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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."
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didn't have the proper tools to monitor the terrorists before the act occurred mainly due to the idiotic beliefs in an outdated and itself a terroristic document, the constitution.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.
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
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!
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I've tried this before but a FAGGOT is such a non-standardized unit of measure no one can seem to come up with a consistently working conversion. Sometimes we ended up with a carton of menthols. Sometimes a big bundle of sticks (why the fuck would I need that?) The worse were the times we ended up with a cheap beer swilling ex high school jock. Seriously inconvenient unit of measure those were and I couldn't trade them for anything useful!
I browse on +1 so AC's need not respond, I won't see it.
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
...and let's be honest, if nature was going to do it, it's had fifty million years to make a move, y'know?
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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.
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!
"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:
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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.
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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.
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
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?
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 ==========
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.
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.
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.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
I've put up the explanation in another comment, but the gist of it is this: the DNA in bacteria and viruses evolves to do whatever is necessary to survive. If you do not set it up so that your construct is vital to the cell's survival, it will drop that functionality within a few days to a week of propagating in the wild. Viruses have been very frustrating to use for controlled engineering tasks like gene replacement because they tend to kill more target cells (without replication) than they transfect, and because viral genomes are so unstable, anything not immediately vital to its function will be gone by the time it's left the host. You'd be better off poisoning the target(s) with Polonium.
Bacteria take a little longer to screw everything up, but they have their own problems, in that they're pernicious gene-exchangers. The majority of genes in any given bacterium can be found in most of the other species from the same environment; this strategy has allowed them to defend against unexpected stressors like antibiotics and plant chemical defences (allelochemicals). As a result, either the payload will be dead in a week or two (a problem that has often marred many good iGEM projects), or on the off-chance it's actually useful, you can expect it to have spread around the world in a few years. That's great for rogue madmen, but an impediment to goal-oriented terrorist organisations and nation states.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!