acrobat which lets me read any pdf the target machine opens."
In short, security through obscurity actually gets you a very long way in biological research. Not to mention that creating a virus is a lot faster than creating the vaccine; perhaps a substance of which a single vial released in downtown Detroit could kill half the humans on Earth long before the antidote was invented and adequately synthesized isn't the place to object on principle some deliberate obscurity.
Seriously, look at the way flu vaccines are prepared. Maybe people should argue for the development of a faster way of inventing and growing vaccine (that is to say, faster than trial-and-error monkey testing followed by incubation in chicken eggs) before they request that blueprints for a killer flu become public information.
This news has been bouncing around the biology world for a few days now. To add some perspective, the "super flu" was created via the technique known as Serial Passage, developed by Louis Pasteur. Yup, that Louis Pasteur. All you really need is a sufficiently large colony of ferrets, a source stock of H5N1, and some time -- there is not going to be any secret Atomic-Bomb recipe in the paper, the virus does the hard work itself, via evolution.
Oh, and by the way... At one of the labs I used to work at, my fellow researchers once were chatting about what the various stereotypes for their colleagues were. I learned that the virologist stereotype among the other researchers was "a little bit crazy". Nightnight.
Triggering apoptosis in infected cells ftw
It was a bit more than the roads. Many of those "barbarians" that conquered Rome were themselves former Roman soldiers.
Alaric was just one of many of them.
The concept of publicizing security flaws makes some semblance of sense in the security world, but when it comes to viruses that could wipe out 50% of the world's population...because patches can be easily made and distributed rapidly over the internet.
When it comes to vaccines, that is NOT the case. It could take years, decades, or possibly never to create a vaccine..or the only vaccines might be too expensive or difficult to distribute on the scale that is necessary.
With a population of over 7 billion, not ALL rational people, not ALL happy people, I'm sure there are some individuals out there sick enough to want to destroy the human race. By reducing that barrier to entry to...perhaps...little more than the $20 it costs to purchase an online journal...it becomes an immediate death sentence for billions of people.
So shut the f* up about your ultra forward thinking concept of sharing info on how to kill us all, you sadist.
We're not getting off this planet. We'll kill each other first.
Now you have to ask yourself - is this a feature? Or a bug?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
"Whatever doesn't kill us, makes us stronger..."
Nonsense. There are things that won't kill you but will leave you weak like an infant, so that you suffer miserably until something else comes along and kills you.
Friedrich Nietzsche was a moron.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
It is a question of how you define "strong". A more accurate saying would be, "What kills people but spares those with certain characteristics, increases the ratio of people with those characteristics in the general population." H5N1 kills the young and healthy, and spares the weak and elderly, just like the Spanish Flu:
"Another unusual feature of this pandemic was that it mostly killed young adults, with 99% of pandemic influenza deaths occurring in people under 65, and more than half in young adults 20 to 40 years old. wiki).
Increased mortality in young and healthy people is attributed to a stronger cytokine response from the immune system wiki:
"It is believed that cytokine storms were responsible for many of the deaths during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed a disproportionate number of young adults.[1] In this case, a healthy immune system may have been a liability rather than an asset. Preliminary research results from Hong Kong also indicated this as the probable reason for many deaths during the SARS epidemic in 2003.[8] Human deaths from the bird flu H5N1 usually involve cytokine storms as well."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The flu in question is highly responsive to modern flu anti-virals as well as "MODERN MEDICAL TREATMENTS". What made this flu so devastating in the first place was its ability to cause a life threatening immune responses in young healthy adults, ultimately damaging the lungs so badly that victims drowned in their own body fluids. That's why this particular flu devastated healthy 20-somethings when it first spread as a global pandemic.
An outbreak today could easily be mitigated and seeing as the people most at risk would have viable medical treatments to prevent both spread and lethal complications this flu would be unable to produce the catastrophic effects it created in its first run through the human population.
The real threat would be an outbreak in a place like Africa, where a large infected population could become a huge bio-reactor evolving the virus into a real monster that was both lethal and untreatable. So our best bet for world pandemics in general are to place special focus on developing nations and make certain they have the resources needed to stop outbreaks of both old and new diseases.
Really, just like HIV has been made harmless. Just took two or three labs a few weeks to have an effective vaccine.
Wait, it didn't happen that way. Because HIV hacks into your immune system.
And other viruses if sufficiently malevolent can do the same, explaining how to do this in detail is exceptionally dangerous.
Your biology is not like a computer. You and the laws of biochemistry are not infinitely reprogrammable.
HIV still kills, but slowly and is not transmissible easily. Suppose you get a combination viruswhich suppresses your immune response, is transmitted by air, and is lethal? You will be dead.
No such a thing has not occurred in evolutionary history because, without non-random malevolent selection, they do not thrive by doing that.
Unless it cripples us. People always forget about the cripples.
That's because we more or less wiped out Polio with a program of mass vaccinations.
Back then, if the anti-vaxxers were around in full force like they are now,
we'd probably still have significant numbers of crippled adults and children to this day.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
I suspect that isn't the only overwrought element here. In my, admittedly limited, search I have yet to find reputable sources confirming any but the barest of details in this story; let alone "Kill Half Humanity" (Wikipedia's already infected, care of rt.com.)
The Canadian Press, which brings us the Winnipeg Free Press article, fails to provide anything real to back up its statements. I can't really follow it any more than looking up the organizations provided and looking for related news postings (of which I found none.) Subsequent searching leads me to a Gizmodo article (links provided for those who wish to follow my searches.) Of it, there are two meaningful citations (that is, not links to the about pages of the source in question.) Science Insider and a pdf announcement detailing the schedule of the September influenza conference in Malta, in which this announcement is quoted as having been made.
The first thing I noticed within the pdf (aside from the garish design) is the absence of any announcement on GM influenza, (or Ron Fouchier, or his organization.) Admittedly, this hardly means this didn't occur; merely that this (what is essentially a flier) is not a meaningful source of information.
As for the Science Insider, it provides few additional details, mostly regarding vaguely related discussions on the classification/pre-approval of these sorts of studies. The closest thing it provides to something interesting is a (Dutch language) greenlight for what is supposed to be Ron's project.
Indeed, the Dutch link does concern GM influenza, and is an answer to a question on procedure for studying this sort of thing (of which they already apparently had a license to do.) It does not corroborate any of the stand out details of this article (how could it, considering it's from 2007.) Of minor note, there is no mention of ferrets; only standard embryonated [sic. Google Translation] chicken eggs.
Color me skeptical, to say the least.
Demented But Determined.
It seems strange to argue about publish/no-publish as if those are the only 2 options.
What about distributing information confidentially to labs that can work on fighting the disease?
Sure, some would argue that that really amounts to "publish", given that nothing can be kept truly confidential.
But in such cases (as with many), it's really about the timing. You want to maximize the time the "white hats" have the info and minimize the time that "black hats" can get to it easily. You want to provide the info to as many reliable "white hats" as you'll want to risk, since the larger the pool, the larger the chance of leaks.
It really seems like an interesting optimization problem with multiple solutions, far beyond the original dilemma of publish/no-publish.
Anyone else think this is probably being overhyped on a slow news day?
Isn't the big problem with "killer viruses" that they actually kill their hosts? If you are dead its a lot harder to transmit a disease to someone else. Thus the spread of such a plague becomes self-limiting.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
An interesting short story about the potential of genetic viral design in the hands of a fundamentalist:
http://eidolon.net/?story=The%20Moral%20Virologist
.: Max Romantschuk
Pardon my ignorance here, but why are they intentionally genetically modifying viruses to be so lethal? It is my (possibly misguided) understanding they're introducing things that wouldn't necessarily happen on their own as they're directing the virus to mutate in various ways. So the "research should be known so we can combat it if it happens naturally" seems a bit wonky as having the virus mutate naturally in this specific way seems unlikely.
I'm not completely opposed to releasing the research, but I must ask why they were intentionally doing this at all?
There are a couple of points related to this.
1 You're not particularly good at assessing risk. Do the maths on people killed by disease and people killed by terrorists
2 There is a history of the flu virus turning lethal. Spanish flu and earlier history of extremely deadly pandemics.
3 This study demonstrates breeding a better pathogen using natural means using traits that already exist.
4 Vaccines for flu type virus are very effective.
5 Exposure to a similar flu virus or vaccine confers some immunity.
6 Agents that boost the immune response to vaccines confer an even broader immunity
The point is that government should be preparing broad spectum bird flu vaccines and allowing people to put their hands up to get them as the risk of this type of virus arising naturally is high. This study demonstrates this are fact.
CSIRO, an Australian research organisation released research relating to mouse pox virus modifications that created a deadly virus precisely because it was hoped that it would lead to better treatments. They also surmised that governments around the world already knew about this but had kept it secret.
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001755.html
The nature of this research may be fairly well indicated by the other papers he is connected to, and there is nothing particularly cutting edge about them. This isn't a criticism- it is a statement that the nature of this research is a) readily accessible by those who wish to pursue it, and b) publishing the recent research might merely be a less important follow-on to the past published work.
To the commentator who brought up the Fermi paradox, this is exactly correct. If someone is sufficiently motivated, a disaster could have been wrought long ago; there is really nothing but undergraduate molecular and microbiology skills, moderate investments in equipment, and sheer sociopathy standing between them and 'success'. That this hasn't happened, despite its relative ease for the motivated group, leaves only a few rational conclusions possible: that this is harder than it looks (possible, but not probable), that the DHS is fantastically effective at detecting and stopping efforts in secrecy (laughable), or these "terrorists" we spend so much money and cultural capital on stopping simply don't exist (most likely).
What you are leaving out of your highly biased one sided statement is that chicken pox never leaves the body, is responsible for god knows how many problems later in life and is the principle cause of shingles in those who have immune system complications later. Leaving out the scarring and other damage the virus does to children. The Herpes virus that composes chicken pox is one of the most highly evolved human viruses. It's very effective at infecting and staying with the host for the remainder of their lives and it's unknown what the long term implications are for infection. In addition this leaves out the child that doesn't get it as a child and ends up getting the far more severe adult version.