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Why Do Pathogen Researchers Face Less Scrutiny Than Nuclear Scientists?
Lasrick writes "Derrin Culp of the National Center for Disease Preparedness explores the different levels of scrutiny that scientists in microbiology undergo, when compared to those who work in the nuclear weapons field. His complaint is that, even though America's most notorious biosecurity breach — the 2001 anthrax mailings — was the work of an insider, expert panels have concluded that there is no need for intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research."
That's incredibly naive.
I'm sure that there are certain sequences of nucleic acid or protein that, once synthesized and not "contained" could represent an existential threat to life on this planet.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/02/washington/02anthrax.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0
Seems like biowarfare researchers make just as solid scapegoats as crazy nuclear physicists and MIT computer nerds.
is scrutiny from A better and/or more reliable than from B? will multiple scrutinizers provide better data just because they're *more*? my position is: inviting more to the party invites more of absolutely everything.
Also, there's no reason to suspect that engineering an infectious agent that spawns a global pandemic is impossible, even if the agent is easy to neutralize.
Im incredibly worried about biological attacks. If there was any reason that we should have universal healthcare it is the threat of biological weapons. It's national defense.
Remember 9/11 folks. That happened because the government didn't have the proper tools to monitor the terrorists before the act occurred mainly due to the idiotic beliefs in an outdated and itself a terroristic document, the constitution. Now that we are moving away from the constitution, which was a piece of crap anyways, the country can be made secure. We now have a solid globalist President that is on board with the abolition of the constitution, especially the second amendment, which will lead us to a socialist global society. It's time to give up your so called 'rights' and get with the program. FORWARD!
1. Biological agents are readily available. ;-)
2. Biological agents are naturally dangerous ie H5N1 is killing people.
3. Reseach into these agents will provide positive outcomes. ie vaccines
4. Stupid measures such as profiles fail the best researchers, eg NSA fails more than 50% of maths researchers. Those creative left handed types are dangerous. It's actually true that NSA employs fewer left handed people than the research community at large and is an acknowledged problem.
5. Research doesn't have many resources, wasting them upon dumb controls means much less reseach.
6 The military has oodles of cash (read wasteful) however they're not allowed to play with biological weapons so biology doesn't get much of this cash. (unlike nukes)
You do realize that biological agents do something that chemicals don't, right?
Spill any chemical you want - that's all there is and all I have to do to escape it is not go where it's laying. Weaponized anthrax? Smallpox? Pandemic flu? Yeah, good luck escaping that shit by staying away from the place of the initial outbreak.
The plague took months to spread around Europe when there was no sanitation whatsoever. As a weapon of mass destruction, diseases are (a) wildly impractical and (b) much less convenient than many alternatives.
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"I'm sure that there are certain sequences of nucleic acid or protein that, once synthesized and not "contained" could represent an existential threat to life on this planet."
Nope. Nucleic acid is not terribly stable stuff and for relatively short sequences every possible combination already exists in nature. Proteins aren't terrifically stable either and the vast majority require a three dimensional fold on top of the chemical structure in order to function. You can get rid of that fold-denature the protein-by a large number of means. Even if you still have properly folded protein its activity is heavily impacted by temperature, pH, presence of salts, concentration, etc. Life has evolved over billions of years to consume, break down, and reuse nucleic acids and proteins. The risk factor is around that of somebody manipulating water to go all ice-nine on us.
It's not. There aren't. And if there were, it would be cheaper to do anything else, like one of the many missing Russian nukes. All things die when left alone in the wild. This fearmongering is the product of years of zombie fantasies in popular culture. All of it is utter nonsense.
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The reason there is less scrutiny is simply history. Nuclear weapons were used in the last world war. Biological warfare was not used extensively since WWI. It was used in mid evil times and in the American wars against native Americans but biological weapons are more difficult to contain than other weapons of mass destruction and are less widely used for that reason. Also, there are justifiable reasons for biological research in the medical research field that might be severally limited if over-regulation were applied. This is not to say that misuse of biological pathogens is any less deadly.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Thats not necessarily true. There some pollutants that stick around for a good while. Some of those could be mixed into a bioengineering bacterium that would stick around for awhile in the environment as well. Again its all unpredictable, but you could really screw up an ecosystem for decades by using 1 pathogen targeted at the right environment with the right payload.
DDT is a chemical that comes to mind. Something like that wouldn't be as dramatic as zombies but would definitely make for a devastating affect over a long. Really great if you planned for a war of attrition and wanted the enemies food supply to become unreliable.
Oh, yes. A doomsday device that gets preyed upon by every protozoan, yeast, and bacterium in the world. How brilliant. At least that rules out any organization other than a lunatic from employing it!
Why do you think MRSA—by all means a real, legitimate biological threat that isn't the fantasy of a powerhungry politician—is only found in hospitals and factory farms? The metabolic cost of the antibiotic resistance makes it vulnerable to the environment. The more radically efficient a disease is, the worse it is at killing. Even exceptional pathogens are meagre: "during the outbreak the fatality of SARS was less than 1% for people aged 24 or younger, 6% for those 25 to 44, 15% for those 45 to 64, and more than 50% for those over 65."
Furthermore, what would controlling American researchers accomplish? The United States does not have a monopoly on disease research. Surely a much greater threat comes from disease research laboratories in less developed countries with more corrupt governments rather than the exceptional person in a generally healthy, secure, and safe working and living environment. Moreover, despite the lack of a direct oversight mechanism, there is still a great deal of internal review, and it is implausible that an academic would have the resources to work on a project such as this without scrutiny and authorization.
Ultimately, this approach seeks to treat with suspect people who do sensitive work. In less fortunate populations that has been shown very thoroughly to induce criminality. Ivins, the prime suspect of the "Amerithrax" case, was known to be mentally unstable and once saw a counsellor, who was apparently terrified of him. He should have been directed to another therapist, but wasn't.
So there you have it. The only real scenario that has ever occurred, which this policy seeks to prevent, and it was caused by a failure of the psychiatric system. And no one died.
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That's merely a popular misconception of cult leaders—they're not that short-sighted. Even North Korea's current sabre-rattling is an attempt to get something out of the UN and the US.
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Chemical weapons were used extensively in WWI.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
I don't think you know a thing about evolution.
Multiple antibiotic-resistant bacteria are not found in the wild unless there is an excess of antibiotics significant enough to justify the metabolic cost of wasting energy on keeping the resistance alive. What bacteria do not need, they do not keep. Take the patients out of the hospitals and they will do just fine. You should have picked a better example, like Russia's tuberculosis epidemic, but I get the feeling that if you had anything more than surface knowledge about this subject, you wouldn't be throwing such childish words around. Engineered mutations are fragile.
The reality is that the real biological threats to human health don't need us to enable them. Malaria kills millions of people a year, and has been doing so since the beginning of human history—it kills so many, in fact, that most deaths go unreported and it's believed that the real figures may be ten times higher than what we can verify. And it does it without any engineering or mentally unstable biochemists getting in the picture. This proposal is a complete waste of money that will only bring misery to the researchers it affects.
So, really, take your paranoid babytalk and go back to your basement.
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Speaking of naive. You're sure of this. Just a 'few sequences' and poof, the end of life as we know it?
Obviously that seems exceedingly unlikely so to try to cut through irrational fears lets try looking at a real disease. The Spanish flu of 1918 killed 50-100 million people world wide. If we scale that as a percentage of the population today that number would be 180-300 million and that is for a disease which 80-90% of the people who caught it survived. This is clearly comparable to several, powerful nuclear weapons and for something as infectious as flu it is unlikely that you could stop it once it got out e.g. the recent swine flu outbreak.
So for those involved in researching viruses with the same, or worse, potential as the spanish flu why shouldn't there be similar safe guards to nuclear weapons researchers? The consequences of material getting out is similar in both cases and, in a world with suicide bombers, I'm not sure I'd rely on the fact that a biological weapon may well kill the one who releases it to stop if from happening.
Try reading scientific journals before showing off your lack of knowledge ... there are some organisms and some sequences of nucleic acid that could be used as bio-weapons but they wouldn't be a "threat to life on this planet". Those that could be weaponized are maintained very securely, use and access is tightly controlled and restricted, and they are quite expensive and cumbersome to do research with or on.
What is intrusive anymore?
Things you don't need a warrant for:
-tracking someones travels via their cell phone
-reading their email
-any call that originates from another country or is destined for another country can be monitored/recorded
-who they have called/texted
-any and all business records [actually, are there ANY limitations on NSL's?]
-lots of other stuff, based on secret interpretations of laws, cherry picked from "friendly" lawyers, which you are not permitted to know about
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
Happily, you're not the one making policy decisions on this.
Ebola comes to mind.
Go back to your corner.
Speaking of corners, Elboa sits in one. It's not a very good bioweapon. Really virulent viruses tend to be crappy weapons. Once you kill your vector, you're pretty much dead yourself unless you simultaneously invoke the deux ex machina of a Zombie Apocalypse.
Now that would be a good bioweapon. Even the CDC agrees with that.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
They do get higher—there are a handful of BSL-4 labs where everything is vacuum-sealed, and personnel suits have life support systems that are kept under positive pressure. It sounds like you're describing a BSL-2 lab, which can be used to study (for example) hepatitis, but not tuberculosis or anthrax, which are BSL-3. BSL-3 labs require either constantly working under a hood or special safety equipment. Different safety levels may be found in adjacent rooms, so it's easy to get confused.
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Ebola and TB could be imported from Africa by anyone, though. Why harass researchers?
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No, a biology degree isn't even required—just a well-concealed sample imported from a third-world country in your carry-on luggage, like a mosquito with malaria. No exposure to academia of any kind needs to be involved, and it certainly doesn't make sense to harass researchers who are likely to wind up in the middle of the quarantine area. With nuclear weapons this all makes sense because the transfer of technology could give a vulnerable country a bartering chip in world politics, and a scientist giving up this information does not put himself or herself in danger to do so. But with biology, the resources are already available.
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This fearmongering is the product of years of zombie fantasies in popular culture. All of it is utter nonsense.
Second that. Though it's not just zombies.
Plagues, both natural and manmade, are a staple of apocalyptic fiction. Current craze is zombies, but they're a recent (and effective) retelling of a very old meme.
Stop me if you've read this one: "PLAGUENAME a (virus/bacteria/prion/plot device) created by (godless researchers/actual god(s)/mother nature/snidley whiplash) swept the globe after (accident/outbreak in the third world/contrived event) killing (millions/billions/everyone but our heroes), and turning our cities into haunting graveyards". When you can make a mad libs version of what is essentially the same story, it's officially become a cliche.
Now, reality time. The worst plagues in recent history were the 1918 flu epidemic and the HIV pandemic, while the worst in ancient history were the black death and smallpox. These are the killers that the cliche above sprung out of. They set the bar.
They aren't even close to apocalyptic. Especially not on a global scale. Even a pathogenic perfect storm is at worst a regional catastrophe.
Is this any surprise? Fiction always takes things further than reality. If the world conformed to our fantasies, we'd have moon cities twenty years ago. Reality is a huge letdown sometimes. Not that that stops people from believing; you could probably make a killing by selling lunar real estate with the promise that it'll be ready in twenty years.
So you get people who think that yes, it really is possible to bring about the end of the human race via pathogen. And those same people will look at something like the 2001 anthrax attack and think the sky is falling, while reality being what it is, the total death toll for that was single digit. The article is pandering to that mindset.
Erotic is when you use a feather. Exotic is when you use the whole chicken.
...and let's be honest, if nature was going to do it, it's had fifty million years to make a move, y'know?
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The plague took months to spread around Europe when there was no sanitation whatsoever. As a weapon of mass destruction, diseases are (a) wildly impractical and (b) much less convenient than many alternatives.
The Spanish Flu took about six weeks to go from barely noticeable levels to its peak. Other flu strains do the same.
In the past seventy odd years or so, how many nuclear scientists / chemists / biologists / etc. have gone awol?
There's your answer.
I am John Hurt.
There is something humorous about the story right below this being a nuclear water containment leak....
Am I lying when I tell you that im telling the truth? Or am I telling the truth when I say that Im lying?
Of course, there are plenty of dangerous pathogens that are researched actively in the US and other countries. However, Anthrax for the most part is not one of them. As my undergrad microbiology professor said, Anthrax is a "weapon of mass distraction", as it is of little value in terms of actually causing fatalities. It is incredibly difficult for someone who has caught Anthrax to actually transmit it to another individual. Even when you have spores (such as those that were mailed) it is not easy to actually infect someone with it as the required number of spores to infect someone is highly variable. And on top of that, if it is quickly diagnosed the outcome is usually quite good.
In other words, you could do almost as much by mailing letters with powdered sugar instead.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I wrote an article on the Ulterior Motives: That killed the best nuclear solution to date for the US for nearly seventy years. That solution is LFTR Nuclear Reactors, If it hadn't been for the Oil industry, Nuclear Bombs, and Other Alternative Energy Movements, we would have a nearly endless supply of safe and cheap power. It goes to show you spreading FUD does pay off. Every time I post a message about LFTR reactors someone inevitable says something that is unfounded. Being as impartial a write as possible, I always entertain the arguments by giving them counter arguments which takes a lot of time from research for the defense. Nuclear is a solution and a good one. One the US would be smart to invest in. It would kill the Global Warming problem in 10 years with the right effort with the least environmental impact of any solution that can be deployed to date.
And they're all similarly non-perilous in the face of modern medicine.
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"during the outbreak the fatality of SARS was less than 1% for people aged 24 or younger, 6% for those 25 to 44, 15% for those 45 to 64, and more than 50% for those over 65."
Are you saying it is less important because it is a possible resolution to the "social security crisis"?
What?!? I couldn't find any of the expected juvenile jokes involving scientists, small things, and magnifying glasses.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
ordinary pathogens tend towards less lethal simply because killing off all available hosts is bad for business and will likely lead to extinction of the strain.
however, engineered pathogens are not subject to such restrictions, modify a rhinovirus so that it also craps all over p53 and now you have a cancer causing cold.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
>For partisan political advantage. Really? Had nothing to do with a very possible nuclear war apocalypse (which almost happened, from my knowledge, at least once . . .).
>Pathogen research offered no such advantage. Maybe if a version of the Nagasaki or Hiroshima bombings were to occur with pathogen research, you would start to see some more protests. Humans are not very good at understanding risks, such that it can take seeing cities of people perish in unimaginable hell before they actually care enough to get involved.
The rest of your post gives examples that basically do not even come close to a "global apocalypse." In fact, your post seems more politically motivated than the protests against nuclear war. If nuclear science was also a target, I would consider it as just a casualty of being too closely associated with the very real threat of nuclear war apocalypse at the time. Seems some of the blame for nuclear science getting a bad wrap should go to weaponization and use against large numbers of civilians.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
Ebola IS very dangerous to humans and it does spread, but there have been a lot of outbreaks and they always burn out in a few days. It kills its victims too fast to spread rapidly once people are aware that people are getting sick. To be a big threat to humans, a disease has to have a longer incubation. Smallpox, for example, had an incubation period of about 12 days.
Interestingly, during the 19th and early 20th centuries, a less-virulent form of smallpox evolved, called "variola minor." Patients with this form didn't get as sick but it was higly communicable. The minor form spread rapidly and might eventually have made full-blown smallpox extinct if the eradication campaign hadn't made both forms extinct in the wild.
because nobody could distribute the daily HF etchant load so as to kill very many people. Contrast that with the Black Death, which killed 1/3 of Europe through the movement of fleas on rats on ships. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death
Chemweapons have to be distributed and don't extend their effects very far beyond their delivery locus. Bioweapons can propagate. Engineer a latency between infection and onset of symptoms of say, 100 days into an airborne pathogen with high clinical mortality and watch it spread far and wide before it surfaces.
I understand that such bioengineering may be nontrivial, but to say that "no biological weapon could ever be as effective as a chemical one" is, I believe, incorrect.
Honestly, Malaria would give far better results, in which case harassing disease researchers won't accomplish anything. My point was that engineered diseases are futile.
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(1) People have an irrational fear of radiation and anything "nuclear".
(2) It's damned hard to create a deadly pathogen that's any worse than what already is out there.
(3) Radioactivity is trivial to detect, new pathogens are pretty much impossible to detect, so it's hard to "scrutinize" the work.
And they're all similarly non-perilous in the face of modern medicine.
That's not correct. The Spanish flu was a particularly deadly strain, unlike most other flu variants before and since and we don't really know why it was so bad. It is completely possible for a deadly new flu (or other disease) variant to crop up for which we just don't have the proper medicines. Flu outbreaks can be reduced with vaccination campaigns, but that depends on the correct prediction of what flu types will be going around in a few months. Sometimes the flu shots are effective and sometimes they're not because the formulators guessed wrong. There are now antivirals like Tamiflu, but not all types of flu are susceptible to it.
Your suggestion is a perfect example of why engineering wouldn't work.
Rhinoviruses are successful because they mutate rapidly. The only thing that prevents them from corrupting their genes completely and disappearing is the tiny chance that they won't misfold and will, instead, produce new viable virions after host infection.
A payload protein specifically meant to interfere with a normal cellular function would (a) be selected against due to a high rate of failure and (b) not serve the virus in any capacity, thereby causing it to fail through mutation. (And I don't know enough about virology to say for certain, but I don't think enteroviruses integrate with the genome normally, so there goes that approach.)
You would probably have more luck trying to engineer a really aggressive strain of HPV, but that's easily eliminated with sanitation.
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Let's snoop on everyone! Or we could just establish real world precautions that prevent people from smuggling anthrax out of labs and that sort of thing.
And there's a key theme—communicability is inversely proportionate to impact, particularly with viruses. They don't really have incubation periods; cells get infected and effects worsen until the immune system can't keep it under control. If the symptoms are extreme, people die right away. And if you really want to kill a handful of people immediately, why bother with a disease at all? Envelopes of anthrax spores is a gimmick that works once before everyone gets suspicious. There is no advantage over a normal assassination or a poison gas attack.
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"expert panels have concluded that there is no need for intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research."
For good reason.
First, the knowledge is more widespread.
We have large numbers of researchers/lab workers/hospital lab techs that could do the neccesary techniques for much of biological work.
We have to have them in large numbers to keep us safer from the NATURAL bioweapons we face every day.
Such well known killers as malaria, bacterial pneumonia, a whole range of virii, the various strains of antibiotic resistant bacteria we keep a running treadmill race going with, etc, etc.
Putting all of these lab/hospital workers (Yes, they are working with pathogens. Why else do you think they're doing culturing of that throat swab your doctor took?) under a magnifying glass is needless, discouraging to those who might enter the field, and actively disruptive to trying to fight disease.
Second, nature completely outclasses us.
Someone in a lab can do one experiment every few days/weeks, maybe. Mother nature can and does do billions to trillions of experiments all in parallel.
The bioweapon arms race has been going on in nature for billions of years (yes, billions. Single cell life has been around that long and competing. Multicelled life and armor/teeth is a latecomer at 600 million or so). Every nasty trick you're likely to think of to put into your superbug has been tried multiple times naturally.
The metallo-beta-lactamases that are the hot new nasty in antibiotic resistance? They aren't new. They were old genetic material that were present in a minority of bacteria, and then spread due to it being an advantage for some bacteria in some cases. None of the antibiotic resistance we see is "new". It's all relics in the bacterial genomes that have become useful again. Why? Because Mom Nature already tried those tricks.
And,it's the same for virii or any other one you can think of.
It seems like it's mostly because of bad PR for the word "nuclear". The sciency types here on /. know that nuclear power plants are not as dangerous as other types of power plants, yet the majority of the public is against nuclear power systems. The PR for "nuke" is so bad that it even caused medical types to change the name of one of their diagnostic devices:
.
MRI machines (magnetic resonance imaging) are called that because when they called them NMR machines originally, people were afraid of the word "nuclear" in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. Even though MRI machines are still exactly the same thing and still measure nuclear magnetic resonance, they no longer use the word "nuclear", because no one wanted to be stuffed in a tube of a machine that had "nuclear" in its name!! People confused it with nuclear imaging in which radioactive isotopes really are injected into the human body and then imaging is performed to see how the isotope is distributed and if it clusters in certain parts of the body.
.
People are scared of "nukes", and not-so-much of teeny little microbes, though look at all of the wacky episodes of ReGenesis, a canadian show about the canadian equivalent of the CDC and a genomics lab, to see the crazy plotlines of what could go wrong with bio-organisms. Psych also did an episode, "Death is in the Air", Season 4, Episode 13, that used "Bob" from Regenesis as the same sort of scientist. See my other post here for links to those episodes.
Subtle, and possibly quite effective at cleansing the earth of its two-legged parasites, but I prefer the more direct and messy approach of using the Ebola glycoprotein.
In that case, most of the precautions taken are in the fume hoods. If a BSL-3 lab has a containment breach, typically the entire building will go under quarantine until everyone has been properly screened; a friend of mine had the misfortune of going through one once.
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The mechanism is actually understood, now; like SARS and H5N1 it causes a cytokine storm. A 2003 publication produced results suggesting that cytokine storms can be treated. Moreover, both SARS and H5N1 were largely defeated by public awareness and proper sanitation; in contrast, the 1918 flu spread throughout Europe in a time when military censors prohibited publication about it, making things worse. In fact we call it the Spanish flu because Spain wasn't subject to that censorship.
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You sound like you have a very childish grasp of sexuality.
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Apocalyptic plagues are an evolutionary dead end. If it kills quickly and surely enough to be a weapon, it's not a particularly fit organism because its host will tend to die before they can infect others.
I'm far more scared of pathogens than nukes, though, and I don't think this idea deserves the derision it's getting. Prion diseases, for example, are really terrifying stuff. The kuru strain of the CJD prion, for example, exhibited an incubation period of between 5 and 20 years. If you were really determined, you could get that disease into a lot of people before it started showing itself.
Look up Biopreparat. Look up the Marburg virus. This is very useful, very worthwhile research which we should be spending a great deal of effort on, but it's also the kind of research that could end up destroying a civilisation. Is it really so terrible to suggest that perhaps we should be a little more protective than we already are?
Where was the "grim milestone" protest for Obama's Obama didn't go tarded and start as many wars as he could.
In the 70s and 80s, the anti-nuclear crowd was able to spread lots of FUD Yeah. FUD. Because humans never get lazy or forget to expect the unexpected.
because it helped the left gain political power. Yeah. Because every time there is an anti-nuclear protest it only charges the left.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Weaponisation of prions is an interesting angle I hadn't considered, although it looks like research into BSE and CJD is far enough along that, if Kuru were weaponised today and spread amongst a million people, we would notice it and cure it before it started causing symptoms. (That might be a little on the optimistic side, but presumably funding and other resources would be reallocated in such a situation.) Engineering new prions also seems like a woefully wasteful plan, and ultimately all such superdiseases run into a classic shortcoming of zombie stories: it's not currently practical to defend yourself or your people from getting infected, too.
The Marburg virus, like other BSL-4 diseases, falls under the other clause of this debate, which is that it doesn't require a biologist to disseminate, and so monitoring researchers wouldn't do a lick of good. I've already noted similar of other diseases like Ebola. As a general rule such diseases kill so aggressively that they can be only used with a handful of targets, in which case it would be more reliable and cost-effective to send a hitman, or use a nerve gas attack.
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So far diagnosis of prion infections can only be reliably done using post-mortem detection of PrP, which is too late in most cases. The incubation period of most prion disease, measured in months and years, makes it a very poor bio-weapon candidate. While the argument can be made that military research can make progress toward that end, the practical reality is that it is still a not very well understood disorder and a lot of basic research is still needed despite intense and public scrutiny (for obvious reasons) from the agricultural sector of developed nations. Treatment options at the moment are virtually non-existent. Containment and culling to halt the spread of infection is still the order of the day in most agro scenarios. But this has been difficult where the infection exists in wild populations. Studies from a Colorado wildlife research facility where chronic wasting disease is endemic in local elks and deers have shown that prion infections can persist dispite conventional cleaning and sterilization methods. Other research shows that livestock to human transmission are not the only cross-species cases with examples being observed in minks from fur farms and guinea pigs in the laboratory also being suceptable. Such realities have resulted in hunters and recipients of venison from road kill being publicly cautioned from consuming the meat of animals from area known to have infected populations. There are a few efforts in very early experimental stages, but owing to the still very immature understanding of prions in general, it is still effectively a fatal disease with know cure/treatment options in human.
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
i am sure it would not be point and click VB.net simple as i describe, but working in some type of hardening code to partially protect the payload should help longevity, and you only want limited longevity, a nice bloom is desired, a global kill pandemic is not (unless the party engineering the virus is a human-extinction advocate)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Not so in the case of intellectual property. Imagine corporate black ops where a company eliminates a competitor by ensnaring their key employees with hookers loaded with chlamydia that has been weaponized with a fatal payload.
Stay sentient. Don't drink bad milk.
Intrusive regulation "may" discourage infectious disease research? Of course it would. It has done just that for (non-medical) nuclear research.
We sent a UCLA professor to jail when a student in his lab died in an accident related to poor training. Maybe that's the right idea.
If a deadly accident or malicious release occurs from your lab, you go to jail. Just reiterate that to everyone: you're ultimately responsible for what comes out of your lab. It's a lot less harsh than the permanent label you earn as a terrorist and an enemy of civilization for a nuclear mistake.
You don't need a citation for that, just a clever method of concealment at airport security, an experienced drug mule, or any other common household method of smuggling.
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If you're referring to the Spanish flu as your "one little bug", it lasted for three years and only killed 3-5% of the population. Furthermore, it was only able to spread as effectively as it did because of a communications blackout. Today, it would be no more dangerous to public health than SARS.
And if you're thinking of Malaria as your "another", that's somewhat treatable with Mefloquine, and like all existing diseases, could easily be imported by a smuggler.
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You'll have to get in line behind the rest of 4chan. Is this a parlour trick, or do you talk like this during job interviews too?
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The virgins are noisy again today.
I think the proposed usage was more of a "I want to destroy all of civilization by poisoning schoolchildren's lunchmeat" scenario than a targeted weapon. This is a totally different scenario from normal warfare, for which an unmodified form of the disease vector would do just fine. Speaking generally, I would guess that the period before symptoms manifest on a given prion is unmodifiable, and is directly linked to that protein's role in the organism.
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However the reality of 2001 was that the anthrax didn't spread everywhere after release. It's also the reality of a town near me where records of anthrax stored from WWII were found, so the canisters were dug up with great care and found to have rusted away years ago - it all got out but nothing happened because it doesn't quite spread the same way as in the movies.
Unfortunately, anything in a virus that's static makes it vulnerable to culling by the immune system. A virus has to be able to change constantly in order to survive, and if you try to have it both ways, the frozen part will just stop working and be replaced by the dynamic part.
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If there was any reason that we should have universal healthcare it is the threat of biological weapons.
Since it's not (the current system of people showing up in US (since that's the only place with this sort of debate) emergency rooms actually works just as well), the contrapositive of your conditional statement asserts that no reason exists for universal healthcare.
As I understand it, the body is quite efficient at neutralizing viruses or bacteria that it has encountered before because the body has to create antibodies that can kill a particular virus, but once those antibodies are created they can be recreated very fast. That's why vaccine works. The flu and cold viruses mutate rapidly so each time you get infected it's a "new" virus because your body could get rid of the old virus quite fast the second time.
On the other hand, if somebody engineered a virus that has static genes, but very high mortality rate, it would no matter, since people would only get infected by it once (which would be the "first time") and then they would die. After all, human bodies do not keep a centralized antivirus database for the entire population ("John was infected by a similar virus once, here's how you build the antibodies"), just for the individual.
So, the effectiveness of a static virus would most likely be limited by how fast a vaccine can be created and distributed.
there is zero evidence that H5N1 causes a cytokine storm. In fact is was more mild than the previous strain from the previous year. Tamiflu however made a lot of money.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
There was a little Spanish Flu
A deadly pathogen you know
He'd heard of microbes like Tetanus
Malaria spread by mosquitos
Why not a little Spanish Flu
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
My mistake.
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No, a static virus would be recognized by the body too quickly. The immune system constantly circulates a huge pool of antibody-producing cells, each of which detects a different target (antigen). If something gets detected, then the antibody-producing cell responsible is told to reproduce aggressively. The memory functionality is simply accomplished by keeping more of that cell line around. It's like a very basic single-layer neural network. Short of killing the entire organism simultaneously, no static virus can be effective. Even HIV, a very rapidly-mutating virus, has problems overcoming the immune system immediately following an infection.
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I'm far more scared of pathogens than nukes, though, and I don't think this idea deserves the derision it's getting. Prion diseases, for example, are really terrifying stuff. The kuru strain of the CJD prion, for example, exhibited an incubation period of between 5 and 20 years. If you were really determined, you could get that disease into a lot of people before it started showing itself.
There is no such thing as a 'kuru strain' of the CJD prion. Prions are not infectious organisms. If you get exposed to pathogenic prions, the prions naturally found in your brain are converted into pathogenic prions. This process is more akin to crystallization, rather than a standard infectious process. If you get exposed to pathogenic prions from humans, cows, sheep, or gerbils... the course of the infection is only determined by how you were exposed, how much of the protein you were exposed to, and your own genetic situation.
Of course there is an easy way to prevent the agent from infecting your own populace at a future point... they're called vaccines.
No sequence of nucleic acid, by itself, is dangerous. It gets obliterated by the stuff on your finger, for example.
You need to shoot it into an organism, get it stably being transcribed into proteins, and then after all that actually wind up with an organism that's viable and has good disease properties. Most "flesh eating bacteria" for example are normal throat bacteria that are normally harmless.
The Wired Article : Anthrax Redux: Did the Feds Nab the Wrong Guy? makes me wonder if the anthrax mailer got away with it. Also the Wiki article says one of the 19 involved in 9/11 may have had anthrax based on a doctor which I had never heard before.
The trustworthy people in the physics department always have a suitcase nuke on standby, in case the microbiologists get unruly.
No, you need a lot of DDT for it to affect an ecosystem. The reason POPs coudl do it was that we spread thousands of tonnes of them over our food supply, cities and nature. If you have the ability to do that to your enemy, traditional explosives would be much more effecient, and include much less risk for it to spread to your own food supply.
I was under the impression that, while the first versions of antiobiotic resistance made the bacteria ineffecient, we had seen evidence for the evolution of less expensive versions, allowing resistant bacteria to spread outside hospitals. Is that wrong?
The real reason that people in nuclear establishments undergo extensive screening relates more to a cold war philosophy than public safety. They're just making sure that you don't sell those secrets to the Reds.
There is no such thing as a 'kuru strain' of the CJD prion.
The origin of the prion agent of kuru: molecular and biological strain typing
Kuru is an acquired human prion disease that primarily affected the Fore linguistic group of the Eastern Highlands of Papua New Guinea. The central clinical feature of kuru is progressive cerebellar ataxia and, in sharp contrast to most cases of sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease (CJD), dementia is a less prominent and usually late clinical feature. In this regard, kuru is more similar to variant CJD, which also has similar prodromal symptoms of sensory disturbance and joint pains in the legs and psychiatric and behavioural changes. Since a significant part of the clinicopathological diversity seen in human prion disease is likely to relate to the propagation of distinct human prion strains, we have compared the transmission properties of kuru prions with those isolated from patients with sporadic, iatrogenic and variant CJD in both transgenic and wild-type mice. These data have established that kuru prions have prion strain properties equivalent to those of classical (sporadic and iatrogenic) CJD prions but distinct from variant CJD prions. Here, we review these findings and discuss how peripheral routes of infection and other factors may be critical modifiers of the kuru phenotype.
That's just the first hit when you Google "kuru strain".
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
An organisms role is to generate more copies of itself, it doesn't matter if it wipe out 99% of the host during that periods as long as it spreads. If increased virulance spreads better than being benign the virulence wins as more copies of that clade will spread.
I think the proposed usage was more of a "I want to destroy all of civilization by poisoning schoolchildren's lunchmeat" scenario than a targeted weapon.
I'm sorry for coming a bit late to the discussion. Who's proposal? It seems to me that a Kill-every-living-human/WMD-type device that takes months to years to take effect in a statistically small proportion of the exposed target population wouldn't be a very good way to achieve any kind of military or political objective in any sensible way. If on the other hand, you are a non-state actor trying to spread terror....I'll give you that, maybe. But still, there are no historic precedence to my knowledge of any extremist groups declaring to the world: "give us what we want or we will give you brain cooties". True, symptoms of fevers/bleeding/malaise of things like bird flu makes for dramatic visuals in the same way conveyed by WWI photos of soldiers blinded by mustard gas. In contrast, aside from the scary name of Mad Cow Disease, how many in the general public can identify the symptoms of vCJD much less know what it is? Put it another way, Do you think a terrorist would consider it a good idea to weaponize HIV? Similar in a lot of way - certainly easier to get and transmit, but just not practical from a common sense perspective.
This is a totally different scenario from normal warfare, for which an unmodified form of the disease vector would do just fine.
Exactly! In unmodified form, the disease vector is terribly inefficient - being statistically significant enough infection-wise to make your target sit up and take notice, but otherwise doesn't nearly approach the virulence that true pestilences of the past have cause death and destruction among the masses. It really isn't going to kill very many people. I guess what I am trying to say is, no matter how you cut it, prions - as we currently understand them - do not have the qualities of a good biological weapon regardless of what kind of war you are trying to fight with it. I would assert thus, that given the slow acting nature and generally vague symptoms (which can easily be mistaken for other neurological issues in the absence of post-mortem histological analysis), the only appropriate role for prions as a weapon of some sort is along the lines of some kind of assassination tool. That is, if other short comings can be addressed.
Speaking generally, I would guess that the period before symptoms manifest on a given prion is unmodifiable, and is directly linked to that protein's role in the organism.
Last I was aware, no one has yet divined the role played by PrP in living organisms. (It must be important though because the sucker is highly conserved across many species.) It has been a while since I've kept up with this stuff, so it is entirely possible that something within the last few months has been published that can be used to put numbers on this thing. However, The matter of symptoms can be really tricky to pin down. We've made great strides in illuminating many aspects of prion molecular biology, but not nearly enough to say we truly comprehend disease pathology. To complicate matters further, the brain is an incredibly resilient organ capable of taking quit a bit of abuse by adapting and compensating around damage. It may very well be the reason why symptoms take so long to appear is because victims brains are actively rewiring around parts damaged by plaque formation. I don't know if plasticity is something that has yet been quantified and/or standardized across all people. But given the range of brains, even in a place like slashdot, there are different levels of suceptability. I could very well be wrong, but I think it is premature to be asserting any kind of symptom time frame in association with a protein function that still isn't clear at all. From a strictly experimental perspective, however, I am optimistic analytic tools and techniques can be applied with further
========== "Hello World" in my programming language of choice: ATG - LET THERE BE LIFE - TAG ==========
You forget the psychological effect. Certain diseases are way scarier than normal assassinations.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
I hear everyone arguing about what a scientist could produce, and how, and how bad it could/would be...but that isn't the issue at all here. If you're going to talk about nuclear technology vs. pathogen technology, then you need to talk about proliferation. The treaties at stake, the classification of information, export controls...none of these are about *doing* research, they're about the control of knowledge needed to do research. The controls on nuclear research and engineering are about proliferation, about containment of what is known rather than direct prohibition of learning more or experimenting by people who are not in the trusted circle.
Here's the problem: what's needed in terms of expertise to make effective (more on that word in a moment) nuclear weapons is only known to a relatively small and contained population of scientists. But what's needed to do the kind of research which is feared here on the pathogen side of things is, quite simply, not. You could make all kinds of arguments about why this is, but the fact of the matter is that the horse has left the barn (or whatever the rural metaphor is) with regard to the issue of proliferation on the biological side of this. Maybe it's because of organizations like Biopreparat and what happened when it disbanded, maybe it's because dangerous pathogens have always existed naturally (unlike nuclear weapons or, for that matter, any of the key materials used to build them). Maybe it's because there's a genuine value to the public good for many people to study how pathogens work...and ironically, the nastier the pathogen, the more the public good is studied by intensive and widespread study.
But however you slice it, you can't restrict sharing knowledge nor the research methods around pathogen-focused microbiology now. And even if you could, restrictions on either sharing knowledge or generating new knowledge through research would inevitably cause unintended consequences because you would also hamstring benevolent research that seeks to do things like develop vaccines and decipher previously unknown pathogens like SARS.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
This is the kind of "scrutiny" they're talking about, BTW.
http://thebulletin.org/web-edition/op-eds/lessons-not-learned-insider-threats-pathogen-research
Both determined that intrusive monitoring of microbiologists engaged in unclassified research would not necessarily increase protection against insider threats and rejected broad adoption of procedures that scientists and military personnel who work with nuclear weapons and fissile material must endure, such as random testing for alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, or amphetamines; observation of off-duty behavior; video monitoring of laboratory activity; annual psychological assessments; or mandatory privacy waivers to allow supervisors to review mental health treatment records.
Now I know. Thanks for the explanation.
I'm attaching this here instead of under a more relevant OP, because otherwise it will quickly be buried.
I have a few family friends that have done work for the government (biology-related, the sort of "let's figure this out before somebody else does so we can combat it if it ever gets released into the air" sort of work), and one of them is now retired. He left because he eventually found out what they were using his work for. I can safely say that the government keeps _very close_ tabs on these guys, and they face a TON of scrutiny. I don't know who this guy is that wrote this article, but it's complete codswallop. If you work on anything remotely dangerous in this field, the kind of thing our government actually takes seriously, they will keep tabs on you, very close tabs, and they'll never let you out of their sight unless they absolutely can't help it.
The second paragraph of the linked article makes this bogus assertion:
Since 2008, when investigators led by the FBI's Washington Field Office identified Bruce E. Ivins, an Army civilian research scientist, as the sole perpetrator, the collective response has been to minimize discussion of the problem, indulge in wishful thinking, and enact cosmetic changes.
Here is a Wednesday, Feb 16, 2011 article by Salon's Glenn Greenwald, titled "Serious doubt cast on FBI’s anthrax case against Bruce Ivins - A scientific panel concludes the Government overstated its genetic evidence against Bruce Ivins": http://www.salon.com/2011/02/16/ivans/
It happens, but only as long as the environment is a little contaminated. If there are no antibiotics around, then it's just dead weight. Environmental bacteria with antibiotic resistance are proof that we're massively overusing antibiotics.
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Sure, but not scarier than a bucket of hydrofluoric acid! Chemical weapons are much better at producing dramatic horrors.
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We have no ability at all to predict whether a person will strike out or not. The notion that we can watch, predict, or stop bad actors is a fantasy.
First we have no way to determine if an individual is acting on his own impulses or is being coerced. A family member could be held by terrorists for example. We also have big problems spotting people with abnormal levels of greed who might be bribed. Follow that up with the fact that we have found no way to determine whether a person simply is the type to want to commit mass murder.
Yet somehow our rather limp response is to pass laws, form panels, hire some people, and waste tax dollars trying to prevent things which will surely happen from time to time.
This mentality is rather like the chumps who walk into a casino and just keep gambling. The more you participate in the gambling the more certain your failure. The more money we toss down the rat hole of predicting anti-social acts the more we will lose until some technology is born that will aid us.
a clever method of concealment at airport security
And the human body works pretty well for concealing such things. Just pay the airfare (and a small bit for the family) of a (likely) terminally ill individual and VOILA -- intercontinental transmission. Bonus points if you can get them to stop off in Madagascar first.
You know what does have almost no problems overcoming the immune system at all? Parasitic worms. Even with medicine those things can be a daunting task to eliminate completely. and for some stupid reason doctors are terrible at detecting them.
Right. As a general rule, eukaryotic parasites don't need our engineering to destroy civilization, just a little bit of transport.
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Actually, they screen for that. You can be held for quarantine when leaving some countries if you're not able to prove good health.
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O, that's correct enough. The conclusion doesn't follow, but the facts are correct.
The chance of it happening by accident are quite low. As proof, we only have three or four instances in all of history. (Flu, black death, bubonic plague, maybe another one or two.)
This, however, doesn't address the current situation. We now have a much denser and more mobile population than ever before. And we've been carefully incubating LOTS of microbes to be immune to all the treatments we possess. So there's lots of raw material. Having it happen by accident is thus more likely than ever before. (To be honest, it would probably only kill off humans and one or two other species. Depending on the exact route by which it became lethal.) Imagine if it were carried by flys AND could spread by contact.
Now if we add malign human intent, it becomes quite probable. This is only unlikely because there's no plausible way that the malign humans could protect themselves and their associates. But many people don't think things through.
Note that this still doesn't involve experts in the field. And doesn't even necessarily involve malign intent. Rats around a factory farm could pick up a disease of pigs that had been cultured in the midst of antibiotics. These could infect the rats in a pet shop with a disease that adapted itself to rats (so it no longer harmed them excessively) but which spread by contact. And some version of this could learn to live on people. It would quite likely be deadly, because it came from a significantly different species, but it could still spread through contact and, say, coughing. NO treatment would work, because it had inherited an immunity to all our antibiotics.
FWIW, tuberculosis shows signs of breaking out in a new form that resists all current treatment. This isn't as quickly lethat as a new flu, because it's adapted to humans. But it's resistant to all known treatments. And many people who have it are living in the general population of several countries where free medical care isn't available. So expect it to spread worldwide.
The only real answer to contagious diseases that resist treatment is quarantine. But people tend to avoid that because of the economic burden that it imposes on them. (There are also other reasons, but that's the really intractable one.) But even quarantine won't work if the disease becomes contagious before symptoms become blatantly obvious.
P.S.: The burning of the houses of victims is one of the things that spread the plague. Don't believe we won't make equivalent mistakes.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yah. But if the incubation period were 5 years, and it were (slightly) contagious during the last two years before obvious symptoms...
Then there's the question of how we would notice. If the symptoms were increasing lack of attention to detail slowly progressing over another 5 years to total unconsciousness (but not death). Since it is proposed to be very slow, there might well not be any obvious changes.
OTOH, that kind of disease WOULD require an expert to fabricate it. Someone more expert than I believe currently exists. I find zoonotic diseases much more plausible, especially given factory farms. But it's also true that the current multi-drug resistant tuberculosis could mutate into a form that was much more contagious and not less deadly. Or there could be a vairant of measles that was resistant to the vaccine, and which had a much worse recurrence than sciatica. (You never kill off the measles virus. It lives on in hiding, waiting to reappear when your immune system stops suppressing it.)
Note that these aren't generally humanity killers, but some of them might well be civilization killers. Or perhaps they would just drive us to eschew all human contact, and only use electronic communications...but robots aren't yet well enough developed to allow that to be practical.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The rate of transmission of highly contagious diseases is related to the common speed of travel, and also to the fastest normal speed of travel, and also to the number (not percentage) of people travelling.
So you can't say that because it took months to spread around Europe when the fastest speed was a fast horse, and the common speed was oxcart, and the number of people travelling was extremely low means that it would take months now. Actually it can take days to spread from New York to Shanghai. (It's usually a bit slower, but that's not the way you calculate threat estimates.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
IIUC, weaponized anthrax can generally be avoided by not being where it is being used. That isn't, of course, true of the others.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
If by "effective" he means "targeted" (a defensible usage in this context) then his comment is defensible, though still, I believe, incorrect.
Consider how effective mailing anthrax powder to a key Senator was in getting certain legislation passed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Yep, I neglected to think of cost efficiency. Thanks for pointing that out.
I do not know how cost efficient it might be to engineer a bacteria that poisons its environment though with something that doesn't kill its host but disrupts other parts of the food change or something that would stop nitrogen from re-entering the soil or something. (may be impossible)
I would wager the cost to make oil devouring bacteria is probably close to the cost it would take to make an organism purely for disruptive purposes.
yes. you should also look into what a prion actually is.
And yet the diseases that do manage to spread so quickly are aggressively contained due to improvements in sanitation and quarantining. SARS killed 775 people, mostly in China and Hong Kong, and there were only 8273 cases in total. The spreading characteristic of viruses and bacterial pathogens is all but defeated by modern practices.
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In particular, you should read further than just the abstract of the paper you just referred to. The second sentence into the introduction is :
Their central feature is the post-translational conversion of host-encoded, cellular prion protein (PrPC) to an abnormal isoform, designated PrPSc.
This accurately tells you what a prion is and how the pathogenic process occurs. Because it is conversion of the host prion proteins, the only 'strain' that exists is the host. With regard to the pathogenic process, it is better to think of some people as 'kuru strain' while others are not.
In general, it really helps to read what you cite. Don't worry, plenty of professional scientists don't do this... citing papers that don't actually have anything to do with what they're talking about in their paper.
OK, thank you for that, and thank you for bringing a lot of factual knowledge to the slashdot discussion, it is much appreciated.
The authors cited use the term 'molecular strain types', when they should have said 'molecular isoforms'. An 'isoform' is not the same as a 'strain type'. An isoform is a variation of a protein, due to a different gene sequence. Unless you're prone to referring to different types of soda pop as different strains, you really shouldn't refer to different isoforms as different strains either.
As Samantha Wright have pointed out at other places in this discussion, things that are of no benefit for the microorganism is bound to disappear withing days, as it is broken by random mutations.
The incubation period of most prion disease, measured in months and years, makes it a very poor bio-weapon candidate.
Make it incubate in 10 years with a very very high mortality rate, then poison the food in the exclusive schools. Before they have a chance to breed, the richest and brightest will start dying a horrible death. The country will collapse. Do it on a couple of countries that are growing faster than us and leap-frog over the "competition". Or spread it over Somolia and get rid of pirates (and everyone else).
Learn to love Alaska
Just agree to go out with him, you know he can't speak in front of a real girl, that's why all his girls are inflatable, and his "fix" to that is saving up for a RealDoll.
Learn to love Alaska
Anthrax caused quite the disruption, and it was engineered. Someone else mentioned weaponizing prions. Not a military weapon, like the flu could be (even the regular flu, or malaria like you mention would impair the other side enough for an advantage), but as a weapon of genocide.
Learn to love Alaska
When it's weaponized, it's assumed you don't need a vector. You can infect directly with large canisters of infected water blown up in heatless explosions dispersing the germ over multiple square miles in infectious concentrations. Secondary infections are bonus, not required.
Learn to love Alaska
Anthrax was a one-trick pony, now spent; people are too paranoid for that to work again. Someone said that as much could have been accomplished by mailing an envelope full of white sugar. The anthrax was not engineered or modified beyond the addition of powdered glass, which when mixed with the air would make the lungs of the victim more vulnerable. The mutations seen in the anthrax was simply a product of natural drift in the sample's genome—good for forensic fingerprinting, but not actually meaningful.
Prions take years and years to become relevant; you may want to read the replies to that post where we summarily beat the idea to death. The difficulty of containment, low fatality rate, and ridiculous amount of research required to make them useful makes it solely the purview of Bond villains, much like stupidly large lasers and melting the ice caps.
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And if you really want to kill a handful of people immediately, why bother with a disease at all?
Anything you can't see is scary. "An invisible killer took out Congress today." After all, it wouldn't be that hard to sneak in an aerosoled-weaponized disease in a fumigation canister designed to look like deodorant.
Learn to love Alaska
An interesting strategy, but I've concluded it's probably nowhere nearly effective as just ignoring it.
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Anthrax was a one-trick pony, now spent; people are too paranoid for that to work again.
The delivery was one-trick. But take 10 balloons of it (mostly helium, some anthrax powder in each one, no I will not blow up your baloons for you), and walk through a crowd, popping one every 10 meters. The concentration will not be high enough for guaranteed kills, but it will cause a fear of public spaces worse than the sniper attacks, and a fear of balloons. Your problem is that you understand it too much to understand it. It's not scary to you. That's where your logic fails. You expect the purpose of the attack would be to cause deaths, not to cause panic. And that's where you fail.
Prions take years and years to become relevant; you may want to read the replies to that post where we summarily beat the idea to death.
It was asserted to be a bad idea. That's not beaten to death. Nobody explained how large amounts of prions spread on meat products destined for school children in the elite private schools in China wouldn't destabilize China enough for a takeover in 20 years time. You are again assuming that the *only* purpose is to kill, and yes, prions are a poor choice for that. They aren't nearly reliable and dependable for that.
Learn to love Alaska
The problem is you seem to assert a solution, but not follow it. How many times did you reply after determining that to be the optimal solution?
Learn to love Alaska
First off, prions are infectious pathogens. It doesn't matter what the mechanism for infection is, just that the infection happens. Viruses have a different mechanism for infecting hosts than do bacteria, but we still refer to variants as strains. Soda cans generally aren't considered pathogens, so I don't refer to their variants as strains.
You're implying that the only difference are the host's proteins and all the variance is accounted for by the host's genetic variations. But just like other pathogens, genetic variations in hosts result in different levels of susceptibility from different strains.
You seem to have you panties in a knot about the use of the word "strain" to describe prion isoforms. Sorry to bust your pedantic bubble, but strain is commonly used in literature about prions. Of course, since you're posting on Slashdot, you must be a subject matter expert and know must know better than everyone else.
Because it is conversion of the host prion proteins, the only 'strain' that exists is the host.
Wrong. From the UCL Institute of Neurology MRC Prion Clinic:
Although prions do not carry genetic material, they also come in several different forms - again known as strains. If prions are just proteins, how can they come in different strains? This has been a very important question. It is now clear that there is not just one rogue form of PrP that causes prion disease but there several distinct rogue forms.
Oh look, they also use the word "strain" on that page, the horror!
Aside from the authors I cited and the MRC Prion Clinic, a quick search shows hundreds of examples. They all must be wrong too, huh? Anyway, I'm going to go with the credentialed neurologists and researchers on this, as opposed to some random arrogant Slashdot pedant.
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Probably the same line of reasoning that will be moving a disease lab from an island to the campus of a centrallly-located public university (also within eyesight of the stadium, coliseum, and rec center): greed and pork-barrel politics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bio_and_Agro-Defense_Facility
Why do you characterise SARS as spreading aggressively? I know people were afraid that it would, but I didn't see any evidence that it spread as readily as the flu, or even measles.
If you say "The spreading characteristic of viruses and bacterial pathogens is all but defeated by modern practices.", I'd want to know how those practices are applied in schools, bars, and public transit, not in hospitals and biology labs. (But even in hospitals those statements appear to be a vast overrating of actual practice, though certainly increased efforts are currently underway.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Not to mention the delivery methods are not very good or useful.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Yeah, but the real issue with LFTR it will explode, killing millions like in Chernobyl
False. Chernobyl didn't kill millions. Stop spreading lies please.
I had no idea how efficient nature was at selecting positive traits and weeding out the bad ones. I figured that really only went for things that were grossly or moderately detrimental to the organism.
Thanks for enlightening this layman.
12 Monkeys Damn the taxpayers, full speed ahead...
Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
The proposal being that of the AC to whom I was originally replying; who brought up prions in the first place. Its only real utility would be to weaken a general population (again, with foolishly low success rates.) I find it amusing how some posters are ignoring the ineffectiveness of these methods of killing and then saying "yeah, but I think it's scary," as though we should legislate against bogeymen.
The "rerouting around plaques" explanation makes sense. I expect there's a maximum plaque formation rate which is mostly a function of the protein's normal kinetics, localization and availability.
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You're kinda beating a dead horse here, buddy.
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Outside of The Dark Knight, creating panic is not actually an objective of terrorism. It's much more important for them to prove that they can do anything at any time, which is a useful bargaining chip. Fear is useless unless it affects those being extorted.
As for prions, it looks like vCJD may actually be practical as a weapon. Until the late nineties BSE epidemic in Britian, most known prion diseases cases were in people over the age of 55.
The only numbers we have on any prion's success rate were of the first Kuru epidemic in the late 50s. 1 in 50 people were affected; with about 90% being women, and all women being potentially exposed to the disease, it is likely that the rate of problems was around 4%. If vCJD has the same characteristics, this seems like a very low-yield strategy compared to alternatives like chemical poisoning. There are plenty of methods that would be about as untraceable, and could give much more effective, rapid results.
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Well, it's the closest example of a modern disease. There were only a dozen or so cases of H5N1 transmitting between humans; there aren't any other good examples of epidemics affecting Western countries in the last few years, except maybe the 1972 Yugoslavian smallpox outbreak, in which there were only 175 cases and 35 deaths due to vaccination and quarantine.
"Modern practices" is, honestly, pretty simple: basic hygiene. Schools, bars, and public transit are all regularly sterilized. Simply washing your hands with warm water eliminates ninety percent of the bacteria on them. To contrast, there are millions of people in India who rely on the Ganges river for both drinking water and waste outflow—and it's not exactly segregated as to what goes into the river where. This is a major factor in the continued persistence of plague, cholera, and other diseases in those regions which Europeans would normally assume to be relics of history.
The spread of disease in hospitals is a completely different problem. Because keeping those places sterile is so important, we've come to rely on antibiotics that are normally very effective, but target specific mechanisms inside of the bacterial cell in order to kill it. Against these weapons, bacteria have had a chance to evolve defences, due to frequent usage but insufficient thoroughness.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Outside of The Dark Knight, creating panic is not actually an objective of terrorism. It's much more important for them to prove that they can do anything at any time, which is a useful bargaining chip. Fear is useless unless it affects those being extorted.
The terrorism of suicide bombers in crowds is mainly to demoralize the population to cause a loss of will of keeping up a fight. The panic is an objective, in that a disorganized and conflicted enemy is a weaker enemy. Panic is never the end goal (even in Batman) but a means to an end. Killing all the enemy isn't ever the "goal" of a war. "Winning" is the goal, and killing everyone else may be a means to the end, but isn't the end. Your focus on killing is irrelevant, as that's not even the goal of chemical attacks. Or the US's nuclear strikes against Japan. The goal wasn't to kill Japanese people, but to end the war. Demonstrating a chemical or biological weapon of less destruction may have had a greater effect on the will to fight because the fear itself is a desired outcome as an intermediate step to the desired final outcome.
Sometimes the goal is a slow and predictable destabilization of a government/nation. And I can see a place in that for something with a 10 year incubation period.
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I'm not saying it wouldn't be a worthwhile tactic, but it goes against the philosophy of the nuclear and chemical strikes. The bombing of Japan and the attacks on the World Trade Center both attempted to say the same thing: you are defenceless. They were shows of force, intended to make the military itself feel vulnerable. The military can thwart the second wave of biological attacks against it easily, so there's no chance of lasting intimidation. Attacking already vulnerable civilians essentially contravenes the doctrine of "shock and awe," which has been a component of successful military strategy all the way back to Sun Tzu and the Roman Empire, and is likely to create martyrs, as 9/11 did.
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most worms are stupidly easy to prevent through adequate precautions and hygiene.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
The military can thwart the second wave of biological attacks against it easily, so there's no chance of lasting intimidation.
You seem to prefer chemical to biological attacks, so that seems like a silly statement. The military's response to a chemical attack will likely render it immune to the next. Many of the preparations for chemical match biological. And both greatly reduce fighting ability, especially in hot climes.
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My idea of an effective chemical attack involves extremely vicious acid, not a toxin. Even so, chemical attacks are much faster-acting and can conceivably be employed without giving the enemy time to warn others.
I'm not sure what the point of your bombing explanation was, since that qualifies as shock and awe (against the air transit system itself) and could not be implemented with biological weapons.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
And I don't understand how you think chemicals are better than bio attacks when a hint of warning (or previous attack) and your vicious acid will have zero effect on the authorities - who will be all decked out in NBC gear.
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It's quite simple; extremely high concentrations of triflic acid can eat through anything but glass and teflon, including plastics and rubber. It spontaneously vaporizes if put in air that's even slightly humid, and the fumes can cause severe burns and blindness within seconds from several metres away. It can destroy buildings. And unlike a biological attack, everyone has to be outfitted with safety equipment; it can't be defeated by herding everyone into a room with extremely rapid ventilation.
Chemical attacks aren't nearly as versatile as traditional warfare, no, but they have much more potential to cause actual damage than biological attacks.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The problem with your chemical attack is that you'd need to have all of it in a rooftop water-tower set to spill on the crowd. It would be useless in a subway situation. That's why toxins are used, rather than chemicals. What's the maximum damage that you can cause with one cup of liquid in a crowded subway? For biological weapons, the theoretical maximum is killing billions. For toxins, you could kill hundreds. For your acid, you kill no more than tens, perhaps with a higher rate of casualties, but maybe not.
And I can mail-order trifilic acid for about $2000 per kg. Though results for "eats plastic" doesn't return anything indicating it eats plastic, so I'm not sure why you think a military NBC suit will not protect from a "common" industrial chemical.
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The word 'strain' doesn't imply anything about pathogenicity. People refer to different strains of plants, animals, fungus, etc. that have no pathogenic modes.
Prions don't replicate themselves. They convert pre-existing host prion proteins into an altered pathogenic conformation. If you have active prion disease, it is your own cellular-synthesized protein which has become mis-folded and is causing pathogenesis. The initial mis-folding in your body can happen sporadically or it can be triggered by mis-folded prion proteins from external exposure.
It turns out there are different pathogenic ways the native prion protein can mis-fold and that these are referred to as 'strains', but that term doesn't imply what it means in other contexts. I'm not claiming that those articles are incorrect, I am claiming that you are misunderstanding those articles because you don't understand what prions are and how they work.
From here:
Because of the hygroscopic nature of triflic acid, handling and transfer under a dry, inert atmosphere is recommended. Contact with natural and most synthetic polymers (rubber, cork, common plastics) can lead to reaction. For this reason, storage in glass or PTFE containers is recommended.
Triflic acid vapour aggressively spreads through the air. People I've known who've worked with triflic acid describe the phenomenon as shimmering smoke, a little like a halon extinguisher. A cup of the stuff could most likely kill everyone on a crowded subway platform (i.e., hundreds of people) within a minute, by burning their lungs and pulmonary edema. The more humid the environment, the more aggressively it spreads. Handling the stuff unprotected for only a couple of seconds will cause nosebleeds. People would be dead long before they realised what was happening, eliminating the chance that they could warn others (a major problem with slow-acting biological weapons.)
Plenty of common industrial chemicals are seriously horrible, nasty stuff. While they do make PTFE-coated (teflon) hazmat suits specifically for handling spills of reagents like triflic acid, such suits are not appropriate for all toxins. One of the first things you learn in organic chemistry is that no material can protect against all chemicals.
I think that's a lot more dangerous than a theoretical maximum which is trivially capped by a shower and a standard ventilator and would take years to reach.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I had a misunderstanding about prions having multiple pathogenic folds which are commonly referred to as 'strains'. The term 'strain' is very often misconstrued by science writers in the media to mean the same thing as a 'strain' of bacteria, leading to most media discussions of the pathogen having many of the fundamentals wrong. I may have jumped the gun in thinking you were making the same mistake.
Of course, since you're posting on Slashdot, you must be a subject matter expert and know must know better than everyone else.
I am an actual practicing biologist in academia at a major research institution, but don't let that stop you from being a jackass and making claims that don't represent reality. Actual science, practiced by actual scientists, is full of arguments all the time. Scientific conventions are hothouses of drinking, dancing, and fighting. However, once you've decided to go with personal attacks, you're no longer doing science and should examine your motivations.
a theoretical maximum which is trivially capped by a shower and a standard ventilator and would take years to reach.
When you are considering the case where everyone in the subway is standing in a shower wearing a ventilator to be the "theoretical maximum" you are obviously no longer discussing things rationally. That leaves nothing left to say.
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The subway platform was a separate example. The fact remains that biological attacks remain less effective against prepared targets than chemical ones, and are easier to prepare against. Further, I already agreed with you that a sleeper attack on civilians is (in principle) a valid move when were discussing prions; just not compatible with major real-world doctrines.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
The word 'strain' doesn't imply anything about pathogenicity. People refer to different strains of plants, animals, fungus, etc. that have no pathogenic modes.
Quite right. I didn't mean to imply that strains only referred to pathogens, just that the word strain is commonly used to describe varieties of pathogens, a category which includes prions.
Prions don't replicate themselves.
Neither do viruses.
It turns out there are different pathogenic ways the native prion protein can mis-fold and that these are referred to as 'strains', but that term doesn't imply what it means in other contexts.
What you're missing here is that not only are there are multiple variants of PrPc (normal form) protein, caused by variations in the PRNP gene, but that there are also multiple variants of the PrPsc (misfolded/prion form) protein (not just different ways of misfolding), and that different variants of PrPc result in different levels of susceptibility or resistance to different variants of PrPsc. These PrPsc variants are referred to as strains in pretty much all the literature, despite your claims that the use of the word is wrong.
I may have jumped the gun in thinking you were making the same mistake.
No, not "may have". You did jump the gun, despite the fact that I actually cited an example of the word strain being used to describe a prion variety in the literature.
Of course, since you're posting on Slashdot, you must be a subject matter expert and know must know better than everyone else.
I am an actual practicing biologist in academia at a major research institution,
Argumentum ex cathedra: "I'm an expert, all you amateurs stand back!" Whatever your background and present situation may be, you're just plain wrong about prion strains.
but don't let that stop you from being a jackass
I started with a simple citation demonstrating that the word strain is used to describe prion varieties. You responded with the following:
yes. you should also look into what a prion actually is.
you should read further than just the abstract of the paper
it really helps to read what you cite. Don't worry, plenty of professional scientists don't do this... citing papers that don't actually have anything to do with what they're talking about in their paper.
Unless you're prone to referring to different types of soda pop as different strains
Several thinly veiled strains of condescension implying that (a) I don't know what a prion actually is; (b) I didn't read what I cited; (c) I cited a paper that didn't actually have anything to do with what I was talking about; and (d) I'm an idiot. Thinly veiled, but easy to translate: I'm an ignorant buffoon and you're an expert, so I should stop playing in the same room as you. In other words, you were a jackass.
Actual science, practiced by actual scientists,
More ad hominem and ex cathedra. Now you're implying that I'm not an actual scientist practicing actual science, but you are.
However, once you've decided to go with personal attacks,
Except you decided to go with personal attacks, very thinly veiled ones.
you're no longer doing science and should examine your motivations.
Good advice. You should take it.
and making claims that don't represent reality.
You mean like:
There is no such thing as a 'kuru strain' of the CJD prion.
and
the only 'strain' that exists is the host
Both of those cl
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?
Argumentum ex cathedra: "I'm an expert, all you amateurs stand back!"
Note that this is exactly the opposite of what I did. I was pointing out that real science involves arguments, but thanks for playing. I made no "thinly veiled personal attacks". The closest I made to personal attacks was calling you a jackass in response to you making personal attacks. You accused me of thinking I knew better than anyone else, so I pointed out that I am a researcher and that real science involves arguments as a matter of course. Me having an argument means that I think something differently AND I want to know better about something.
you should read further than just the abstract of the paper
it really helps to read what you cite. Don't worry, plenty of professional scientists don't do this... citing papers that don't actually have anything to do with what they're talking about in their paper.
The introduction of the paper contradicted what you referred to in the abstract. (This is fairly common because condensing the entire paper into an abstract leads to information loss.) You focussing on what the abstract said, rather than what the paper said suggested you read the abstract, but not the complete paper. There were several citations from the paper which, when those papers were read, contradicted what the paper claimed those citations said. This indicates the authors are not in agreement with the community they're working in. (Again, fairly common.)
Citing the number of Google findings from 'prion strain' also suggested a quick overview method of research review. Googling 'prion isoform' produced a similar, but larger number of hits. At best it suggests there might be disagreement over terminology among scientists researching prions. A more likely interpretation is that neither result means much, but referring to google as an authority could be interpreted as an attempt to prove superior Google-fu.
Several thinly veiled strains of condescension implying that (a) I don't know what a prion actually is; (b) I didn't read what I cited; (c) I cited a paper that didn't actually have anything to do with what I was talking about; and (d) I'm an idiot. Thinly veiled, but easy to translate: I'm an ignorant buffoon and you're an expert, so I should stop playing in the same room as you. In other words, you were a jackass.
(a)(b) How many of the papers cited by the paper you cited did you read? Doing so it made it clear that the authors in that paper were using the term 'strain' to mean what researchers in other communities mean by 'isoform'.
(c) I was referring to citations that paper made which made it clear the paper you cited was talking about isoform differences.
(d) I never said this in any way, nor do I think it is a relevant statement. If you know something that I don't, I don't think of myself as an idiot. If I know something that you don't, I don't think of you as an idiot. If we have a disagreement of opinion, I don't think either of us are idiots. Seriously?
There is no such thing as a 'kuru strain' of the CJD prion.
Because it is conversion of the host prion proteins, the only 'strain' that exists is the host.
These are the statements you made that I am refuting. I quote them here for easy reference.
The introduction of the paper contradicted what you referred to in the abstract.
No, it didn't, and I'll explain why in a bit.
You focussing on what the abstract said, rather than what the paper said suggested you read the abstract, but not the complete paper.
Because I only needed an example of the use of the word "strain" to describe varieties of prions, specifically the kuru strain, and nothing more.
There were several citations from the paper which, when those papers were read, contradicted what the paper claimed those citations said. This indicates the authors are not in agreement with the community they're working in. (Again, fairly common.)
Irrelevant to our discussion, because we're not discussing their study, just the fact that there is a kuru strain and that the word "strain" is used in prion literature.
Citing the number of Google findings from 'prion strain' also suggested a quick overview method of research review. Googling 'prion isoform' produced a similar, but larger number of hits.
I only used Google to find examples of prion varieties being referred to as "strains" in scientific literature. Since you suggested this as a metric... prion strain: About 518,000 results; prion isoform: About 356,000 results. Searching for the exact phrases... "prion strain": About 30,400 results; "prion isoform": About 5,290 results. Not that those numbers mean anything.
At best it suggests there might be disagreement over terminology among scientists researching prions.
The disagreement isn't among prion researchers. They use "strain" and "isoform" to describe two different things. Again, explanation follows.
The authors cited use the term 'molecular strain types', when they should have said 'molecular isoforms'.
The authors used 'molecular strain types' because they meant 'molecular strain types' and not 'molecular isoforms'. You think they should have used the other phrase because you misunderstand what they mean, and I think I understand why there's confusion.
Here's the promised explanation. In prion literature, we mainly study the protein PrP (aka CD230), which is encoded by the PRNP gene in humans. The normal form is referred to as the PrPc isoform or the normal cellular isoform (c for cellular). The pathogenic form is called the PrPsc isoform or the scrapie isoform (sc for scrapie). PrPsc is a misfolded PrPc and it seems to be able to cause existing PrPc to misfold into PrPsc. In prion research, there are two isoforms of PrP, the normal c and the misfolded sc.
There are several gene polymorphisms of PRNP which express into slightly different forms of PrP. These are what are referred to as strains. The encoding genes are slightly different and the expressed protein sequences are slightly different. These different strains have a (naturally occurring) PrPc isoform and most of them also have a misfolded PrPsc isoform. The PrPsc isoforms of PrPc strains have slight compositional and structural differences, due to the base PrPc isoforms having those differences, hence the existence of PrPsc strains or prion strains. The use of the word "strain" for prions is essentially identical to that for bacte
Excuse me, wtf r u doin?