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Researchers, Biosecurity Board Debate How Open Virus Research Should Be
New submitter rackeer writes "Exchanging research results is at the heart of the scientific method. However, there are concerns about whether investigations of pandemics, which possibly constitute a threat to the whole population of earth, should be shared. The debate about research on the avian flu was discussed on Slashdot before. Now the main parties have their own two cents to say. On-line at the journal Science are commentaries both by authors of the paper in question, who went ahead with the publication, and by the national advisory board for biosecurity, which advised against publishing."
From the Biohazards committee:
Recently, several scientific research teams have achieved some success in isolating influenza A/H5N1 viruses that are transmitted efficiently between mammals, in one instance with maintenance of high pathogenicity. This information is very important because, before these experiments were done, it was uncertain whether avian influenza A/H5N1 could ever acquire the capacity for mammal-to-mammal transmission. Now that this information is known, society can take steps globally to prepare for when nature might generate such a virus spontaneously.
The method they used (serial passage) isn't complex. The identification of the hemoglutinin protein as the determinant for increased infectivity is interesting, but not particularly relevant to someone interested in a "12 Monkeys" scenario.
Too Late.
We're doomed.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I believe this conversation has already been settled.
sooner or later some scientist is going to kill most the planet by a malicious release or careless negligence, it is not "if" but "when".
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Science is progressing at a reasonable pace BECAUSE scientists share data, results, ideas, etc. If you limit or remove that capability, you will be wiping out a large portion of the creative and lateral thinking that often leads to new methods, as well as create much more waste of resources due to duplication of effort. And when you are dealing with something that involves infection rates, you really want MORE research on it, how else can you gain the knowledge to apply to real situations.
Can something like this be used in a combat or terrorist situation? Yes, but it can also be used to develop countermeasures as well. Besides, there isn't any invention of mankinds that wasn't used to further the ways and means of violence. Medicine, to keep your troops healthy and useful. Food Preservation, to conquer foreign lands. (In fact, that's why Napoleon paid people to develop it.), Vehicles and other means of transportation, you have to get your troops their. HIghways and roads, you have to get them their quickly. (Both the USA and the Roman Empire built their major roads for that purpose, the boost to trade was just a favorable byproduct.), etc.
So if you want to ban research from being shared among the scientists in that field just because it might be used for non-peaceful purposes, then you'll just have to ban everything. And hey, once you've thrown a tablecloth over one genie lamp, it gets a lot easier to justify doing it again. After all, it's just one more...
Screw the National Advisory Board for Biosecurity. I want a damn zombie apocalypse. NOW!
... will be more devastating then natural ones? After all evolution has had millions of years to experiment, not only that there is massive counter-offensive known as immune system and all sorts of other interactions that are not tractable to human minds. Why should anyone assume a pandemic will 'spread out of control' especially with modern facilities? The same thing was thought about nano technology, also known as "grey goo". Why would virus's be any different then 'grey goo' considering how bad human beings are at predicting what nature is capable of or not capable of?
This "controversy" is largely driven by War on Terror scammers who want to 1) set up a bureaucratic lobbyist-driven police state gravy train, and 2) loot the treasury using War on Terror hype as a pretext, much as they have done with Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran. If you think that it is a new phenomenon to use the results of scientific research for nefarious purposes, or that the only major precedent is nuclear arms proliferation you are quite mistaken. Next time you have a few hours of free time and are near a university chemistry library with a hard-copy of Chemical Abstracts that goes back 100 years or so, I highly recommend browsing through it looking for the nastiest substances you can think of. They're in there, recipes and all.
We really need to stop believing all that horse shit just because some pompous windbag politician says it's true. Scientists, who know the literature, are justifiably reticent to cooperate with that crap unless their political aspirations demand it.
They had a lot of mustard gases and viral agents developed in WWI, which were never used. But I do feel nervous. Maybe it's not that the weapons are getting more dangerous... maybe the people on the earth are getting worse.
Gently reply
A great deal of modern science comes from the practice of alchemy, which begat chemistry and (less directly) biology. And a lot of what alchemists did looked like what modern scientists do: they had laboratories, they did experiments, they weighed and measured and otherwise quantified their results, they developed theories consistent with their observations. Similarly, modern astronomy and much of physics grew out of the work of astrologers, who, although they obviously couldn't experiment on the subjects of their observation, did take precise, repeated measurements of the apparent motions of celestial bodies, and developed mathematically rigorous models with considerable predictive power.
So what distinguishes the alchemist or astrologer from the modern scientist? The sharing of knowledge. Alchemy and astrology spread knowledge, if at all, by the apprenticeship system, in which well-respected practicioners would take on a small number of apprentices, swear them to secrecy, and slowly teach them the secrets of (their particular version of) the art, often with considerable penalties for revealing this knowledge to anyone outside the circle; the apprentices would then do the same in turn. The very idea of anything like the modern system of peer-reviewed, widely disseminated publication would have been anathema to them. The walls started to crumble during the late Renaissance period and were more or less completely down by the mid-eighteenth century, and thus modern science was born.
Since then we've seen incremental improvements, of which the internet and open access -- fought tooth and nail by certain journal publishers, who used to be allies of the scientist's labor of spreading knowledge, but have now become the last gatekeepers of the alchemical worldview -- are among the most recent and the most successful. But the basic idea is centuries old. It's thoroughly tested, and it works, in a way that the old mysticism, for all its occasional brilliance, never could. And any attempt to drag us back to the days of sages locking up their knowledge behind guild walls must be fought tooth and nail, or science itself will be in danger.
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
In general, psychotic murderous people are somehow defective. The shoe bomber is more typical than the 9/11 hijackers. This is fortunate, and it's one of the reasons we've never had a terrorist group build a nuclear weapon and detonate it among a civilian population somewhere.
However, if you abuse people, mistreat them, oppress them, steal from them, in huge groups and over generations, they will get increasingly upset, radicalized and dangerous. You will get dangerous people who are otherwise fully functional, capable of planning your destruction and acting on those plans. So if we (privileged Westerners) continue the current international order, which is horribly unjust, we're going to get desperate and angry people who are well enough educated to strike out in this way. Bioterrorism is a predictable consequence of our actions.
This doesn't mean that these hypothetical bioterrorists are not responsible for their actions, or that their actions are justified, or any other defense-of-terrorists which apologists for the powerful might conjure into my mouth. It is simultaneously true that: 1) crimes are the responsibility of those who commit them, regardless of their motives, and 2) if you systematically give people a motive to commit crimes, you will get more crime. If you are serious about reducing crime, rather than about issuing a self-righteous polemic, you will seek to reduce the motives.
Additionally, when large groups of the world's people are systematically oppressed, you do engender sympathy-for-terrorists among the victims of oppression, even when those victims-of-oppression are also the chief victims-of-terrorism for the terrorists you want to catch! This has been illustrated in painful clarity of course in Iraq and Afghanistan. Again, if you are serious about combating terrorism, you start out by doing right by people; if you do, they'll turn the terrorists in.
The easy availability of biomedical technology just raises the stakes.
You could add extra proteins to the virus, that ONLY when present in a human cell with a specific messenger RNA, the messenger RNA would bind to a receptor site on the protein and activate it. This protein would cause the infected human cell to express a gene that would cause it to produce and export some product. I like steroids for this because they don't depend on external receptors that the immune system can detect. So suppose you have the infected cells producing a variant of testosterone borrowed from an animal, or some other steroid.
But what would that do for sports? You come down with the flu once, and later you're outperforming athletes who don't juice.
(no, turning them into zombies is probably not technically possible)
Toxoplasmosis already causes zombie symptoms, so I'd beg to differ with your assessment of "probably not technically possible".
The development of effective vaccines is the most effective strategy for reducing the potential for loss of life from this virus. This measure will increases the likelihood that you or your loved ones will die from something that could have been prevented.
There is a real need for the public to actively lobby for reductions in volume of information which governments are restricting "for the common good" as it is having a negative impact upon society's ability to mitigate the associated risks.
A significant part of the puzzle has been the renewed vigor of the cold war agencies in their war on terror, their practices are geared towards countering foreign intelligence services rather than the the current threat. For example you will find that while terrorist acts are criminal activities the infrastructure which exists in many countries actually effectively reduces agencies ability to counter and prosecute these threats which is disappointing to say the least.
Research organisation have known for many years what our security organisations are only just starting to realize, dissemination yields greater results than information partitioning, in fact the benefits from dissemination are exponential in nature, or conversely, limitations on information flow leads to an exponential reduction in your personal safety.
A great deal of modern science comes from the practice of alchemy, which begat chemistry and (less directly) biology...they had laboratories, they did experiments, they weighed and measured and otherwise quantified their results, they developed theories consistent with their observations...
Say, didn't a great number of Alchemists die of the plague?
We might get to see a repeat if data is not shared thoughtfully. There is no harm in caution around this.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Caution is good. Paranoia isn't
Paranoia is just another word for "backup plan" and "risk analysis". A little bit of paranoia is healthy and necessary in most things.
It's good at this point to take a step back and see what makes sense.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
On the one hand you don't want the wrong people getting a hold of such data, but on the other hand the more people with the ability to create an effective preventive or curative measure against such organisms have access to the data, the better. Who gets to decide who the right people are and (probably more importantly) who the wrong people are? The US? I wouldn't trust the American Government with my hat. My opinion follows: Science and international politics, to offer a simple solution, should be separated and kept separate. Science is about discovery and it's about knowledge, it should not be used as a weapon. So what if the application of such knowledge leads to weapons, benefits few and harms many; peaceful application of knowledge benefits everybody. Anybody who cannot or will not accept that has no place making decisions affecting it.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Good point. Topic adjusted.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
>Estimates of the impact—including the death toll—of a possible future H5N1 virus pandemic for use in (inter)national pandemic preparedness plans do not generally exceed those of the H1N1 Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918.
This is like saying, "Mom, why do you worry? I can't get less than F for this test."
>followed by consultation with local biosafety officers and facility managers
As I suspected this is about US enforcing on other countries their own fear of terrorists as the result of their aggressive external policy
>We consulted with NIAID NIH staff, collaborators within our CEIRS center, and organizers of the ESWI meeting about the decision to make our results available to the public.
smmry:
Restricted Data on Influenza H5N1 Virus Transmission
Since its first detection in 1997, highly pathogenic avian influenza H5N1 virus has devastated the poultry industry of numerous countries of the Eastern Hemisphere.
Estimates of the impact-including the death toll-of a possible future H5N1 virus pandemic for use innational pandemic preparedness plans do not generally exceed those of the H1N1 Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918.
Our research program on H5N1 virus transmission, which led to submission of one of the papers that has stirred up so much recent controversy, aimed to investigate whether and how HPAI H5N1 virus can acquire the ability to be transmitted via aerosols among mammals and whether it would retain its virulence.
If we knew which mutations and biological traits can change the zoonotic H5N1 virus into a virus with major public health impact, detection of specific mutations in circulating avian viruses should trigger more aggressive control programs than those employed currently.
Finally, research laboratories that study H5N1 virus host adaptation, H5N1 virus in mammalian model systems, or use the virus lineage that was the subject of our studies have a need to know because they may unknowingly develop high-risk variants.
Viruses emerging from animal reservoirs have killed many millions of people around the globe without the help of direct human interference, and we need to be prepared for other naturally occurring events similar to those caused by influenza A virus, HIV, SARS-coronavirus, West Nile virus, filoviruses, and henipaviruses.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.