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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!
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...
No one has ever built the kind of nanotechnological mechanisms that would be capable of self replication, much less "grey goo". Thus, without working examples of nano-machinery, we don't actually know if grey goo is a real risk or not. Every thing we have ever discovered about fundamental physics and working mechanisms in life says that self-replicating nanotechnology IS possible. Existing life is a working example of it. However, the engineering and technical barriers to building some are very large, and it will take many advances before we have any. I personal think the grey goo scenario is plausible, however, safeguards can be taken to make the chance of it happening by accident essentially 0.
Biological viruses are a different scenario. They are not hard to make, and while the chance of an accidental escape is low, if one WERE to happen and to reach a major hub, control would be impossible. Nature will not evolve organisms in the directions of deadly pandemics because evolutionary forces act against this sort of thing. However, doing it on purpose is straightforward and quite easy (the tough part is actually making the genetic changes actually stick in the real lab, but the code changes are not very complex at all)
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.
Let me give an example of an "on purpose" change. 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.
Well, the infected cells would also express the nuclear receptor for that same animal-derived steroid, and be tuned so that ONLY if a critical mass of other infected cells is reached, the next phase begins.
Once critical mass is reached, the infected cells start producing some type of toxin to kill human beings. Or, presumably, do some other unspeakable thing. (no, turning them into zombies is probably not technically possible).
So you'd have a virus that spreads throughout a population, by aerosol, and ONLY once a certain incubation period has passed does it produce some horrible effect all at once, before medical treatment could possibly react. For example, if millions of the cells in the lining of your lungs made botulism toxin all at the same time, you'd be dead in a matter of minutes. There would be no treatment that could save you, and no way to easily detect you had been infected.
Now, this kind of weapon wouldn't be the end of the world. However, in principle it could kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people in waves, all at once, and the first few waves could happen before anyone with authority could react to control the virus somehow. (with drugs, quarantine, etc)
There are also only a limited number of people in the western world with the skills and training to do anything. Make ground zero for the weapon the CDC headquarters and the European equivalent, and I would imagine that the damage caused by this kind of weapon could be a catastrophic, western civilization collapsing event. Sort of how HIV targets the particular T cell type that is effective against HIV itself.
And, I'm not a virologist or a scientist with the training to actually do these kinds of code tweaking. I'm sure much more clever doomsday solutions could be thought of.
Another imbalance is this : making a biological weapon that causes harm is like a BILLION times easier than making one that heals. If it causes harm, but doesn't work correctly, the "bugs" are probably nasty side effects that still accomplish the goal of causing harm. To make something that would heal, you have to make countless tries to find a change that is safe, and then spend billions of dollars proving it is safe enough, and then more billions defending yourself in court when it turns out not to be perfect. It's a lot easier to break something than to repair it, especially a system as complex as a human being.
So forget the idea of using the same tech to build a defense.