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Mutant Flu Researchers Declare a Time Out
New submitter scibri writes "Researchers working on highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza have said they will stop work on the virus for 60 days, to allow them to explain the importance of their work to politicians and the public. Quoting: 'Despite the positive public-health benefits these studies sought to provide, a perceived fear that the ferret-transmissible H5 HA viruses may escape from the laboratories has generated intense public debate in the media on the benefits and potential harm of this type of research. We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.'"
Reader Harperdog sends in a related article arguing that we shouldn't be having a debate about the censorship of research, but rather a debate over whether the research should have been allowed in the first place.
Are they researchers for the mutant flu or are they flu researchers that are mutants? Or did the mutant flu make them mutants?
If these guys don't do the research, someone else will. Probably some government, and then they'll spread it once they have a secret cure for themselves.
And this is the way the new Dark Ages will begin. Not from where you'd expect, religious fundamentalists who are offended by the challenge reality presents to their mythology. But from easily-frightened handwringing "ethicists", who had they been around in the time of the caveman would have taken away Ugh's flint for fear he'd burn down the forest were he to succeed in starting a fire.
I'm going to dream about an old woman in a cornfield on a porch soon, aren't I?
Research with dangerous things works much better in self-limiting environments. There wouldn't be much risk of trouble if they were on a moon or space base. We're really playing with fire when we test things that could wipe us out.
I knew those ferrets where up to something. They must be stopped!
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your kids, and hitting them?"
...have someone studying it now rather than having them start when its already too late. It can take months or years to create a vaccine, then more time to manufacture/distribute it to the public. By this time a large proportion of the world's population could be infected.
'But he thinks that the duration of the pause is too short. “The 60 days will likely not be adequate in terms of getting a truly workable international policy and applying that. I just don't think that's realistic,” he says. '
Is it really too short, or are the parties involved not interested enough to put their time into resolving it quickly? Because if they aren't really interested in coming to a resolution, the scientists have just wasted 60 days of their lives for people who don't actually care.
And I admit I don't know the difference between level 3 and level 4 facilities, but if it really could cause a pandemic, why is it not under the highest security? That's my life you're taking a chance on and claiming you're being cautious enough. I think anything you could learn from it is not worth the risk of my life.
I'm all for science and progress, but scientists are known for forgetting the stakes of what they're doing and claiming that progress is necessary, no matter the risk. It sounds to me like they need some oversight, and that's what this is.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release.
Why does this remind me of all the stories where some contractor walked out of a "secure $organization facility" with highly sensitive data/source code/credit_card numbers etc...?
Should we be surprised when we read a story one day that says that some Chinese researcher walked out the door with a container of some highly contagious strain of Ferret Flu...
A virus more deadly than Humans? Works on Ferrets to.
We could use a couple good ones.
Would somebody please think of the poor terrorists? Everybody knows they are not smart enough to do this sort of research on their own. Without real scientists helping them create doomsday weapons like this one, how will they ever take over the world?
The experiment is so low-tech that anyone with access to the virus could do it. They literally exposed one ferret to another, several times, and the virus strain that successfully transmitted was, well, transmissible.
Which means people should know how easily this can be done.
It kind of puts a burden on these guys to prove it can be done so they can warn people, for the same reason that we want security researchers to, hey, research security. And to tell people when they find security problems.
What they are working on is a way to create a sustainable world with a far smaller population. You can't just line people up against the wall and shoot them or poison them as the Nazis did but a global epidemic accidentally released from a laboratory will serve just as well and with a far smaller number of people that need to be held accountable.
and that should give us time to find that Damn ferret.
If I was a mutant, I would take some time off from researching the flu, too.
Of COURSE I didn't RTFA!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bWJFAdup25Q
my mom
Who really cares if mutants get the flu? The less monsters the better, I say.
If these are the same people who flipped their shit over H1N1, their importance = 0.
Otherwise, whatever.
Hello, Ron A. M. Fouchier and 38 co-authors here. I want to assure everyone that our work on a highly pathogenic H5N1 avian influenza will have no
er...
hold a moment...
we aren't feeling too well..
can someone please #$%^
NO CARRIER
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
Personally, I feel that if these scientists insist they have the right to create a highly infectious agent that is airborne and kills 60% of those infected, the public has the right to kill these scientists.
It seems like both right and left want to stop research in science depending on RELIGIOUS POVs. The evangelicals, want to stop genetic research, deny evolution as well as Global Warming. The left, with their own brand of religion, want to stop nuclear research and now this.
it is hard to believe that America was at one time, the leading nation in science. Since the likes of reagan onwards, we have suffered over and over by both extremist on right and left wings.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I see no reason for an experimental virus to be both highly contagious and deadly at the same time. Couldn't you learn the same thing from two viruses. One that was very contagious but not dangerous and another that was very deadly but not contagious?
Why put the warhead in the missile if you don't intend to kill people? if you want to test the missile, put a dummy warhead in it. If you want to test the warhead, then detonate without the delivery mechanism.
Viral researchers do this sort of thing all the time. They test contagious viruses with harmless strains to watch how they get into the body. Deadly strains are typically injected. They're not airborne.
Maybe I don't understand what they're doing but the whole thing smells like a germ warfare lab if they're combining the two and trying to make them more deadly. That's a weaponization program.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
... it's biotechnology as usual, only this time the public got to hear about it and now, being utterly ignorant of anything, they're in a panic.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
No, the researchers are themselves a highly evolved mutation of the influenza virus.
Which mean that they can't produce offspring unless they infect you?
Whatever you do, don't click the link!
:-P
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
The military are going to want something which is both easy to pass on and effective at taking out the enemy population.
Deleted
It seems to me that these researchers need adult supervision. Forgetting about 'terrorism' for the moment, the consequences of a small mistake or small misunderstanding are far too large. They appear to be thinking like little children playing with cap guns than like adults working with technologies that could possibly lead to either another human population bottleneck or, indeed, extinction.
And where is the most money? Military research.
Clearly it's going to be weaponised. They're probably researching selectivity now.
Doomsday weapon; kill all humans on the planet. Except that's not really what you want, it might get you. What you want is to selectively be able to kill someone. Maybe an individual, maybe a certain ethnicity etc.
So. They've already got the doomsday weapon now, the biological equivalent of the hydrogen bomb. How do you control it? How do you make it only kill Russians, or Iranians? Could it be used to assassinate Putin?
Deleted
...the really bad stuff that the evolution of these virii WILL produce at some point.
NOT. VIRII.
You sound like an idiot.
Indeed. The closest Latin word to virii would be viri, which is just the plural for vir, "a man". So I guess the GGP might be right -- "the evolution of these virii^Wmen" *has* produced some really bad stuff.
More pedantically though, assuming virii existed as the plural of some Latin word, the rules state that the singular would be virius -- still not virus, and not a word in any language that I'm aware of.
Going the other way from singular to plural and using basic Latin rules, many people might look at virus and assume you just change the -us to -i to make the plural, but that gives us viri again -- meaning "men" as the plural of "a man". Looking deeper, we find that the actual Latin word virus was uncountable , so it never even had a plural in Latin -- so applying Latin rules for deriving the plural is just silly.
Applying English rules for plural formation to the *countable* *English* word virus gives us the proper plural form viruses.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
It's still just a variation of the Flu. Some people will be resistant.
If you want a doomsday weapon you have to genetic engineer in some African sleeping sickness surface chemistry genes. That would really fuck over our immune systems.
I bet (hope) the new $150,000 gene sequencer machines are pre-hacked not to sequence those genes, just like printers would'nt copy currency. All they would need is a table of hash's in the machine. Every time the CDC finds a new very dangerous gene they add a hash with the next update.
Otherwise it's just a matter of time before some small group of lunatics cooks up something for Prof Farnsworth's collection.
Governments for all their faults seem to lack the insanity required to kill us all. Even the Indians/Pakis haven't nuked each other. A-bombs seem to force a level of sanity on otherwise fanatical people.
Perhaps its facing the A-bombs that does it. When it was only one, it was bombs away, don't fuck with us now. Granting 'don't fuck with us now' is a lot better then any historical precedent.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"We would like to assure the public that these experiments have been conducted with appropriate regulatory oversight in secure containment facilities by highly trained and responsible personnel to minimize any risk of accidental release."
If it wasnt world war iii, numerous private 'defense' companies would be working on atom bomb by then, and be willing to contract with whichever nation was willing to buy from them. of course, atom bomb research ALSO would eventually enable nuclear power. ..........
this kind of thing goes beyond atomic bomb. to effectively discharge an atomic bomb you need to go through numerous hurdles. to start a plague bomb, all you need is a working sample that is enough to infect 3-4 people in a crowded location.
Read radical news here
... Why are they not working on something that multiplies in just air alone and kills within minutes of contact?
I mean if they are going to speculate on what nature might or not create, why don't they just go for the brass ring?
It's still just a variation of the Flu. Some people will be resistant.
Wonderful. We've just shifted out of 12 Monkeys and entered The Stand...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
It is a risk/reward analysis; to me the risk of killing billions of people is much heavier on my scale of importance than any reward from the research.
The risk of research: Billions of people could die if containment fails or if natural strains evolve and spread before an effective vaccine is developed.
Reward of research: Eliminate risk of Billions of people dying if natural strains evolve and spread or containment fails.
Risk of NO research: Billions of people could die if natural strains evolve and spread.
Reward of NO research: eliminate risk of Billions of people dying from containment failure.
Which is better? There is no action that creates zero risk of Billions of people dying.
Has anybody noticed that Governement oversight and regulations where your personal data is concerned gets out all the time, so why should we trust their abilities to contain a deadly disease?
Since we now know that there are a plural number of infinities, it only stands to reason that "uncountable" should be extended to also have a plural form.
Further, although Latin is officially a "dead" language (ie: no longer evolving), there is no reason why it can't be undead and therefore still have new words added to the dictionary.
The word "virus" in the discussion here might derive from the Latin, but in modern English discourse the term has clearly been borrowed into the English language and is used as English. There's no need to change anything about Latin dictionary entries unless something changes in how Latin itself is used, as Latin.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
I think you are not quite doing justice to the subject. The Latin Language Forum has a rather longer treatment of it.
In Neo-Latin the plural is vira.
Interesting thread; I recall reading something along those lines some years ago, but clearly forgot the conclusion.
While this certainly fills in details lacking from my post, the issue at hand in Gotung's post and then in geekoid's reply was the proper plural in English. I'm not sure if a word borrowed from classical Latin into modern English should use Neo-Latin forms, at least not when there are already perfectly serviceable English forms available.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
"We would like to reassure the public that there is no way this can ever escape the la"
likewise, radioactive decay is happening everywhere on earth, so who cares if someone has a neutron bomb
pffffffffffft
of course in the vast scope of the universe human endeavour is paltry. but that doesn't mean a couple of smart humans can't get together and make a virus purposefully tailored to infect humans, and do that well, and do that tomorrow, rahter than mother nature arriving at the juncture in 20-2000 years
and some other asshole fucks up and releases it by mistake or some nutcase thinks its a good idea to repeat the experiment and release it because allah or god or yahweh said to
so i'll make you a deal: i won't posit mankind as omnipotent in the face of mother nature's power, if you don't pretend mankind has no abilities to royally screw himself. deal?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
false complacency
intelligence is not freaking out in panic at every possible scary scneario
intelligence is not being completely relaxed even when a possible scary scenario grows in possibility
intelligence is realizing both extremes are a problem
i am glad you and others are so smart as to see false alarmism is dangerous
now grow the other half of your brain and realize false complacency is equally dangerous
if you don't have an appreciation of man's vast power to completely fuck up on purpose or by mistake, you're an idiot
reference: fukushima
(now we will hear form those who will dismiss fukushima as not an example of any warning about mankind's ability to screw up... guess what: you false complacent types are just ignorant as the hysterical false alarmists. now grow a brain and learn why)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfejBpD_wm4
We could unite against the mutant menace! :-)
See also this thread I started:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2621264&threshold=0&commentsort=0&mode=thread&cid=38699248
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Sorry about the typo in his name.
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Hey Ugh, Hey Ugh!
Nyup Nyup, I mean Ugh Ugh Ugh!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
Forgetting something...?
A group of people controlling lots of money with political influence are generally pretty sane to begin with to be able to pull off a manhattan level project. That, and keep tabs on these weapons. But event that's not guaranteed with the likes of N. Korea and Iran.
No. The biggest fear is someone cooking up a synthetic virus with one of these sequencers. It's just another form of programming. But instead of controlling computer hardware, your playing with meat. Far more deadly.
Life is not for the lazy.
Epidemiologists worry about H5 because of the often-mentioned "50% case mortality!" However, these are only cases which were bad enough to justify hospitalization in the first place. Much like we do with tuberculosis, we can easily check if people have been infected with an H5-bearing flu strain by checking for circulating antibodies in blood. Extensive testing has revealed many individuals are seropositive for the H5 protein suggesting that the 50% value is highly misleading (due to the biased case selection.)
Now, it's an epidemiologist's JOB to worry about this sort of thing, but a good bit of literature is out there suggesting that the worries are unfounded.
WRT the comment that the research should never have been permitted, hogwash.
What the research shows is that it was quite easy to accelerate the evolution of transmissibility, and it is important to know this. It means that relatively unskilled persons could succeed in creating an easily transmitted form of the virus, and not knowing that could be fatal.
-michael
Comment removed based on user account deletion