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Putting Biotech Threats In Context
Lasrick writes "This article starts with an interesting anecdote: 'In 1998, President Bill Clinton read a novel about biological warfare that deeply disturbed him. In fact, the story reportedly kept him up all night. It’s one of the reasons that Clinton became personally invested in protecting the United States from bioterrorism threats. The book was The Cobra Event (Preston, 1998), a sci-fi thriller by journalist and novelist Richard Preston that told of a mad scientist who brewed a lethal, genetically engineered virus in his New York City apartment. Preston’s tale highlighted the potential ease with which individuals or small groups with access to advanced bioweapons capabilities could launch attacks on major US cities.1 After reading The Cobra Event, Clinton called several advisory meetings and ordered classified assessments and simulation exercises to examine the threat depicted in the story. As a result of these deliberations, by the end of his administration Clinton had increased funding for biodefense preparedness efforts fourfold, to more than $400 million per year.' The article goes on to describe the two trajectories of bioweapons threats, and puts them both in perspective. It may or may not calm everyone who's ever spent a sleepless night after reading one of the many bioterrorism novels"
I remember seeing a used PCM multiplier online for $10k, and thinking what a powerful piece of machinery that was, especially given this was done in 5 mutations. It makes it sort of scary to think that all that steps in the way of Armageddon, is a disgruntled scientist and about $20k worth of lab equipment and supplies.
You've been watching too many Hollywood movies.
There are so many problems with trying to use bioweapons, you could write a whole series of books on it.
Vaccines are not that easy to develop, especially for something that makes a 'viable' bioweapon.
Just look at HIV. It would make a lousy bioweapon, but it still kills, and with millions upon millions spent on trying to develop a vaccine, they still don't have one that works reliably for human.
And of course, there is no method to target such bioweapons. Sure you can control where it's released, but once that's done, it goes anywhere it wants to.
If you seriously want to worry about bioweapons in this century, you better start worrying about nanotech turning the world into grey goo as well. They have about the same probabilities.
Maybe after centuries worth of man hours and hundreds of billions spent in R&D, it might become a viable threat. Of course, terrorist organizations don't have that kind of time, funding, or foresight much less actual R&D divisions, so they aren't the threat in those fields. Now governments are a different story, but not by much, and for pretty much the same reason.
Related: Richard Preston also wrote the non-fiction book The Hot Zone, where he discusses Ebola, Marburg, and other hot viruses in detail (and it's perhaps the first mass media coverage they received), as well as how the CDC operates to identify, contain, and otherwise deal with hot viruses.
The Cobra Event was OKi for fiction, but rather meh compared to works by Follett or Crichton (RIP), that may be shakier on the science but way more entertaining. However, in my opinion, Preston's non-fiction, documentary accounts in The Hot Zone and in The Demon in the Freezer are way, way, way scarier. Highly recommended.
Trivia: Richard Preston is the only civilian, non-physician/doctor of any kind, who's been recognized for his work by the Centers of Disease Control.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Hot-Zone-Terrifying-Story/dp/0385495226/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_z/177-7970503-1396814
http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Freezer-True-Story/dp/0345466632/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y/177-7970503-1396814
Cheers!
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
There has already been real-life testing of biological attacks. The ones we know about took place in the 50s and 60s. The US Navy released bacteria in a cloud off the coast of San Francisco to see what would happen. The bacteria they released was "mostly harmless" but killed some people with compromised immune systems. Some other government scientists spread bacteria around the NY subway system to see what would happen. Was hushed up for 20 years and sounds like trooferism but it really happened: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/
Develop a strain of Bacteria that causes chronic flatulence.
THAT is harassment.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Develop a strain of Bacteria that causes chronic flatulence.
THAT is harassment.
... or the solution to our dependence on fossil fuels.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
No comments yet?
How the hell am i supposed to spend my lunch break? I read other articles and comments already!
If you have spare time, I'd appreciate a digest of the RTFA: I tried reading it, my (sole) neuron got curly with the effort and I skipped to the end where I read:
This work was supported by grants from the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council and from the US National Science Foundation.
Yay, that's a factoid I could grasp.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
If you want to infect very many AND kill a high percentage of the infected you'd have to design the virus to be mostly symptom-free (or at least symptoms that are tolerable) but still reasonably infectious/contagious and then only killing people a month or more later.
Many of the noticeable symptoms are what makes a virus more contagious - coughing, sneezing, body fluids leaking everywhere. If the virus starts by quickly making a victim bleed from every orifice and then killing within a day or two it may be good for a Hollywood movie but that stops the disease from spreading that far. Countries will notice, quarantines would be enforced worldwide and you only need to lockdown for a week or two at most till the disease burned itself out.
Whereas if the virus could quietly infect people for month(s) and then only suddenly kill them, then everyone has a big problem...
FWIW if _everyone_ quarantined themselves when they just started to sniffle, instead of going to work (e.g. living in a country with no paid sick leave) then many diseases would evolve to be milder.