Slashdot Mirror
US Asks Scientists To Censor Reports To Prevent Terrorism
Following up on a disturbing story we discussed in November, Meshach writes "The United States is asking scientific journals publishing details about biomedical research to censor articles out of fear that terrorists could acquire the information. 'In the experiments, conducted in the United States and the Netherlands, scientists created a highly transmissible form of a deadly flu virus that does not normally spread from person to person. It was an ominous step, because easy transmission can lead the virus to spread all over the world. The work was done in ferrets, which are considered a good model for predicting what flu viruses will do in people.' The panel cannot force the journals to censor their articles, but the editor of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the journal was taking the recommendations seriously and would most likely withhold some information. Are we heading for another Rorschach-style cheat sheet being developed?"
Fuck you, Science, I'll send my papers to Nature now!
... at several conferences. Anyone who wants the information can get it. This is RIDICULOUS (coming from a biochemist.)
Suppose our enemies used the research to develop a vaccine? Then the research will have been wasted.
From TFA: The panel said conclusions should be published, but not “experimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.”
Have the "experimental details and mutation data" already been presented at these conferences, or only the conclusions?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Keep it quiet! If we say it don't exist, maybe reality can be fooled.
(\__/) This is Lapinator
(='.'=) copy it in your sig
(")_(") so it can take over the world
The US is ridiculous...
Corrected that for you.
First they came for the Whistleblowers but I didn't speak out because I wasn't a Whistleblower.
Then they came for the Scientists...
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
As far as I understand it, the soon-to-be-redacted information has already been publicly (wow, my spelling sucks) presented. I haven't seen it live, but everything could easily be cobbled together by someone with standard virology knowledge and the publicly presented information (mutational data with associated details.) Maybe someone who attended the actual conferences could speak up.
âoeexperimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.â
But the whole point of science is to see if results can be replicated or not. This is anti-science and pro-stupid and if taken to its logical conclusion means a drastic slowdown in research since people have to reinvent wheels for no reason except for bad movie plots.
Fuck this government-by-fear bullshit. Publish.
--
BMO
Was this something that they were able to do in a day after getting the idea?
A week?
A year?
I got my original idea of inverting a LALR parser in late 1986 in a 400-series compiler course. I remember discussing it with my lab partner, who's now a professor with Queen's University, specializing in (what else) compiler theory.
That was the inception, the spark, the egg-gets-knocked-up moment.
Gestation lasted 25 years for it to grow into something worthy of being turned into a product or service.
Ideas cannot be stopped or prevented; the risk of an idea being used by a terrorist depends on how much effort and luck is required to go from idea to implementation.
Just because the drug cartels are building custom narco-subs and fielding entire cell phone networks doesn't mean even they have the funding and tenacity to do bioweapons research on this scale or level of complexity, so I don't feel at ALL threatened by terrorists because of this research or it's publication.
Just another case of patriotic fervour and artificial fear being used to paint the world as a scarier and more dangerous place than I believe it is.
Perhaps most importantly, I believe their is risk to everything you choose to do, including the risk of your work being abused. No amount of legislation, threat, or outrage will prevent it, so I believe the benefits of open R&D far outweigh the risks of "terrorists might figure it out."
The United States of Dumberica: Home of Chicken Little Security Politics since 9/11
You fools -- you let the terrorists win. You let them change you at the heart and soul of what the country used to be about.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
Grow a pair.
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Although I suppose if you outlaw ferrets, then only outlaws will have ferrets.
Does this mean we shouldn't take Science seriously any more?
After all, there's no way a terrorist organization could have their own scientists doing research for them into these things.
There is arguably some science that we don't want in the public domain. Weapons tech comes to mind, of which this is an excellent example - particularly if the methods involved (and I am completely ignorant on this subject but generally speaking) don't require much to duplicate (ie easier to replicate than a nuclear bomb).
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
then why fund it with public money (NIH funded this) which usually dictates that the information is placed into public domain.
Now that the whole world knows what it is about and since some of the results (if not all) have already been presented at public events, it seems likely that the information will anyway percolate to the scientific community at large in the years to come. Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
B-b-but information wants to be free!
Seriously though, it's really almost impossible to keep something like this locked up, especially when it's in a public research field. Okay, so let's say we start censoring scientific reports. What's to stop someone with "terrorist" leanings from becoming a biologist and learning how to do it firsthand? What's to stop, say, China, Russia, etc. selling secrets that they stole from another country on the black market?
Once something is discovered, it's almost impossible to put the genie back in the lamp.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
If it's not in the public domain, it is almost by definition not science. And nukes are not that hard to do for a seriously committed organisation with a bit of cash to spend.
[FUCK BETA]
that would enable replication of the experiments.
So the government is banning good science then.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Buy some ferrets and then keep an eye open for the agent assigned to tail you and observe your behaviour.
lol. this story has been circulating for many, many months around Europe. Much before it gained media attention. It's a commonly-known fact that the mutations and the methodologies have been publicly presented. But, that's OK, I'm sure that you know more about the situation.
Because nature will inevitably find a way to recreate those research results on it's own.
Atleast now we can be one step ahead of it and start researching ways to combat the virus before it's here.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
They are sensoring this study so only american biomedic companies have the technology to deal with it, hence they will be the only ones selling it when the disease is released in the wild... terrorists my ass...
his is anti-science and pro-stupid and if taken to its logical
conclusion means a drastic slowdown in research since people
have to reinvent wheels for no reason except for bad movie plots.
seo consultant
Osama did not crash a plane against the twin towers, he sent other people to do it for him. People running terrorist organisations are not crazy, just power hungry. Blow up a dirty bomb in the middle of NYC? Sure, they are not going to be anywhere near NYC when it happens and they can watch it on TV. Releasing a deadly flu virus which will wipe out 60% of mankind? When you are yourself an ageing man living in a vastly agricultural region with little to no modern infrastructures? No thanks.
>arguably
This is a weasel word and to start a sentence with it means that the sentence is mealy-mouthed bullshit.
If you're going to censor, you need some evidence to justify it, not bad movie plots.
--
BMO
There is arguably some science that we don't want in the public domain.
Bullshit. All information ends up in the public domain regardless. Excessive attempts to control it only result in the common man getting screwed over. We are eventually going to figure out how to make a super flu anyway, same as anyone today who was determined enough could build a nuclear weapon if they wanted, despite many years of secrecy. There is no point trying to hold this back.
No kidding. As the government noose tightens around the citizens necks even tighter...
the editor of Science, Bruce Alberts, said the journal was taking the recommendations seriously and would probably withhold some information — but only if the government creates a system to provide the missing information to legitimate scientists worldwide who need it.
(emphasis mine). How that would be accomplished is left as a problem for the reader, though.
This is, of course, from the same man who later says
“I wouldn’t call this censorship,” Dr. Alberts said. “This is trying to avoid inappropriate censorship.”
So it isn't censorship, because they do it to avoid repercussions. That man is in serious need of a dictionary.
There is a huge difference between engineering plans for a weapon and the scientific research that underlies the technology; you cannot build a nuclear bomb knowing only the nuclear physics/chemistry of fission. Granted, in this particular case, the scientific discovery also contains the blueprints for creating the virus, but the authors are certainly not disclosing plans for making a biological weapon. In fact, you can construct a nuclear weapon without knowing any of the underlying science, but someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper. And a nuclear weapon won't make itself. In this case, the authors have discovered that relatively small mutations can convert a benign virus into a deadly, pandemic-ready beast of a virus. Disclosing this information publicly will not change the probability of it occurring naturally through random mutation, will not enable your average terrorist to produce a weaponized virus, but it will spur the pro-active research of cures or preventative methods.
Think of it this way; I am a chemist. If I published a new and simple synthetic route to methamphetamine in Science, and then put photocopies of that paper under the windshield wipers of cars parked in front of every meth lab in the country, I would get sued by AAAS and exactly zero people in those labs would be able to utilize that information. If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy. Science != Engineering
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
I suspect this will go farther than science. I can picture engineering on the board too. Can you just see engineering diagrams with black rectangles covering the controversial piece? How about self-defense classes? Poli-Sci classes? Police training? Military? What other parts of life will our Repubmocrat overlords throw to bureaucrazy ? Once started they know no bounds. Remember when we used to have Constitutional rights that
a child could understand until the supreme court interpreted it for the benefit of the Repubmocrat overlords over the last century?
I think this censorship is just smoke and mirrors for whatever they are REALLY going to do.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
No, no there isn't. Weapons aren't normally very dangerous, at most you can kill tens of people before the authorities get to you. That is a sacrifice I am willing to make in order to live in a free society. More dangerous weapons will either get yourself killed (nerve gas), or demands quite some investments (nuclear bombs). And such censorship isn't going to be succesful anyway, if there were an easy way to kill thousands of people, that knowledge would seep out no matter what. By far the best ways to avoid terrorism is a) Have an effective inteligence service (you do not need to give up rights to have this) and b)stop pissing people off (that in and of itself will not be 100% effective, as some people will always have an irrational reason to do terrorism, but it can minimize the job of the intelligence service).
...about the US Government getting dangerous information.
What if some bigot doesn't care about it being controlled and just wants the world population thinned 90%?
Such a person/organization would be very quick to pull the trigger.
Drop The Big One.
ALL science should be made available to the public domain. By censoring information there is a chance at people using it for evil, but also a chance people will use it for good. If people do choose to use it for evil however, it is the governments job to protect it's people, not to remove information that could be used for good.
No matter how much the information gets censored, unless they censor it to the point that its discovery becomes pointless, it would not be too difficult to gain the information. All you would have to do is get into that area of expertise, and if you can understand everything they are saying in their reports and have easy access to the materials needed to repeat them, chances are the person already is, and has access to that information anyways.
Now that the whole world knows what it is about and since some of the results (if not all) have already been presented at public events, it seems likely that the information will anyway percolate to the scientific community at large in the years to come. Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
That is a valid point that you're making, perhaps without quite meaning to. Fear of a virus spreading uncontrollably would not deter people who are willing to blow themselves up to make a point or to get to their enemies.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
So far, we've had policy-makers acting ignorantly (or worse) in response to- (or, in my opinion, in the manufacture and perpetuation of-) "terrorism."
Now we have an example of a directive that seeks to spread ignorance among those of us who have the lowest tolerance for ignorance; i.e., geeks, nerds, scientists, engineers, researchers, students and teachers, et al.
This political mindset gives me the same sickness in my stomach that the DMCA's anti-research/anti-publish provisions caused.
My admiration and thanks go to all of those who've leaked or published their "illegal information," repercussions be damned.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
The article explains how the N1H5 (bird) flu virus, which has a 95% mortality rate for humans, can be genetically modified into a version that would be transmittable from human to human. If such a virus would get out into the wild, it could decimate human population on earth.
All military research is funded with public money and is not going to put into the public domain. This is research that has a military application and as such should perhaps have been more restrictive to start with.
I am not pro government and I am not at all against the sharing of information to further the good of human-kind.
I am, however, fully against the spread of weapon technology be it nuclear, chemical or as in this case, biological.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I can see some discussions which kind of mention the recent virus experiment, or the weapon technology, as a way to partly agree with what TFA is about. How I see all this is under a different light though. Scientific research is science. It is not something which necessarily has to do with weapon, or war, or terrorism and such. Technology is simply technology and it remains such no matter how one puts it into use. It is like withholding information on how to produce high quality steel because it will be used to make very sharp swords, or nuclear energy and research is bad and information about it should be restricted because such knowledge is involved in producing bombs. One doesn't need a knife to commit murder, a fork can serve just as well. Awareness and choice on how technology is used has nothing to do with technology itself. If the concern is at such level that technology will be used for harm, the problem lies with the functioning of the social system, or what values the population has come to appreciate, or what classifies as justice and the feeling of whether it is applied justly or selectively, and so on. It most probably is not a problem of technology. Trying to solve whatever problem it really is by covering it with the veil of 'harmful tech' is burying the head in sand towards the real problem.
1) All information does not end up in the public domain and to think so implies a level of naivete a bit beyond belief.
2) 'The common man' does not need to know how to make nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. I'd just as soon that organizations that want to attack my society also not know how to make such weapons.
3) Where some few governments have succeeded, with the help of other governments, I'm sure there are a lot of people and organizations, not to mention countries, who have been very determined to make a nuclear weapon who have obviously failed or we'd know about it.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Stop beating that ridiculous straw man. Publicly funded does not automatically imply publication to the public at large. The Manhattan project was also publicly funded yet even independently researched theses that describe the implementation of an A-bomb cave been classified.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
I understand your very well presented point. I'll focus on one bit, if you don't mind: "...someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper."
The problem comes in when you have people are are extensively trained in biochemistry/virology who might be able to do something with the information under discussion.
Similarly, it's not beyond believe to think that the organizations (in Mexico for example) making meth might be able to take your research and do something with it, even if the home brewers couldn't.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Militarily applicable research is generally fairly well protected. This research should probably have been kept 'in house' if it's something that the government is worried about.
I'm sorry but I just don't agree that all science should be available to everyone.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
The problem is that your assuming someone values control over the virus. Just as we once assumed that hijackers wanted to live after hijacking airplanes. It's a dangerous assumption to make.
A virus that would be out of control and could kill half the population of the world. It's an Eco-terrorists wet dream. Think of the carbon reduction from reducing the population by half? With one release of this virus you topple almost every government in the world, end globalization and meet just about every eco goal in existance.
Eco-terrorists are becoming increasingly radicalized, they already do things like break into research centers and release all of the animals into the wild without care for the fact that the animals will then all have to be euthanized. Assuming a bad guy is going to act rationally or have the same values as most people is a really good way to get screwed by the bad guys.
That being said, censorship is something I find abhorrently wrong, one of societies great evils. I'm just saying that something that would allow the weaponization of a biological agent arguably does rank up there with the fine details of how to build a nuclear bomb. Biological weapons of mass destruction were widely used in WW2 and killed far more people than the atomic bombs ever did.
I would have to imagine that the panel would have told them to go fish if there wasn't a reasonable basis for them asking to begin with. That being said I am far from qualified to know if this paper would raise that kind of concern. Their argument is valid, even if in this case they are wrong, I just don't know.
Other countries having nuclear weapons put an effective stop to using those weapons in a war.
I can understand why a war-loving dictator wouldn't like that, but for the rest of humanity it seems like a good thing.
Also from what I've heard, anyone who might have the education and resources to create such a virus can already get enough information from the little hints that have been dropped early on, so attempting to cover up the information at this point is just whipping up the Streisand Effect.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance.
The threat we are currently worried about is not a modern army, it's a bunch of crazy terrorists. They don't need to control the propagation.
Note: I'm not saying that we should be worried about terrorists plots, I'm just saying that, as a society, we are.
Obviously science should be able to exchange papers and ideas. But try to have some tact about it. Indifferent to this specific incident we don't want making super plagues to become any easier then it already is right now. Just keep private enough of the information that the report will not aid or inspire one of the various blood thirsty dictators or mad dog terrorist organizations to replicate it.
If this isn't something people feel like taking seriously then fine.
I'm going back to my bunker on the moon to make myself a banana smoothy. So long suckers.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Umm. Is it just me, but even ignorant terrorists must be able to work out that creating and releasing a highly transmissible lethal flu virus is a bit stupid. Judging by most recent flu pandemics, they travel everywhere, not just the country/people/religion you hate. Not very targeted. How about a nuke instead?
Fair enough, though I think the argument then boils down to the open-source vs closed-source security argument. In this particular case, I would wager that there are a lot more "white hats" (e.g., academic scientists) than "black hats" (e.g., terrorists with the know-how to engineer a virus) looking at the source code. Also, a pay-walled scientific journal further inhibiting access to publicly-funded research by redacting experimental protocols, particularly just to avoid bad publicity from layman/journalists/politicians, makes my blood boil.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
Aside to the main topic, is there actually any data on how many people were infected with H5N1. Around the time of the last big scare (late 2009 in the UK IIRC) it seemed to me that a lot of people (myself and my wife and a lot of people we knew, and anecdotally in the population at large) got unusually bad colds and chest infections and what-not, that took a long time to shake off. FTA, "The virus, A(H5N1), causes bird flu, which rarely infects people but has an extraordinarily high death rate when it does" .... are there actually useful figures from random sampling amongst the population, or it is based on people being actively diagnosed with the infection and their subsequent death rate? Call me a cynic, but I have the feeling that there is a significant chance that the number of people infected was much larger than commonly supposed, adn the death rate correspondingly much smaller.
Read "The Stand."
Watch what happens when hell breaks loose and the government works to quarantine and censor everything having to do with it.
Well, at least I know how I'll go out. Screw you all.
Funny how US legislators slavishly chant the National Rifle Association mantra that if guns are made illegal, only criminals will have guns. Yet for something like this, refereed scientific journals are supposed to censor themselves, lest terrorists get hold of information they could probably find on-line with a 15-minute Google search.
It's so nice to know they actually understand the problem and are cynically ignoring it. The alternative is even MORE frightening.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Grow a pair and ignore them.
I fixed that for the GP. The way to combat terror is to not be afraid of "them." That's the whole point of a terrorist - to create fear. They can't actually do much physical damage, as they're too small. Dropping all of the public security that was put in back in 2001, and funneling even half of that theater money into coordination of intelligence and PSAs about how safe a place the first world really is would do far, far more to combat "terror" than the entire government and media playing an unintentional, supporting role in the terror plan.
More troops were killed - by an order of magnitude - and more foreign civilians were killed - by almost 3 orders of magnitude - than died on 9/1/2001 in both towers. Trillions of dollars - more than the entire Wall Street bailout and recovery stimulus - have been spent or lost in productivity due to the reaction to that "attack" - a third of which was foiled by average citizens on the third plane with no training and no advanced knowledge of the attack.. All as a result of our "reaction", the terrorists had their effort multiplied thousands of times.
If you stop fearing a terrorist, you take most of their power away from them. So, yes - all we really need to do is grow a pair.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Streisand effect -- somebody tried to ban the paper and now even the nerds on Slashdot knows about it. It has made multiple hits on Reddit, Digg, Fark, the social networks, TV channels and the blogosphere. The whole internet is aware of it and talking about it. Finally it is time to suppress and censor the journals with a scientific Patriot act of sorts. Face palm.
At least an H-Bomb still needs to be built - using somewhat-hard-to-obtain materials - and physically delivered to its target.
Now yes - if indeed the cat's out of the bag already, then I agree, the censorship is pointless, and in general I do - strongly - oppose any censorship of science.
But folks - however noble the researchers' intentions, this IS a biological doomsday weapon, perhaps THE doomsday bio-weapon. The existence of this virus - and data on how to make it - is inherently dangerous. If the research leads to a vaccine and/or treatment, that's great - and should be the very top priority for those who created this beast.
But let's be clear; would-be mass murderers can do research too, and they also read the scientific journals. If THEY need to reinvent a few wheels to achieve their aims, that's a good thing.
You are assuming that you are dealing with rational people.
Terrorist by their very nature are not rational. Especially those that believe in dying for their cause...
This is research that has a military application and as such should perhaps have been more restrictive to start with.
Arguably, most research can have military application. If we start asking all such projects to self sensor themselves, the scientific process gets cut off at the knees. The dividing line between civilian and military applications is vacuous at best (think Internet).
...the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released
I can think of quite a few leaders who are about as unstable as any mutated form of virus. That instability didn't die with Kim Jong-Il. I certainly wouldn't take that bet.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"U.N. Declaration of Rights"
Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (Videogame)
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
The main reason that nuclear weapons are not more of a threat is that uranium enrichment is such an expensive process. The economic and manufacturing activity associated with doing it is easy to spot. Chemical weapons require feedstocks that are often tracked. It's harder to control, because the level of activity required to produce a successful weapon is much lower.
You could make a biological weapon in a lab with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, a small team or a lone worker, and sufficient patience. The base materials (biological samples) are available for a few hundred dollars from any number of lab supply companies. You don't need large scale manufacturing to make it effective - bacteria and viruses have this neat property that they will arrange to manufacture themselves. The main constraint on biological weapon manufacture is thus the availability of skills and knowledge, which are becoming much cheaper and easier to obtain.
I also abhor the censorship, but they do have a point. It's a shame they have the wrong response - if the knowledge is already out there (and from comments here, it is), then making a fuss about it will only draw attention from the kind of nutjobs they want to prevent using it. I wouldn't be surprised if radical organizations and individuals are already investigating the requirements to set up their own labs, in response to this.
I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that.
As I am sure many people are aware, the US government is a sprawling organization so it might be useful to know which department this comes from.
The request was made by the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity which falls under the umbrella of the National Institute of Health, which is an agency for the US Department of Health and Human Services. According to wikipedia the USDHHS is the biomedical and health related agency like how the National Science Foundation is the science and engineering related agency.
Not only have I invented time travel, cold fusion and found Elvis. But I have also solved world hunger. But because of 'security' all the proof has been redacted.
But it'd be nice if you guys could just peer review this and say I'm telling the truth anyway.
Thanks.
This work should never have been done. There are countless more important and more valuable activities that need to be done besides genetically engineering a virus that kills all humans. The virus should be completely destroyed and these people need to start working on something constructive.
No, I don't think it should be published! There are a few things that we do NOT need to teach each other. Genocide is one of them.
The thing about terrorism is that the terrorists want to create fear not total destruction. There is no fear when there is nobody that can fear. I think that almost nobody would be mentally capable of unleashing non-discriminating, globally effective bio-weapon.
Only the ones with serious mental health problems seem to have the goal of just wreaking havoc. But this is marginal, and this are single people not organisations so hopefully they don't have resources to do much harm. Well, maybe breiving is the exception that proves the rule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aum_Shinrikyo
If the paper is published, yes the terrorists may be able to reproduce the virus.
But, civilians may be able to create an antidote or vaccine against the virus.
Now who would want case #2 not to happen..especially if a vaccine already exists, but is not published.
Who would stand to gain from a very profitable vaccine?..or from the deaths of many?
Change is coming indeed, get ready.
Thinning of the herd is coming.
99% of people and researchers who saw this research would use it for good, or would try to. Unfortunately, the true ratio is irrelevant. Out of the billions of people on earth, all it would take is one competent person who wanted (for whatever reason) to wreak real havoc. If the virus in question maintained the lethality that H5N1 has displayed in bird-to-human transmission, you're literally looking at billions of lives at risk.
Kythe
science that we don't want in the public domain
If science is our current empirical understanding of the nature of reality, then, by definition, isn't it already in the public domain? /ducks
Interesting analogy of distinguishing the "possession of tools" from "mal-intent"
However, there are things where knowhow is restricted, while basic science isn't (ITAR and other export control laws). The challenge is always in finding the dividing line, because it's a judgment call, not a bright line test. We've been doing this for decades for electrical engineering/physics stuff, so maybe it's just time for the biologists to do the same?
Throw in the religious Christian and Islamic radicals that believe in the rapture too and you've got a recipe for disaster. Or maybe a N. Korean that's all pissed off his Dear Leader kicked the bucket and realized his life was all a lie. Whatever. Censored or not, the information will get released or R&D will be thrown into making this with the full confidence that it can be done via announcement of this publication. Not to be Mr Doom & Gloom here, but this will get released sooner or later. I can only hope governments around the world start mass-producing a vaccine ASAP. This isn't a waste of time or money. It's exceedingly important that we treat this as an urgent matter.
Now that I think about it, producing the vaccine requires making the original virus in the first place right? It's not looking good I think.
Life is not for the lazy.
Arguable, indeed. I think there's a pretty clear difference between a potentially enabling technology and one which has direct and immediate usage as a weapon. Arguing otherwise - whether you agree with GP or not - is disingenuous at best.
Yes, but this research can only have military applications. That or defensive applications against a military. There's just no valid reason to create a stronger virus other than to kill a metric f**kton of people. We already have a pretty good idea what makes viruses mutate and spread more quickly, what makes viruses more or less deadly, etc.; there are plenty of examples in the wild to choose from. There's simply no non-military justification for combining those qualities of a virus into a single virus, period.
The right way to experiment, if you aren't sure about whether some particular sequence of genes increases or decreases pathogenicity or virulence, is to try to weaken a virus, not strengthen it. What they did is the biological equivalent of someone creating a doomsday weapon that could blot out the sun just to see if they can make it work. It is reckless and irresponsible; there are very good reasons to suppress such research, and few, if any, reasons to support it.
As Jurassic Park put it, "...your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
This gutterment could better serve its employers by censoring itself.
The arrogance in believing that it is above the law because they create the laws, shows just how myopic it really is. The errors made in supplying guns to mexican drug cartels, explosives to McVey and Nichols, as well as all the insider trading that would get a wallstreeter 20 years in prison, the still continuing waffling on balancing of the budget shows that it is well past the time to set term limits to two terms and to imprison any politician with more than that. The need to separate corporate and state is just as dire as that of church and state. So clear out your secret Vatican bank accounts and leave while you can as a free person. When the other shoe drops, it will be harder to accomplish this task with international arrest warrents dogging your miserable collective asses.
the anthrax attack.
E Proelio Veritas.
I would have to disagree. We are at a point in technology that it doesn't matter what information is released, it will make no difference. Currently, almost anyone can build nukes, so long as they have access to the technology and materials necessary. If they have a gun, they could build an attack drone with technology that toys use. If someone doesn't have access to the technology or materials for more advanced technology, then they can build lower-tech replacements, for less money, and most likely more of them, and use them instead (dirty bombs, regular guns, home-made explosives, etc). These lower-tech replacements can be just as deadly, if not more deadly in that buying the materials for some of them is not unusual.
In this particular case, the gist of the method is widely known, understood, and, frankly, obvious to anyone that cared. They simply applied artificial selection on the population to select for strains with a higher virulence -- no genetic engineering or manipulation involved.This is already an obvious inexpensive and simple approach to anyone that wanted to try it, provided that they had an inkling of biology knowledge and a desire to do so. Further, it highlights that there's a series of natural mutations that could occur in the wild to the same effect. Presumably, it suggests that we should be prepared for the eventual natural occurrence of this strain.
It's important to note that the product of these experiments was not something that's highly transmissible or deadly to humans, but rather to ferrets. It's presumed that it may (or some variant may) be a threat to humans, but that was never assessed.
For a typical terrorist, being able to control the distribution would be key. Part of a terrorist act is showing that you are in control of the situation and the other party is not. To that end, they'd prefer something stable outside the human body, transferrable by physical contact, with a long enough gestation time to be able to distribute to a large area before the outbreak is recognized. High mortality would probably be preferred, but debilitation would be just as good.
Something highly infectious by contact and aerosol would be good for a sociopathic ecoterrorist, but the key would really be to get a strain that remains as asymptomatic as possible post-infection but ultimately has high mortality. If people get sick the day after exposure, it's likely to be contained. If you developed a strain where there was an infectious period of 3-4 weeks before symptoms set in but still had high mortality, you'd kill off most of the industrialized world.
The Streisand effect will ensure that the censored results are among the most widely read.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.
To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
Better baseball bat technology has direct and immediate usage as a weapon. Where do you draw the line? How about at the point where the research has no other viable purposes? As I understand it (and I could be way off) this research has a very important use in preventing such things, natural and man-made.
Eco-terrorists are becoming increasingly radicalized, they already do things like break into research centers and release all of the animals into the wild without care for the fact that the animals will then all have to be euthanized. Assuming a bad guy is going to act rationally or have the same values as most people is a really good way to get screwed by the bad guys
You assume that the eco-terrorists are the bad guys. Releasing a few research animals, or driving spikes into trees, or hell even committing their own 9/11 level terrorist attack is small potatos compared to what is going to happen to this world if the carbon sequestered in Alberta's oil sands. Those who continue policies of unrestrained growth are on track to cause the deaths of billions once the oil runs out and the sea rises 20 feet. That is the face of true evil.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Not only that, but if this research was performed at a university, the original manuscripts and experiment designs will probably not be hard to obtain. My department just got a new building, with fancy locks on the doors, but it is common to just let people in if they are standing outside -- no questions asked. I have seen server rooms locked with a cheap padlock at another university, or even left unlocked.
If a terrorist wanted information from a university, they could just walk in and grab it, at least in my experience (admittedly, that is in engineering; perhaps biomedical research is different?).
Palm trees and 8
Yes, exactly. If it wasn't for all the hype around the subject, I would never even have come up with the idea of making those viruses in my basement. And I would never have contracted that nasty cough that I don't seem to be able to get rid of. Well, at least I'll have some great results to publish.
If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy.
You would not go to jail. It's entirely legal to publish easy to follow step by step instructions to do anything, including meth.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0114746/
From back when Hollywood bad guys weren't all from the Middle East.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
This is all about 9/11. Back then, the US declared a war on irony. If the US ask scientists to self-censor so as not to assist terrorists and the scientists ignore them and publish dangerous details, then a terrorist group take up their invention and the scientists are killed in the attack, then the US will finally win that war...
Besides, I've read many published research articles that I'd really *not* want to see in terrorist hands... Most of them published by the US military.
So maybe the US already won the war on irony.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
There is arguably some science that we don't want in the public domain
Indeed, imagine the damage that might be caused if research on how different types of plastics behave under heavy stress were to fall into the wrong hands. Terrorists might figure out how to turn plastic bottles into knives and then use those knives to hijack an airplane!
How do you decide what sort of research should be censored or hidden from the public? Terrorists are creative and can find ways to weaponize just about anything. Perhaps we should require people to get licenses before allowing them to read scientific papers?
Palm trees and 8
One does wonder.
If some research created a super deadly easy to spread virus would it be wise to release that information to the public. This does remind me of nuclear weapons in many ways. the scientists told the military that their was no way to keep them a secret because their are no secrets in physics. The Universe allows for nuclear weapons so they are their for anyone to find if they look. The same is probably true for biomedical research as well. The question is then what do you do about knowledge that could easily kill millions of people if someone is crazy enough to use it?
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
yet even independently researched theses that describe the implementation of an A-bomb cave been classified.
Yes, and it was pretty damn conclusively proven back in 1967 (Nth country experiment) that was pretty much completely pointless and it's hardly any less true today.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Actually you are off about Gas.
Gas was used in WWII. The Italians used it in Africa and the Japanese used it in China. What stopped the use of gas in WWII was the fear of retaliation in kind. Both sides kept large supplies on hand just in case and the Germans developed the first nerve gas agents. They didn't use them in large part because Hitler hated gas for good reason. He as gassed in WWI.
As to this virus making a good weapon? Well it depends on one detail. Can you create a vacine for it. If so it is about a perfect weapon. Imagine if North Korea had it and a vaccine. They could vaccinate all loyal North Koreans and then release the virus around the world. Some North Koreans would die from it so no finger would be pointed at them but the majority would live. Then you have the rest of the world suffering massive deaths. With half of South Korea sick or dead the North could roll over the South and unify Korea. The rest of the world would be in such poor shape they could do nothing to stop it and the New Korea would grow in strength.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Is anyone else sick of the US Government trying to censor everything now?
I am Bennett Haselton! I am Bennett Haselton!
Actually, if I understand the project correctly the purpose was the OPPOSITE of "kill a metric f**kton of people". Two strains of influenza can often require two totally different methods of developing a vaccine, and two totally different methods to cure. When the two strains trade genes you may well end up with something that needs an entirely different method to prevent or kill it. The purpose of this was to find out if a third method was going to be needed if/when these two strains combine in the wild.
What the found was that this third strain, if it developed in a certain way, was an order of magnitude worse than either one alone. Prevention and treatment regimens are going to need a new paradigm to attack a disease like this, and it was totally responsible of the researchers to warn the medical industry of this fact.
This is not the US Army spiriting Ken Alibeck out of the Soviet Union so that he could recreate Black Pox (a smallpox/Marburg chimera) for them. These were actual scientists doing legitimate work.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
"You assume that the eco-terrorists are the bad guys. Releasing a few research animals, or driving spikes into trees, or hell even committing their own 9/11 level terrorist attack is small potatos compared to what is going to happen to this world if "
And that is the the true face of evil, justification.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Hey, if you want to bake the planet like ant under a magnifying glass, go for it. I'll be dead by the time it happens. I'm only here to warn you. Hope you don't care too much about what sort of world your grandchildren inherit.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
There is arguably some science that we don't want in the public domain
Indeed, imagine the damage that might be caused if research on how different types of plastics behave under heavy stress were to fall into the wrong hands. Terrorists might figure out how to turn plastic bottles into knives and then use those knives to hijack an airplane!
There's a small difference between hijacking an airplane and a weaponized virus with high transmission and mortality rates but I certainly understand your point nonetheless.
How do you decide what sort of research should be censored or hidden from the public? Terrorists are creative and can find ways to weaponize just about anything. Perhaps we should require people to get licenses before allowing them to read scientific papers?
Are you suggesting that everything should be shared with the general public, such as the names and photographs of spies that we have in enemy societies, for example? Or is it just the idea of research that should be shared with everyone regardless of the risks associated with that research falling into 'the wrong hands'?
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
If by publicly funded you mean funded with tax dollars, then yes the Manhattan project was publicly funded. But most research in the United States is funded by the NIH, NSF and DOE, the DOD accounts for about 25-30% of all research funding and most of that is non-classified research that *IS* publicly published. I know this because I worked for a top research university in its Research division for more than a decade. This proposed censorship is nothing more than paranoid lunacy by the same folks that join Tea Parties and think evolution is still just a theory. It's nothing more than a power grab by those that want to control and don't understand.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea?
Because the probability of said mutation sequence happening in nature is non-trivial and this research allows us to have information to be prepared for if/when it does happen on its own.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Yes and no...there is also a question of scale. How much damage can be done, and how difficult it is to realize that damage if you have reasonably well educated people who can take the information in question and use it.
Think zero day vulnerabilities. If you are aware of a zero day vuln you generally don't advertise it to the entire net before letting the vendor have a chance to patch it (whether they actually do so or not is a different question).
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Now that the whole world knows what it is about and since some of the results (if not all) have already been presented at public events...
This is not necessarily the case. The original poster of the comment that the information had been publicly disseminated later said that he had not witnessed this himself and asked anyone who went to the presentations to comment on what exactly has already been made public and what has not. (I'm paraphrasing because I'm too lazy to scroll up).
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
And one form of terrorism is bioterrorism. That kind of population reduction would even the score.
And you're wrong in thinking this sort of virus cannot be controlled. A vaccine could actually make large portions of the population immune. The vaccine itself might not be perfect but it would result in preserving some populations.
Now that the whole world knows what it is about and since some of the results (if not all) have already been presented at public events, it seems likely that the information will anyway percolate to the scientific community at large in the years to come. Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
That is a valid point that you're making, perhaps without quite meaning to. Fear of a virus spreading uncontrollably would not deter people who are willing to blow themselves up to make a point or to get to their enemies.
I got news for you. Neither will hiding the information stop them from trying to build a virus or other weapon. Where do you think Iranian physicist went to College? Do you think that during their matriculation they were not privy to all the data and information available? Please. This entire argument for censorship is nonsensical. All a reasonably intelligent terrorist operation would have to do is recruit or kidnap the right scientist and it wouldn't matter if the info was published. Or, they could send a member to grad school and get access to the data. The whole thing is just stupid!
Eco-terrorists might support population reduction but it wont work because some of the population will have the money to buy vaccines, masks, and simply wait it out while others wont.
All that will happen is certain groups will find a vaccine and make the virus innocuous to them. Others in poorer countries or less educated places will die. Not all that different from what happened with HIV.
As I understand it, their intention is to figure out how to combat something like this when it will appear in the wild. Which it will do at some point, given how viruses work.
To figure out how to combat it, they needed something to study and test.
As I understood this is quite normal procedure.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
I understand your very well presented point. I'll focus on one bit, if you don't mind: "...someone lacking extensive training in biochemistry/virology would not be able to reproduce the virus from this work from the experimental section of the their paper."
The problem comes in when you have people are are extensively trained in biochemistry/virology who might be able to do something with the information under discussion.
Similarly, it's not beyond believe to think that the organizations (in Mexico for example) making meth might be able to take your research and do something with it, even if the home brewers couldn't.
But this information or discovery wasn't really new. It's something people who know virology already learned. It's only novel in that the details and virus studied but not in the methods.
If someone is extensively trained in biochemistry/virology we have an FBI to monitor them. Of course anyone trained can do a lot of damage, anyone educated can do a lot of damage, but that has always been the case.
The idea behind the research was to try to find out what genetic changes might make the virus easier to transmit.
Right there. It fucking said it. It said what the Hell they were thinking. Stop being such a fucking retard.
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
The main reason that nuclear weapons are not more of a threat is that uranium enrichment is such an expensive process. The economic and manufacturing activity associated with doing it is easy to spot. Chemical weapons require feedstocks that are often tracked. It's harder to control, because the level of activity required to produce a successful weapon is much lower.
You could make a biological weapon in a lab with a few tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment, a small team or a lone worker, and sufficient patience. The base materials (biological samples) are available for a few hundred dollars from any number of lab supply companies. You don't need large scale manufacturing to make it effective - bacteria and viruses have this neat property that they will arrange to manufacture themselves. The main constraint on biological weapon manufacture is thus the availability of skills and knowledge, which are becoming much cheaper and easier to obtain.
I also abhor the censorship, but they do have a point. It's a shame they have the wrong response - if the knowledge is already out there (and from comments here, it is), then making a fuss about it will only draw attention from the kind of nutjobs they want to prevent using it. I wouldn't be surprised if radical organizations and individuals are already investigating the requirements to set up their own labs, in response to this.
I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that.
This is not entirely true. You can make a dirty bomb in your basement and it's relatively cheap. A nuclear weapon isn't always going to result in an explosion but radiation is just as deadly and the spread of harmful radiation doesn't require all that much expense.
Terrorists already can make dirty bombs and take out entire neighborhoods. It's not like censorship helps people in this case because then people don't even know it's possible.
If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy.
You would not go to jail. It's entirely legal to publish easy to follow step by step instructions to do anything, including meth.
You might not go to jail but there is no guarantee you wont have an accident or end up missing. If governments or organizations want something to stay secret they can resort to extreme measures.
And what if one of those released research animals was one from the research project discussed in the article? Congratulations, you just unwittingly released a deadly virus into the general population.
No, there's not, ever. All knowledge of humankind belongs to everyone. Nearly all people will use it for good, a fraction of a percent will use it for evil. That fraction of a percent is no reason to abandon all hope and cower in your storm shelter because some boogeyman might get you.
Nuclear bombs are pretty simple - it's getting the fissionable radioactive material that's the hard part.
They've overplayed their "terrorism" card, people are starting to snicker.
Militarily applicable research is generally fairly well protected. This research should probably have been kept 'in house' if it's something that the government is worried about.
I'm sorry but I just don't agree that all science should be available to everyone.
And why would governments need to conduct this research?
A long as they have the proper containment it's not really different from other contagious disease research. Just like breeding velociraptors is not worse than breeding tigers.
So... People complain that slashdotters don't RTFA but then they post an article you can't access without registering on a site (paywall too?)
This is not good.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
> you cannot build a nuclear bomb knowing only the nuclear physics/chemistry of fission
LOL, WUT? What do you think the Manhattan Project was? All they had was the physics and theory, and that's all they needed.
People are not as stupid as you assume.
Hits are irrelevant unless they contain the information in question. Nobody is trying to suppress the fact that the virus exists.
Nobody asked you, dumbass. Now go home and cower in your basement. The boogieman might get you.
You make me sick.
Governments? They don't care.
Corporations? They don't care.
Terrorists? They don't care.
But if you have money then you matter more to them than someone who doesn't. The reason this information should be released is because most of us are people who don't have money. We might be educated enough to understand the danger but we can't afford the vaccine. By knowing the danger exists it allows us to prepare for it.
When the next pandemic does get made or happens naturally, it's better if people know how to contain it, how to stop the spread of it, etc. The more we know about the bird flu the better because it's up to us civilians to protect ourselves from it.
Is there anything we can do to stop bioterrorism? Yes we can have "secret" treatments and vaccines. Keep them classified or secret. We can have well run intelligence agencies. We can monitor people who get an education in certain fields.
Engineers, biochemists, virologists, if they aren't monitored then the intelligence agency sucks.
Yeah, researching bad things is bad. Let's only research how to make fluffy bunnies and food colorant.
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
I asked a question: how do you decide what research is "too dangerous" to allow people to see? Let me add this: How do you allow science to progress while restricting public access to research? Do only "certified" or "legitimate" scientists get to read scientific papers? How are scientists trying to develop defenses against avian flu supposed to work if they are not allowed to read the paper mentioned in TFA?
Palm trees and 8
The idea behind the research was to try to find out what genetic changes might make the virus easier to transmit. That way, scientists would know how to identify changes in the naturally occurring virus that might be warning signals that it was developing pandemic potential.
Forgot the rest of the quote.
Here's a thought: Suppose some day we're faced with an army of 10-foot tall Charles Manson clones with chainsaws for arms! What would we do? Don't know? Well then, I guess we'd better head for the lab and create a few so we can TRY to figure out a way to stop them - and then of course, we'll print a magazine article with detailed instructions on how to do it. It's science! What could possibly go wrong?!? Folks, H5N1 isn't just a scientific curiosity; it is a killer with its own agenda, and it doesn't give two farts what its inventors have in mind. History has shown us that influenza requires no human encouragement to ravage us. Am I sick of the government censoring things? Yes - but I'm also just plain sick. I am, literally, ill right now with a virus. I know I'm going to get well, but right now I can easily imagine: "What if I wasn't? Suppose I knew that my illness it would only get steadily worse until I died in horrible misery - and that by my very presence, I would endanger the lives of everyone close to me?" Personally, I can imagine nothing more terrifying. I'd rather live next door to a nuclear power plant than live anywhere in the same planetary atmosphere as just one instance of highly-contagious H5N1. Influenza doesn't care if it evolved naturally or if it's shepherded into existence by a Nobel laureate, or cooked up a captive scientist working for terrorists, or brewed by a scientifically-gifted but delusional fanatic who believes God wants him to cleanse the world with a plague. It's a WMD that requires neither missile nor bomb to disperse; a "suicide bomber" need only infect himself, then get onto a bus or plane and sneeze on everyone.
When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.
To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
Arguably they might now work on methods to block the spread of the flu.
I think this research was well worth doing but should be kept out of the wrong hands (i.e. people that want to kill us) as much as possible.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
There seems to be a confusion between deontology and teleology here. There might be a utility in having particular knowledge about a particular virus, but that is a very different thing from whether it is a good idea to create the virus in the real world. Just because there is utility in an action does not necessarily justify the action. I think the question here was more about why they thought it was right to do it, not the utility they could see in doing it. Utility is not necessarily justification. It might be useful to kill all people of a certain religion, and we might learn all kinds of useful data from doing so, but is it sufficient justification to do it?
Korma: Good
There is no such thing as proper containment. Fukushima anyone?
Korma: Good
If, however, I instead placed detailed, step-by-step instructions for how to perform that synthesis in a kitchen sink under those windshield wipers, then I would go to jail and make a lot of meth heads very happy.
Why would you go to jail?
"Hey, if you want to bake the planet like ant under a magnifying glass, go for it. I'll be dead by the time it happens. I'm only here to warn you. Hope you don't care too much about what sort of world your grandchildren inherit."
So the only way is to kill people off to agree with you?
Again Evil... Justification.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
All military research is funded with public money and is not going to put into the public domain.
And yet BRL-CAD serves as an example of a long term project that is open to the public.
> What do you think the Manhattan Project was? All they had was the physics and theory, and that's all they needed. Well, physics, theory, and a metric buttload of money. The uranium separation facility needed so much copper, there wasn't enough available at the time, so the US government gave them 14,700 tons of silver out of the national reserves to build it with. By some estimates, the cost of the Manhattan Project was some $2billion US in 1941, or about 24.4 billion in 2011, 90% of which went to building the factories and reactors that provided the materials, and that doesn't include the cost of the silver, which was only loaned for the project. Just knowing the physics won't get you enough HEUranium or Pu239 to make a bomb. Someone is still going to have to dig up the ore, process it into fuel elements, run it through a reactor, separate out the desired isotopes, and provide a delivery mechanism.
âoe...Fuck this government-by-fear bullshit. Publish.
--
BMO
Yeah, but...yeah, but...those calling for censorship are in the FEAR business. They are the half-empty guys, their own shadow startles them. Besides, most censorship is too-little, too-late.
As a PhD, you want to have as many publications as possible. Go figure if your research cannot be published because of this moderation, you'll look for the next conference/journal that could gladly publish your results.
1. If it doesn't require much to duplicate, even more important to quickly publish it, so more people can tackle the problems around it. Provided that anyone else can come to that same conclusion... remember that "you're not the only one working on that subject"
2. If the government is so interested, then they should put more money and keep NDAs on their students, and their advisers take notes on how to evaluate their students given they are not going to be publishing many papers.
This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
And that's why nobody's tried to use poison gas to kill people since World War I. Especially not doomsday cults trying to jump-start the end of the world - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarin_gas_attack_on_the_Tokyo_subway
> you cannot build a nuclear bomb knowing only the nuclear physics/chemistry of fission
LOL, WUT? What do you think the Manhattan Project was? All they had was the physics and theory, and that's all they needed.
People are not as stupid as you assume.
And a massive, multi year effort to enrich nuclear material spanning the nation and employing the best minds from Europe and America. An effort that annexed large tracts of land for the war effort. Hell, the Y12 site alone was a city with tens of thousands of residents specifically for the bomb effort, on what had been farmland.
His point is that most physicists with a little ambition can figure out the basics of nuclear refinement and bomb building. They just can't get the supplies. But anyone can afford a ferret colony, steal a chicken with bird flu and make a supervirus in their basement. Thats a scary thought.
âoeexperimental details and mutation data that would enable replication of the experiments.â
But the whole point of science is to see if results can be replicated or not.
When the hypothesis is: "A modified strain of flu virus can kill half of all living homo-sapiens within a 2 year time-span." I don't want the science to be tested, replicated, verified, or published any more than I do Newt's hypothesis of "A single EMP over the central United States will knock all of civilization back to the Middle Ages."
Personally, I think the first is achievable and the second is overstating things, but I am happy enough to live my life without experts "testing" either of them. Any "scientific testing" of these things is speculative extrapolation, at best.
This is research that has a military application and as such should perhaps have been more restrictive to start with.
All research has a military application.
"I'm not sure what the right response would be. Mostly to grow up as a society and stop alienating people to the point where they decide that the solution to their problems with the rest of society is to eliminate as much of it as possible. But I really have no idea how to achieve that."
I agree, and here are some ideas I put together on that: ... There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all. "
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"Biological weapons like genetically-engineered plagues are ironic because they are about using advanced life-altering biotechnology to fight over which old-fashioned humans get to occupy the planet. Why not just use advanced biotech to let people pick their skin color, or to create living arkologies and agricultural abundance for everyone everywhere?
And:
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
"Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full.
Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."
Lots more links on my site. See also this site on "A Newer Way Of Thinking":
http://anwot.org/
Sadly, this was also in the news yesterday about budget cuts to health programs:
"Report Claims Cuts Weaken U.S. Bioterrorism Response"
http://www.medpagetoday.com/InfectiousDisease/Surveillance/30333
A great related article:
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What the found was that this third strain, if it developed in a certain way, was an order of magnitude worse than either one alone. Prevention and treatment regimens are going to need a new paradigm to attack a disease like this, and it was totally responsible of the researchers to warn the medical industry of this fact.
Are you sure this was responsible research and not just the result of a bunch of "scientists" passing a bong around while watching 24 season 3?
Stupid fucking scientists! How about they smarten up and quit poking around in shit they shouldn't.
Unless you publish how to circumvent DRM, that is clearly not legal in many cases in the US.
Better baseball bat technology has direct and immediate usage as a weapon. Where do you draw the line?
Maybe undirected self replicating weapons would be a good place to draw that line.
How about at the point where the research has no other viable purposes? As I understand it (and I could be way off) this research has a very important use in preventing such things, natural and man-made.
Preventing, no. Dealing with, possibly. However how many outside of the labs doing classified work would be doing such work?
Moreover, the virus does not seem like a very good weapon to me as it is simply impossible to control or contain its propagation once released. This is the reason why modern armies do not use gas for instance. The Germans tried it during the first world war and it proved to be rather unpredictable making it in effect useless.
And what about those who believe in "God's will" as an effective targeting method? Those who welcome martyrdom personally, and believe that those "believers" who die as collateral damage are martyred so their death is actually a blessing? You know the guys who blaze away firing their AK from the hip screaming "God is Great" so that God will guide one of their bullets to the enemy.
I don't know if you've ever held a security clearance (but given your comments I doubt it) but it is rare for sensitive & classified information to be completely out of the public eye. Usually theres a bit here & a bit there. The point in classifying a document containing publicly available info is to make it more difficult for adversaries to get it all in one place & avoid eliminating the uncertainties that compiling info from multiple sources inevitably adds.
Some people are saying that the info was already published elsewhere. It is far from clear that the previously published info is the same as that which was censored & it may be just this point that got it censored. Unless you are the author or have have read all the papers & cross referenced the data you cannot know whether or not the horse is out of the barn or not. That won't stop you from assuming that classifying the paper is useless, but that just shows that you're ignorant* of the real issues.
* note that I use the word not as an insult but to point out that you don't know enough to know whether or not the paper merited censorship or not. I'm just as ignorant as you are on that point.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
Do you know what happens when real CIA agents get outed or academic cryptographers discover NSA breakthroughs? Absolutely nothing
If any real security threat appears, the CIA or NSA quietly say "Oops, too bad they figured that out. Please nobody make this worse by confirming its importance."
What does DHS do? "Oh hey, the media covered this biology paper. Let's get ourselves in the news by redacting it!"
And later they argue over who gets dibs on starting the DHS subcontractor to review all biology research before publication. Imagine all those biologists who didn't get accepted into PhD programs being paid per word redacted. Joking, you think I am, mmm?
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
... at several conferences. Anyone who wants the information can get it. This is RIDICULOUS (coming from a biochemist.)
If they did not attend the conference, how? As easily as looking at a copy of a journal at a library?
Well they wanted to find out how easy it was to do and found out it was OMG easy. Seems we asked nice, if the journal and authors don't want to play nice, I'm sure they will not get sent to Gitmo, but future funding might be a lot tougher for them to get. It's generally a bad idea to piss off the people that pay your bills.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
WTF are you talking about? If you read my posts, I didn't justify anything. I simply compared magnitudes of evil.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I hate to break it to you but something is going to get you, and probably all of humanity, in the very near future. As a species we're almost certainly doomed unless we have some capacity that we have no displayed to all act rationally in the group's best interest (instead of our own). Being terrified of it is just a way to waste your time before you're dead.
Somebody said on Belgian Radio that the real enemy is not some terrorist who could abuse it but mother nature. She can trow much worse at us AND has the access of enough test subject to do so and already has.
And I agree. Mother nature has more kills on her name then any terrorist group. Even if you combine them all and include indirect kills, like wars over the centuries.
WWII had up to 80 million. That is over several years. Roughly the same amount of people dies of influenza in 1918 in one year. And that is only one example.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Once something is discovered, it's almost impossible to put the genie back in the lamp.
"Those things which were thought can never be unthought." There is a great satire on this topic by Duerrenmatt.
There's tons of research out there which can't be published, because it's subject to various export control laws (ITAR being but one). Dual-Use issues have been around for decades.
And the dividing line is fuzzy.. typically, if it's elucidating basic natural and physical principles (F=ma) that's publishable. So is "General System Description" or "Basic Marketing Information" (specific exemptions in the law for those). If it's "manufacturing knowhow" (how to create a spherically converging shock wave; how to make radiation hard ICs) it's subject to controls.
Another rule of thumb: "If you can find it in a textbook" it's basic research and not subject to controls.
Seems that the bio guys and gals get to have the same fun that we physical science and engineering folks have been dealing with for the last 70 years. It's just a sign of the maturation of the field.
Thank you for demonstrating a form of fatalism that I'd really NOT like to see in anyone with the plans for this virus.
Kythe
This is the first time I've seen a clear expression of the the dominant dilemma we're facing as a species in the open press. This dilemma will come to dominate not just our national security, but also our academic institutions, our manufacturing, our privacy laws and our civil liberties.. every aspect of our lives. Ultimately it will inevitably lead us to change who we are in a very fundamental way.
The dilemma is this:
The number of people needed to inflict damage on others is dropping at an alarming rate, tending towards the limit of ...one ...everyone
AND AT THE SAME TIME
the number of people that damage can be inflicted upon more or less simultaneously is rising at an equally alarming rate, tending towards the limit of
AND AT THE SAME TIME
the extent of the damage they can inflict is rising at an alarming rate, tending towards... death.
If C is your civil liberties then we can put this in the form of an equation thus:
C= (number of terrorists required) / [(victim number)^2 * (degree of damage) ]
Where the power of two reflects the fact that if death is inflicted on a few thousand , a few hundred million will come to the erroneous conclusion that they're next.
In a nutshell, your civil liberties are inversely proportional to how much mayhem how few people can produce against how many.
Nuclear proliferation is a walk in a (dark and dangerous) park (in an admittedly bad neighborhood) compared to what microbiology offers the aspiring terrorist / religious misanthrope.
There is no turning off the fount of knowledge, which is not to say we shouldn't try, because there IS buying time and time is what we need in order to begin to level the inequality which exists between our knowledge and control over nature and our knowledge and control over our own nature.
When just anyone can create a doomsday machine, then no one can be trusted. That's where this goes. The only possible defense against this is more detailed knowledge of the potential destructiveness implied in the capabilities of microbiology- for the purpose of countering it- and more knowledge of the individual personalities in every nation who would study this and related fields.
We need more knowledge of what everyone is doing in certain fields. That is where this has to go, at least. It's not perfect, but it buys us time.
And with that time we have to acquire knowledge of why people are fanatical. What about some humans leads them to the conclusion that everyone should die for the sake of some cause. What about humans causes them to to be illiberal in the broad sense of that term?
Let's just say it. It's not latte sipping, Volvo driving, paper recycling liberals who write their congressmen about danger of global warming who want to splice their way to a doomsday tweety.
It's religious conservatives and adherents of other irrational belief systems like Aum Shinrikyo and or the equally religious Mao adherents. It's the authoritarian personality type, a topic science needs to study more.
In the Middle East that means religious fundamentalists. In the US that means religious fundamentalists... Christian Dominionists and other cults, and secular right wing anti-collectivist extremists like Timothy McVeigh. Even the Koch brothers can be seen as extremist terrorists because what is the continued release of C02 into the atmosphere but a form of religious violence against billions of innocent people?
So what's wrong with these people and how can we prevent it? That's the million dollar question. What is it about their makeup that enables them to blind themselves, or just not care, about the real world suffering they inflict on people-who-are-not-them, while at the same time running arms outstretched to the promise of some grand future paradise?
We have the concept of the sociopathic personality and that's a part of the puzzle, but lots of sociopaths confine themselves to livin
I can understand why the research would have been done. People want to know how the virus behaves so they can know how to fight it. And I'm really glad to hear that the journal publishers are taking the recommendations to classify certain details seriously. There's nothing unreasonable about that request. It's not governments being too controlling. It's just common sense. I just pray that humanity can rise to the challenge of managing that knowledge responsibly. Freely publishing a 'recipe' for something like that would be insane and I think that should be clear to anyone.
It just makes it harder and more costly for the people who actually need the information for legitimate purposes to get it. The criminals will get it either way.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Not soon enough, though.
"You assume that the eco-terrorists are the bad guys. Releasing a few research animals, or driving spikes into trees, or hell even committing their own 9/11 level terrorist attack is small potatos "
I suggest that you read what you wrote. AKA That eco-terrorists are justified in their action even if it involves mass murder to do some "greater" good.
That is the classic tactic of all great evil. You see the simple truth is everybody is the "hero" of their own story. The people that blew up the WTC thought that what they where doing was good. McVeigh, Kaczynski, Manson, Stalin, Pol Pott, and many others all thought that their acts where "small" potatoes compared to the evil they where trying to stop or the good that where trying to do. That is the face of true evil.
Not to mention that the act of releasing lab animals has nothing to do with climate change at all.
No, eco-terrorists are bad guys. They do nothing but marginalize those that they agree with and alienate the population as a whole. They in fact harm the very cause they foolishly thing they are trying to help.
Anytime you minimize the evil of mass murder for a cause you are justifying and doing evil.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Lie to the politicians, and hope that the world isn't threatened with mass extinctions as a consequence.
A long as they have the proper containment it's not really different from other contagious disease research. Just like breeding velociraptors is not worse than breeding tigers.
Yes, as long as. So - once the process for making the buggers is published, how can we make sure nobody will make em WITHOUT observing proper containment procedures?
if you outlaw killer viruses, only outlaws will have killer viruses, or something.
me, I'm just thinking "why the fuck did they do that in the first place?", and "Captain Trips".
if that is arguable, the argue for it.
no, you assume, without any basis whatsoever. big difference.
I listed three bad things, and compared them to another bad thing. If you are reading "justification" into this, that's entirely your own preoccupation.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
In case it wasn't clear, (I guess it wasn't), my point wasn't that great evil justifies lesser evil. It's that our response to evil should be proportional to its magnitude.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.
To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
This is the classical dual-use dilemma. It should be pointed out all the scientists involved are public health researchers and not military trying to make a weapon. Knowing exactly what mutations cause the virus to go airborne and become human to human transmissible would provide a very accurate and effective way for public health workers on the ground to assess in-real time via some sort of PCR diagnostic that could be done in any reasonably equipped hospital lab whether a local outbreak is about to go pandemic or not, and react accordingly.
Interview of the lead scientist in the NYtimes indicates that even if the complete recipe were revealed, it would be difficult to replicate without very sophisticated equipment. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to spell out exactly what you need to do, especially as there are probably analagous things that can be done with other viruses that don't require such a sophisticated setup.
Q. How easy is it to recreate this virus?
A: It is not very easy. You need a very sophisticated specialist team and sophisticated facilities to do this. And in our opinion, nature is the biggest bioterrorist. There are many pathogens in nature that you could get your hands on very easily, and if you released those in the human population, we would be in trouble.
And therefore we think that if bioterror or biowarfare would be a problem, there are so many easy ways of doing it that nobody would take this H5N1 virus and do this very difficult thing to achieve it.
You could not do this work in your garage if you are a terrorist organization. But what you can do is get viruses out of the wild and grow them in your garage. There are terrorist opportunities that are much, much easier than to genetically modify H5N1 bird flu virus that are probably much more effective.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/health/security-in-h5n1-bird-flu-study-was-paramount-scientist-says.html?pagewanted=2&hp
The thing is, scientific discoveries are not made in a vacuum. History shows that often people "discover" the same thing at roughly the same time in multiple parts of the world. Why? Because they're all using the same technologies and have the same bodies of research to work from.
Because of this, redacting the last steps will do nothing to prevent "the bad guys" from coming to the same point, even if the findings had NOT already been presented. What will prevent "the bad guys" from developing such a weapon is providing them with easier ways of doing what they want to do, coupled with restricting their access to the technologies and bodies of research needed.
Since the second and third are pretty much impossible, the only way to ensure that "the bad guys" don't start decimating world populations with killer viruses is to either give them access to something not so drastic that will allow them to achieve their aims (but which can be monitored and protected against), or to completely open the research so that "the good guys" can all get defense funding to find a cure for such viruses, and a way to subvert them to create a reverse situation, where viruses that can already spread have that vector disabled.
And Mother Nature's death tally is orders of magnitude larger than that... I bet most people you know will die of "natural causes".
I agree and disagree, all it would take is one competent person, these people can easily be found working for the government, who will use the research incompetently, which is why we would need the other 99% of the people with knowledge in this area to fix what governments will inevitably screw up.
If you need an example of the incompetency of the government using competent people, look at SOPA and such. The government keeps trying to censor information, even though this will have drastically negative impacts, and very few (if any) good impacts. This will be against the advice of competent professionals, but they will still do it if told to. If you want, I can also provide a historical example instead of a current one, nuclear weapons. If governments were competent, they would get rid of them, however, they are not, so they get the competent people to build and maintain them, while having the incompetent people hold a finger over the big red button.
I suggest that you read what you wrote. AKA That eco-terrorists are justified in their action even if it involves mass murder to do some "greater" good.
That is the classic tactic of all great evil....
Anytime you minimize the evil of mass murder for a cause you are justifying and doing evil.
So you're saying that humans are inherently evil? Or just governments and corporations?
Or are you saying that it's only evil if the mass murder is targeted at a specific group of homo sapiens sapiens in the here and now?
That drivel actually had three seasons? I watched two episodes of the first season, and although I really like the multi-windowed approach to some of the segments (showing simultaneous events in different locations) the program itself was so dreadful that I never could bring myself to watch a third episode. I work in the physical security field, and the technology presented in that program was so absurd that it irritated the crap out of me.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Those ones are easy to counter... just convince them that Satan appears in the form of a virus. It is their divine calling to resist and stamp out the virus, and prevent it from infecting people. Spreading the virus would make them Satan worshipers and agents of demon possession.
No, I think because that is my opinion. You are of course welcome to your own.
Your reply is not really worth replying to as it has no substance but what the hell, I was here.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Some more than others. If I research a new form of glue, it may have a military application...to a degree, but not to the same degree as a weapon and certainly not to the same degree as a weaponized virus that has the capability to kill millions or billions of people.
You can think in black and white but the world just doesn't work that way.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
I don't have an opinion either way, I just noticed you make a bald assertion and pointed that out...
"Your reply is not really worth replying to as it has no substance but what the hell, I was here."
that's correct, it merely consists in pointing out the voidness of your post. you replied, but you didn't refute me, at all. thanks for the confirmation I guess ^^
At least these sort of weapons are a potential foot gun. Anyone developing one has to be at somewhat suicidal to want to do so.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
But doing evil acts that intend to cause harm to another human being are not the proper way to go about expressing your point, and by justifying those actions by implying "it will be much worse if we don't do these evil things" ignores the third and most likely possibility - that humanity will realize that it has fucked up bad and normal people will fight for the environment eventually without you perpetrating evil on others. The GP is entirely correct: to justify evil actions by ignoring other non-evil options is the true face of evil.
I would ask you to think long and hard about the sort of world you want your grandchildren to inherit; are you really sure you want them to inherit a world where it is okay to hurt others (who don't necessarily disagree with you) just because somebody thinks they are right?
I am an atheist and an environmentalist, but perpetrating evil on somebody else is only acceptable in a self-defense situation where the options are life or death, and we are hardly at that point.
My implication was that any publicly funded research could be labeled "military" and suppressed, which is a subversion of the entire "academic commons" of scientific research and independent validation.
Wow, that looks really interesting...
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
No.. the real enemy is/are the investors who somehow think that funding research into a newer super deadly virus is better than research into solving some of the REAL problems in the world.. because *good* people do not buy , or pay for, biological weapons such as this, but only monsters, "terrists" and sleazy guvenmints (props to G.B. for this "new wurld inglish")..
You've obviously not read much in the nuclear sciences. The mechanisms of a nuclear bomb have been common knowledge for decades. It's truly not that hard. What is truly hard is refining the reactive material. Even that is fairly common knowledge, though exceedingly hard technically.
I agree with sociocapitalist. Gov by fear leads to things like the Third Reich and the McCarthy era... Neyt!
And what the fuck is wrong with passing around a bong and thinking about things?
Biological engineering is incredibly cheap compared to nuclear engineering.
I don't disagree, but I would point out that, at least in academic science, people are by far the most expensive part of research--even at the near-slave-wages that researchers are paid. I have no idea what a competent PI/PM costs on the black market (I mean, what is the tuition cost to get a doctorate in evil these days?), but no amount of infrastructure or materials can replace the expertise and knowledge needed to take findings from an article in Science and turn them into an effective weapon. If it were that easy to weaponize a virus, then one would think that Iran, North Korea, Iraq, and Pakistan would have gone after biological weapons research in place or in addition to nuclear. Biological weapons strike me as a fine deterrent; stick a few on some missiles and put a big red button in a brief case, just like a nuke... possibly even scarier than nukes because of the novelty.
But the point, again, is that Science != Engineering and a lot of work has to be done to transfer a technology--even biological--from the laboratory to a blueprint for a weapon. I am not a biologist/virologist, but my understanding is that influenza viruses cannot survive in non-physiological conditions, so the current delivery vector would likely have to be a flock of birds (turkey cannons?). Give it a few decades to mature and I'm sure Johnny Terrorist will be whipping up deadly flu viruses in his bathtub, but for the time being it is not at all straightforward to engineer, grow, package, and a deploy a virus as a weapon.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.
New meaning of Terrorism in US dictionary: Terrorism = Censorship
Recipes for USA bankrupt - http://tinypaste.com/0d66f dd = dollar deluge (printed in the infinity)
You know, they're trying to use a modified version of the AIDS virus to deliver cancer killing drugs. Not only that, but studying how viruses get virulent may teach us how to stop a 1918 Spanish Flu type pandemic. If you're going to limit discussion on modifying viruses and such, you're going to limit science and medicine.
Your fear is based on bad movie plots and lack of information.
--
BMO
I understand your point but I think we can't group all research into the same category without taking risk into account. If a technology can kill large amounts of people and perhaps be relatively easily (re)created then perhaps we don't want that information to be in the hands of people who want to kill us.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
There might be minor details, but there is nothing too novel here. Any biologist could go for this with time and money. I think the reason it is not done is probably because there are so few biologist dumb enough to not recognize that it would bite back in the ass quickly.
Now doomsday cult, like those evangelist and their rapture, that is another story. I would not put past them to "force" the rapture a bit by releasing deadly virus.
But that is beside the fact that the info is available in advanced university biology library.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(2008_TV_series) for an example of how this can happen. ...
This theme was remade recently in a second TV series, but with a more malignant twist the second time around.
The global plague that doesn't "decimate" (kill off one tenth), but obliterates humanity, leaves about 1 in 100,000 alive surviving from a human-engineered virus that kills through a cytokine storm. Not so dissimilar from reality, all of a sudden. I liked the first series about 20 years ago. The remake had a different edge to the stories - well done, actually.
In the new series, the virus was created by some who also thought it a splendid idea to thin the world's population a tad. It didn't work out too well for them in the end of the TV series (spoiler alert on the wiki page), and this might not work out too well for us.
But too bad, rotten luck and all. We're all going to die anyway, eventually, and if we are stupid as I think we are, we'll probably just let this happen and it won't matter to us once we're gone anyhow.
It was fun for a while knowing you guys
Merry Christmas, and all that other hooey ...
Don't get me wrong. Study of viruses, EMP, nuclear fusion, and all manner of potentially highly destructive things is good - extrapolating the results for the general public (virus can kill everyone, EMP can demolish society, fusion explosion underwater can create a chain reaction burning all the water in the oceans...) is what I am opposed to.
And, I do agree - I am the guy that puts my FTP and HTTP ports on random numbers, not because I think it makes them secure, but because I believe that, in practice, they will take more than 30,000 times as long to fall to the hackers (probably much longer since most hackers spend their time banging away on 21 and 80 instead of searching the whole space.)
However, I would much rather have some kind of responsibility among the press about spreading this tripe around - not sure how to do that without putting a muzzle on them, and the muzzle is arguably worse than the stuff they spout about. The scientists need to do the studies in order to understand what's possible and what's possible to do about it. The public may need to know a bit about what's possible, though I think we (the public) are woefully under-informed on reality and over-fed on Hollywood hype.
I take it you subscribe to the 'some evil is ok club'? Let me guess, traditional terrorism is ok depending on your victim too? I'll give you a hint *.terrorists = evil, and it doesn't matter what the * is. Every terrorist thinks that their morally justified to commit murder and inflict terror for their pet cause, they just substitute their pet cause for the *.
I would call you an idiot, with statements like 'once the oil runs out and the sea rises 20 feet', but I think your just plain evil. I'm guessing your the kind of person they had in mind when they looked at holding this information back from the public. Morally justifying murder for your pet cause doesn't make you good, it just makes you deranged.
Yet you continue to argue slippery slope fallacy based on nothing but absolute science fiction.
A fusion reaction under water can burn all the water in the oceans? Really? We've actually done the "bomb under water" thing and the oceans are still here, guy.
Weaponizing viruses is extremely tricky and requires a lot more technology and smarts, really, than any terrorist organization has. Really, look at how intelligent the people are who go to blow themselves up. You expect them to suddenly come up with a weaponized version of the flu? I think you give them way too much credit .
>EMP can demolish society
Go read up on solar storms and what they can do to the Earth. If we have another one like in 1859, we're pretty much fucked, and that is more likely than a terrorist cell exploding a fission bomb in the ionosphere.
You invent scenarios that are less likely than MomNature herself fucking with us. You worry about the wrong things.
--
BMO
Yet you continue to argue slippery slope fallacy based on nothing but absolute science fiction.
A fusion reaction under water can burn all the water in the oceans? Really? We've actually done the "bomb under water" thing and the oceans are still here, guy.
And, you continue to miss the point, I am not worried about these things, these are the things that the media pumps up about the "science" they report on, past and present. I left out the black hole from the LHC...
I am not worried about these things, these are the things that the media pumps up about the "science" they report on,
You said absolutely nothing about this in your previous posts on this. You argued with a straight face about science fiction scenarios and expected me to take them seriously.
It is not my problem if you cannot communicate clearly.
It is not my job to be clairvoyant and throw chicken bones to divine what you meant. Go find some other witch doctor.
--
BMO
Largely I agree...except with expecting the press not to share information. I think that either the information should be public, as in most cases, or if it's really a question of the ever overused 'National Security' (which is used for bullshit as often as for legitimate reasons, no doubt, but which remains a valid concern for some topics) then it should never enter the public domain at all.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
1) All information does not end up in the public domain and to think so implies a level of naivete a bit beyond belief.
Oh really? Name one invention more than 50-100 years old whose implementation, inner workings, etc isn't common knowledge.
2) 'The common man' does not need to know how to make nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. I'd just as soon that organizations that want to attack my society also not know how to make such weapons.
Except that everyone already DOES know how. That cat is long out of the bag, reproduced, and had several generations of kittens. Good luck putting it back in.
3) Where some few governments have succeeded, with the help of other governments, I'm sure there are a lot of people and organizations, not to mention countries, who have been very determined to make a nuclear weapon who have obviously failed or we'd know about it.
Oh really? And how would you know about it, exactly, if someone built a small experimental nuclear reactor and produced enough plutonium to build a few warheads, until the warhead was actually detonated? And what makes you think anyone capable of doing such a thing would squander the capability by wasting it on anything but the most extraordinary of circumstances?
Humanity doesn't work exactly like you think it does. There aren't people who are "just out" to kill us, for no real reason, and will stop at nothing to do it. We create these people through our jacked up foreign policies. When we stop being bullies and accept our PLACE in the world as ONE of many nations, instead of the world's police force, then we don't have to worry about crazy asses trying to blow our cities up.
1) All information does not end up in the public domain and to think so implies a level of naivete a bit beyond belief.
Oh really? Name one invention more than 50-100 years old whose implementation, inner workings, etc isn't common knowledge.
It's not an answerable question.
2) 'The common man' does not need to know how to make nuclear, chemical or biological weapons. I'd just as soon that organizations that want to attack my society also not know how to make such weapons.
Except that everyone already DOES know how. That cat is long out of the bag, reproduced, and had several generations of kittens. Good luck putting it back in.
Nuclear tech is out yes, but it is difficult enough to replicate that most entities can't manage it as much as they would like to. And per the next sentence in my previous message, those that have managed it have had a lot of help.
I'm not a biotech engineer (or anything remotely related) but I don't know that it's as difficult to work with biotech as it is to fabricate nuclear material.
3) Where some few governments have succeeded, with the help of other governments, I'm sure there are a lot of people and organizations, not to mention countries, who have been very determined to make a nuclear weapon who have obviously failed or we'd know about it.
Oh really? And how would you know about it, exactly, if someone built a small experimental nuclear reactor and produced enough plutonium to build a few warheads, until the warhead was actually detonated? And what makes you think anyone capable of doing such a thing would squander the capability by wasting it on anything but the most extraordinary of circumstances?
And how do you know that no one has discovered faster than light travel? Or the goose that lays golden eggs?
Until we've seen the evidence of it I'll continue to think that such things aren't technologically achievable at this point in time.
Humanity doesn't work exactly like you think it does. There aren't people who are "just out" to kill us, for no real reason, and will stop at nothing to do it. We create these people through our jacked up foreign policies. When we stop being bullies and accept our PLACE in the world as ONE of many nations, instead of the world's police force, then we don't have to worry about crazy asses trying to blow our cities up.
There are, nonetheless, people who would like to kill us be it for politics, religion or just mental illness. Whatever their reasons, I still don't want them to have information that enables them to do so.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Lack of communicative ability manifests not only in the speaker/writer, but also the listener/reader. Going off the deep end about whose fault it was is usually a case of "three more fingers pointing back at you..."
I didn't go off the deep end.
You misrepresented your argument. Willfully, apparently.
Good day, sir.
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BMO