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Science Panel Recommends Censoring Bird Flu Papers
Morty writes "The National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) has recommended that details of two research papers involving Avian Flu not be published because of security concerns. At least one of the research groups says that their work should be logically reproducible. The NSABB's censorship recommendations do not (currently) have the force of law, but Science and Nature voluntarily delayed publication."
tooo late...
http://www.doctortipster.com/6952-dutch-researcher-created-a-super-influenza-virus-with-the-potential-to-kill-millions.html
not exact but.... MILLIONS!
These people are an official panel of the US Department of Health. From Wikipedia:
It is tasked with recommending policies on such questions as how to prevent published research in biotechnology from aiding terrorism, without slowing scientific progress.
Just in case you've never heard of them (I know I haven't).
I rarely respond to comments. Also, don't ask for clarifications: a brain and Google are faster, believe me!
If they don't want anyone to read the papers, they should print off millions of copies with an official-looking government cover, then send them out all over the country with big letters on the envelope: "Important Information from Your Government".
That guarantees no-one will read it.
> At least one of the research groups says that their work should be logically reproducible.
I would hope that all papers are reproducible... since one of the criteria for doing "science" is that your results are falsifiable... that is, someone can rerun your experiment to prove you wrong.
Call Dustin Hoffman and tell him Gary Sinese is immune
Nor will they ever be binding as one of the groups is based in Europe and one of the journals is published/hq'd in Europe. Why would their law (NIH is based in the US) ever be binding to a group/publication not based in the US. The US needs to a refresher course in jurisdiction.
When security vulnerabilities are discovered in a piece of software (that is not open source), the release of that information may be delayed to allow sufficient time for the developers to patch the vulnerability. This organisation is basically asking that the release of this information be delayed until such a time as it is irrelevant. The problem we see with this is that people will always find the unreleased vulnerabilities, and it is entirely possible that this will happen in this case, but it would be a bit more catastrophic than a 0-day IIS vulnerability.
Anonymous Coward
Just look at the fact that the bird flu story is directly after then Angry Birds story. Maybe it's just the fact that I'm waking up at 3am and later about 5-something AM, but I think there's more than just a casual connection here. Look at the facts:
1. Both about birds.
2. Both about people unable to control themselves.
3. One is about a bird virus, the other about birds going viral.
There is something at play here... not sure what it is just yet...
What "starts"? Withholding scientific publications because of various "national security" concerns is most definitely not a new practice.
What they actually did was create a NEW strain of the virus, which was physically transmissible. Before they bred this transmissible virus via ferrets, it was not easily transmitted to humans.
So what they did was actually create a superflu... one with a high mortality rate in humans and is easily transmissible. Whereas before these experiments, it already had a high mortality rate, but was not easy to transmit.
These were extrememly dangerous experiments that should never have been carried out. The labs where they did this work do make mistakes... we know because they have suffered loss of containment in the past!
If you want to read more about it, just google "H5N1" and "ferret".
...leads even scientific circles astray, to do things modern science would not have lowered itself to do as litte as a mere decade ago. How sad.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
Anyone who has half-a-background in virology would have had this stroke of inspiration by now. So what has been accomplished with this ban? Well, lot's of attention has now been brought on the matter to alert the quarter-brained ones.
Shh.
.. before someone crazy enough to release such a virus is capable of creating one. At least up until now, the people capable tend to have a mind reasonable enough to show restraint about it.
If it gets easier to do, this may no longer be the case, and so there may be only a matter of time. That doesn't mean we have to help it along by publishing the information necessary to create one in public access journals. If censoring these articles delays the inevitable by just a few months, that is either a few months that can be spent trying to combat it, or even just a few months of extra life for hundreds of millions of people.
seems to me a collective of respected, well known and conscientous scientists, or even professors, should be the ones determining securuty concerns.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Since they'd kill their own people and snuff out their cause.
However that still leaves the deranged , which unfortunately there are a lot of on the planet. Though whether they could be deranged enough AND smart enough at the same time to do it is another matter.
things that are basically obvious to people with ordinary knowledge needed by any industrial worker, well, you cant keep them secret.
nuclear weapons, for example, are not hard to build. the hard part is scraping together enough enriched uranium.
... more government intervention involving suppression of information.
Finding a way to unlock and defeat H1N1, et al will continue to be massively underfunded because drones are cooler and my taxes are just too damn high.
false complacency
are you telling us it is impossible for someone to create something lethal and easily transmissible and release it, by mistake or on purpose?
if you are going to grant it is impossible but unlikely, do you not grant that the consequences are huge?
and giant tsunamis will never strike nuclear plants
and religious fundamentalists will never fly planes into office towers
there's many kinds of ignorant folly in this world
read, and educate yourself as to how your psychology and cognition fails you, and us:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_swan_theory
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I am telling you that the research that was done on N5H1 is misreported
from http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/481443a.html :
viruses possessing a haemagglutinin (HA) protein from highly pathogenic avian H5N1 influenza viruses can become transmissible in ferrets
that is all, viruses with one of the proteins ( a type of largish organic molecule) that H5N1 is using to attack cells can also attack cells ...
this one has more details about how they got viruses with that particular protein http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature10884.html, with my emphasis added
To determine whether H5N1 viruses could be transmitted between humans, my team generated viruses that combined the H5 haemagglutinin (HA) gene with the remaining genes from a pandemic 2009 H1N1 influenza virus. Avian H5N1 and human pandemic 2009 viruses readily exchange genes in experimental settings, and those from a human virus may facilitate replication in mammals. Indeed, we identified a mutant H5 HA/2009 virus that spread between infected and uninfected ferrets (used as models to study the transmission of influenza in mammals) in separate cages via respiratory droplets in the air. Thus viruses possessing an H5 HA protein can transmit between mammals.
Our results also show that not all transmissible H5 HA-possessing viruses are lethal. In ferrets, our mutant H5 HA/2009 virus was no more pathogenic than the pandemic 2009 virus — it did not kill any of the infected animals. And, importantly, current vaccines and antiviral compounds are effective against it.
depressing ... ScyFy (and sci-fi too) should be forbidden and mandatory science + reading comprehension examinations be passed before getting the right to vote ... yeah, probably lethal viruses can be engineered (though I have not yet heard of any research that succeeded in doing it, probably my fault), but not using their methods
The resources in this world are finite and there are opportunity costs when doing one thing instead of another. In my opinion the cost:benefit and risk:reward ratio of this sort of research aren't good enough. Better to do something else first.
Many like to use the excuse that others will do it if "we" don't do it, and my reply is it'll at least be later rather than sooner, and it's still a stupid reason to do something, because as our technology improves we may start to have the capability to create the equivalent of a "Cheap Big Red Button That Kills Everyone", so do we put our resources into developing that first just because we can, or do we first concentrate on building a society where nobody would ever push such a button even if it exists?
The important atomic bomb secret was that it could be done.
The important secret here is that "university-based scientists in the Netherlands and Wisconsin created a version of the so-called H5N1 influenza virus that is highly lethal and easily transmissible between ferrets."
Assume that there are terrorists out there who wish to develop a virological weapon, and have the smarts and the wherewithal to do so. They now know that the H5N1 virus is a good place to start and that there's a winning combination to be found. Holding back the precise blueprint isn't going to delay things much. You have to assume the terrorists are capable of doing research-quality work. It sounds rather as if researchers in the Netherlands and Wisconsin both found answers indepedently. It's quite possible that the terrorists, working on their own, will find something original and better than either of them.
What suppressing the research might do is make it difficult for other researchers to experiment with protective measures against them.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Streisand effect for would-be bioterrorists?
you can't build such a society. the outliers are natural. for example: schizophrenia. there is zero protection in trying to build a society without malintentioned individuals. there weill always be malintentioned individuals. you suggest a fool's errand
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Then logically in the not so long run we are doomed if we persist in developing technologies that allow mass killing to be cheaper and easier.
You just completely ignored everything I said. I am fully cognizant of the danger and folly of ignorant false alarmism. I am talking about an equally dangerous folly: false complacency.
So I will spell it out for you: your complacency is not a product of your intellect and your education. It is a product of an emotional bias just as dangerous as the false alarmism we are both aware of, but for some reason, you see only the false alarmism as the danger on this topic. Failure in cognition on your part.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
So we stop trying? We ignore our ability to gauge probability and costs and do nothing regardless of how cheap and easy some black swans cost to prevent?
The sun occasionally will zap us with enough solar wind/ radiation to induce current in sites that could knock out all power transformers on the northern hemisphere. Probability: very rare. Costs to prevent: low (small advance warning system of a few minutes, auto kick off transformers from long power lines).
Your advice is to do nothing even if the cost is low?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Read again. Where did I say do nothing?
oh, that was it ... missed the point ... my bad
please add to your list:
- birds leaving bread on electrical transformers serving hi-power installations (such as LHC), causing shorts and needing million €s in repairs
or please remember this, if your reading comprehension is suffering: the methods used by the Dutch researchers cannot be used to create dangerous virii
I hope YOU all die because of our stupidity.
captcha: ingrate
Don't read, because there is by definition no education in bullshit. Only brainwashing with aforementioned bullshit.
This "theory" is typical example of philosophical nonsense.
Don't.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
getting tired of this ...
Thanks for cutting through Jane Q's crap. Jane Q exists to intentionally miss the point in subtle ways and argue endlessly, never quite coming to grips with reality, while always retreating to some absurd evasion that seems to acknowledge the obvious while, in fact, concluding the exact opposite. The best we can do is mod down Jane Q's egregious troll posts and point out the insidious misinformation in the better crafted ones.
On every topic you could imagine, Jane Q insists upon things such as that the earth is hollow, birds evolved from insects, bismuth is a stable element, water shrinks when it freezes, super conductivity is the result of electron tripletting, dark matter is a myth, Thomas Jefferson created judicial review, etc, etc, etc, on and on forever. There is literally no subject upon which Jane Q will not loudly correct the truth with misapprehension. Some assholes strangle hookers, others rape their children, but this is what Jane Q does.
Legal will? What are you talking about? Go read TFA. It clearly states that the "Science Panel" recommended the papers be published with the methodology removed.
The Slashdot headline implies they are a science panel, but in fact they are a security panel with scientists on it. Their purpose in life, like lawyers, is to be professionally risk averse, error on the side of saying "no", and censoring any and all information that falls into their domain of knowledge which could potentially be used at some point in the future to do anything risky.
We need people like this, but we don't need them to be the judge, jury, and executioner on what science does or does not get done, or we are sending ourselves back to the time of the Inquisition, who was not so pissed off at Galileo for observing, or for reporting those observations, as they were that he reported them in Italian so that common people had access to the information.
-- Terry
I think it's -possible- that garage molecular biology research is just around the corner. I wasn't around for the era of kids in their garages with a computer leading to million dollar startups, but it seems to me like it's going to happen with DNA.
Affordable PCR machines, or DIY PCR machines are starting to appear, fully sequenced genomes are of course available freely online. Anyone with half a brain can design primers and amplify DNA, anyone with a little patience can make any construct they want.
At the same time, DNA constructs are commercially available, and it's not too hard to see that the prices are inflated. The FUCCI cell cycle indicator is pretty cool, with a decent microscope, you can watch cell cycles. FUCCI is basically genes found in nature stitched together, but to buy the constructs, you'd need to shell out nearly a thousand dollars (maybe the price has come down, it's been a while since I looked into it.)
This seems like a pretty similar situation to music in the napster area: the path of least resistance to acquiring it is ignoring any copyright protections on this stuff. It's not too terribly complicated to make FUCCI yourself using PCR and some enzymes. I'm aware that copyright law and DNA hasn't been completely settled yet, but it's worth thinking about now in my opinion.
I think there's a real danger that companies who hold copyrights on DNA are going to try to enforce them by taking draconian measures. Something like DRM might be invented for DNA sequences I suppose, but I doubt that would even work as well as DRM on music. Instead what I think they'd do is try to kill off the home biology research field before it starts. And I think they'd point to stuff like this to justify it. "We can't have people building their own PCR machines: THEY'LL MAKE SUPERFLU! So please pass the protect life act, which stipulates that no company shall sell PCR primers for copyrighted DNA sequences."
It's possible I'm buying trouble, and am just overly cynical about corporations using laws to enrich themselves by limiting progress. Still, I'd hate to see biological research be stifled any further by copyright law.
The whole argument from your link about it not being as lethal as H5N1 is pure speculation - as he admits, we don't know transmissibility of the strain in humans, because we won't do that experiment.
Right. But the expectation is that the mutations the virus makes, in the process of improving their ability to infect the new non-human host, typically reduce their ability to infect humans. Not necessarily true, of course. But more likely than not.
Even if the new host is "closer to us" on the evolutionary tree, immune systems and cell-surface viral targets are about the fastest evolving (and diverging) parts of the genome. If they'd done this with primates as the target I'd worry. But (absent some research showing that the hemagglutinin targets on ferrets are especially similar to those in primates) I wouldn't worry lay odds that hops from birds to ferrets might make the virus more dangerous, rather than less dangerous or unchanged, when it comes to people.
As I understand it the original research was into finding out how the virus does/might hop species. That's something that does need to be researched. Even if it might make something that you REALLY don't want to escape as a side effect.
Meanwhile the fact of what they're up to and how they did it IS a cat out of the bag, even if the particular two residues that changed isn't yet published. Absent stealing the resulting virus from the lab, a potential bioterrorist would probably be ahead doing his own make-it-hop experiments using something antigenically closer to humans than he would getting the info on THIS thing's sequence and trying to hack the genome of the wild strain to match.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You're a moron. All the link is saying is that surprise rare events have shaped history. Its not fucking complicated, and more importantly, its absolutely right. But I encourage your hatred of philosophy, maybe you'll marry your stated belief with your actions and stop sharing your ideas, to our benefit.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
GP was fully justified in calling you on your complacency. True, as it turned out, the mutant virus was not apparently particularly lethal. However, and this is the more important point: that was not known in advance; it easily could have been.
I repeat: some of these same labs have had containment breaches before. It can and does happen.
If, as you state, the research is truly needed, then better facilities should be built and better protocols for containment developed.
Further, just in case YOUR reading comprehension is weak (as it seems to be):
According to the article you linked to (the one published on January 25), in one of the labs they did indeed create an H5 HA variant of the H5N1 virus, that was -- quite predictably -- deadly to the ferrets. And again, since ferret susceptibility to influenza is so close to that of humans, it is very likely that it was, indeed, a "superflu" transmissible to humans.
How you missed that is beyond me. It's right there in plain English, in paragraph 5.
Also, "virus" is Greek, not Latin. The proper plural form is "viruses".
Oops, pardon me, I guess I got that backward. Latin, not Greek. In any case, "viruses" is still the proper form.