How to Maintain Lab Safety While Making Viruses Deadlier

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How to Maintain Lab Safety While Making Viruses Deadlier

Posted by timothy on Thursday August 14, 2014 @03:56AM from the this-one-goes-to-11 dept.

Lasrick (2629253) writes "A scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published an article in June revealing that he had taken genes from the deadly human 1918 Spanish Flu and inserted them into the H5N1 avian flu to make a new virus—one which was both far deadlier and far more capable of spreading than the original avian strain. In July it was revealed that the same scientist was conducting another study in which he genetically altered the 2009 strain of flu to enable it to evade immune responses, 'effectively making the human population defenseless against re-emergence.' In the U.S. alone, biosafety incidents involving pathogens happen more than twice per week. These 'gain-of-function' experiments are accidents waiting to happen, with the possibility of starting deadly pandemics that could kill millions. It isn't as if it hasn't happened before: in 2009, a group of Chinese scientists created a viral strain of flu virus that escaped the lab and created a pandemic, killing thousands of people. 'Against this backdrop, the growing use of gain-of-function approaches for research requires more careful examination. And the potential consequences keep getting more catastrophic.' This article explores the history of lab-created pandemics and outlines recommendations for a safer approach to this type of research."

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Hacker culture in the lab by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 03:59 · Score: 1

It's not just for electronics and code anymore.
1. Re:Hacker culture in the lab by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 05:42 · Score: 0, Flamebait
  
  It isn't as if it hasn't happened before: in 2009, a group of Chinese scientists created a viral strain of flu virus that escaped the lab and created a pandemic, killing thousands of people.
  Lasrick, you dumb motherfucker.
  The actual quote, which you linked to but obviously misread, states:
  
  Such situations are not confined to the United States; China’s poor track record for laboratory containment means that it was "appallingly irresponsible" (in Lord May’s words) for a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.
  Link.
  The Chinese researchers didn't CAUSE the 2009 pandemic. In the paragraph above, "that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives" refers to the H1N1 virus, not to the hybrid which they created. Try some basic research yourself before you post something so inflammatory and egregiously wrong. Where the hell are the editors? Oh, wait, never mind ....
2. Re:Hacker culture in the lab by skywire · 2014-08-14 11:08 · Score: 1
  
  The text is perfectly ambiguous. He took it one way, and you the other. But he still should have known better, since there were no headlines in 2009 about a lab-made hybrid killing thousands.
  
  --
  Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.
Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

Someone put this scientist on the no fly list. That's some Twelve Monkeys shit he's pulling right there.
1. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by magarity · 2014-08-14 04:18 · Score: 2
  
  Someone put this scientist on the no fly list. That's some Twelve Monkeys shit he's pulling right there.
  But if they're on the no fly list they won't be able to get a sample of the original virus.
2. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:52 · Score: 0
  
  If he's on the no fly list he can't get the new virus to federal agency that asked for it to be created.
3. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by mellon · 2014-08-14 05:21 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  The thing that boggles my mind about this is that apparently nobody in the chain of command at the university thinks there's anything wrong with what this brilliant idiot has done. If I were the prosecutor here, I would charge everybody who know about the experiment with a billion counts of attempted murder (just a back-of-the-envelope estimate), and throw the fuckers in the can for life. Unbelievable.
4. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by s.petry · 2014-08-14 05:55 · Score: 1
  
  Do you really believe that this is some rogue mad scientist? If so, why is the article not discussing the arrest of said mad scientist and how they are destroying all of their creations?
  What's that old saying? "Absolute power corrupts absolutely.", and this is the real state of affairs with the US Federal Government. These projects are being funded and approved by that same source. It's right on par with dumping radiation on impoverished cities in the US in the 50s and 60s, giving ethnic minorities syphilis and studying how it corrodes the brain over time, or using depleted uranium munitions all over the middle east (but don't worry, the birth defects are only happening to those brown skilled people).
  
  --
  -The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
5. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:03 · Score: 0
  
  Attempted murder for doing some experiments in a lab? Life in prison? Did he ATTEMPT to release the virus into the population?
  I'm sure glad you have no ties to our legal system in the United States. The other poster that called you a "fucking fag" understated it.
6. Re: Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:23 · Score: 1
  
  So it's cool if I build a nuclear weapon right? I mean, I'm a nuclear scientist so I know what I'm doing, and I don't intend to use it, so its no problem in me building it, right?
7. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:24 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  Scientists do this all the time. My buddy once worked in a lab in Maryland that engineered extremely virulent (in some cases deadly) rhinoviruses. Killer colds!
  They do this to understand what makes a virus more dangerous, or what makes it more contagious. It's part of the scientific method. If you have a theory that gene Z can make a virus more deadly, the best way to _test_ that hypothesis is to add gene Z to the virus and compare its effects to a control. You're not doing it to make a deadly virus; you're doing it so you can detect deadly viruses in the wild. Over time this has allowed us to estimate the future damage of viral epidemics with increasing accuracy.
  Of course, "best" is relative. It's best in the sense that it provides the most sound scientific data. But the potential non-scientific externalities come into play in a big way. The "best" way to test the radiological effects of nuclear fall-out is to drop a bomb on a population, but obviously that's a tad unethical.
8. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by Oligonicella · 2014-08-14 06:28 · Score: 2
  
  Your post is true. Your list of horrors should include this one and if those bother anyone, this should as well.
  
  It is unconscionable for the gov or anyone to actually create this item. There have been too many incidents of accidentally losing and miss filing and just plain letting escape of pathogens here and abroad to purposely create a friggin' virus that is *designed* to elude immune responses - in other words, purposely designed to kill at maximum. Yes, the government is the main culprit but this guy is a definite accessory and if this shit escapes and kills people he definitely shares the guilt.
9. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by eedwardsjr · 2014-08-14 07:12 · Score: 1
  
  Sounds just like "I am Legend". That is some scary crap.
10. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by HiThere · 2014-08-14 08:06 · Score: 2
  
  Not attempted murder, because he didn't attempt to release the virus, and had no intention of doing so. Even if it were released, and he was responsible for the deaths, it wouldn't be murder. Manslaughter, perhaps. As it is it's closer to "reckless endangerment" (a more general class that includes reckless driving as a subclass).
  The problem would be proving that he acted recklessly. I accept that this is probable, given the history of biology lab accidents. (Wasn't it earlier this month that someone found some weaponized anthrax abandoned in a closet?)
  Personally, however, I would question the sanity of the researcher and each and every one of his superiors who authorized the research.
  
  --
  
  I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
11. Re: Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 08:10 · Score: 1
  
  I'd feel a lot safer with some physicist building a nuke in their basement than some biologist tinkering with flu virus to make it more deadly and immune system resistant.
  Nukes, after all, aren't very portable and actually take a fair bit of effort to detonate. Worst case, he irradiates his neighborhood, and radiation is relatively easy to detect and avoid (with eg a geiger counter). Flu virus, on the other hand, is highly portable, easily spread, and if you can detect it, you're already exposed.
12. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by mellon · 2014-08-14 08:13 · Score: 1
  
  This wasn't a thought crime. This was an actual crime, knowingly committed with full buy-in from the administration. Actual virus was produces, and had the intended effect.
13. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by mellon · 2014-08-14 08:18 · Score: 1
  
  So if I fill a big, weak tank with a poisonous substance and deliberately park it upstream from a public reservoir, but don't actually open a valve to dump the toxin into the reservoir, and there's really only about a 20% chance of the thing bursting and dumping the whole load of toxin into the reservoir, you are saying that I have done nothing wrong, and should not be subject to prosecution, because although I set up a situation with a real probability of poisoning the water supply, I didn't actually poison the water supply.
  ISTM that you are really saying that it's only attempted murder if the toxin actually winds up in the water supply; if so, you don't understand what attempted murder is. It's when you try to kill someone, but fail. I suspect that there's no mens rea here, so the charge wouldn't stick, but knowingly manufacturing a pandemic virus ought to be a crime, and the knowingly part would then constitute mens rea.
14. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by mellon · 2014-08-14 08:23 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  You are correct—this isn't attempted murder. But IMHO it's in the same moral category. I think you are basically right that it's a failure to think outside of the immediate problem space, but what a failure. Imagine if 40-60% of the people you have ever met or heard of, as well as those you don't, died within a month. The 1918 flu left emotional scars that persisted for generations. And that had a 2% mortality rate. The amount of suffering this person could have caused through his narrow thinking is more than has ever been experienced in all of history.
15. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 08:30 · Score: 0
  
  You mean it did actually kill billions of people, since you said it was attempted murder and it had the intended effect?
16. Re: Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 09:58 · Score: 1
  
  I for one would be a helluva lot nore comfortable with a rogue nuclear scientist making a nuke than a bio-engineer making super-flu. With the nuke, it's "there goes the city", with the super virus it's "there goes humanity".
17. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 10:37 · Score: 1
  
  Why is this flamenait? The parent is right!
  If I lived in the US I would say 'I feel threatend' by that guy and shot him myself!
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
18. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 10:42 · Score: 2
  
  Construction of bio weapons is forbidden by multiple multilateral contracts since decades, for a fucking reason, idiot.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
19. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by mellon · 2014-08-14 12:32 · Score: 2
  
  No, I mean that by any rational standard, deliberately creating a pathogen that can kill millions, whether you release it deliberately or not, is a crime. It may not be on the books, but it should be.
20. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by dryeo · 2014-08-14 13:34 · Score: 1
  
  Depends on who you are and who the people using the reservoir are.
  If you're a regular or poor person, especially brown with an Arab sounding name, well the book will be thrown at you so hard it'll knock your head off.
  If you're running a successful mining company and it's just a bunch of brown (or red) skinned poor people using the reservoir for water and the government was saving money by not inspecting that big tank, well even when it breaks the worst that will happen is you have to re-incorporate as a different company after much finger pointing.
  
  --
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
21. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by Zynder · 2014-08-14 14:02 · Score: 1
  
  Oh well, it's good to see the effectiveness of making a thing illegal and how it totally solves the problem of people making them, whether supervised or not.
22. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by kwbauer · 2014-08-14 17:12 · Score: 1
  
  Well, its a good thing we don't prosecute people for what a few think should be a crime then isn't it. If we did about 99.99% of the world would be in jail.
23. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by kwbauer · 2014-08-14 17:19 · Score: 1
  
  Who said anything about constructing a weapon? UW-Madison is one of the more liberal campuses in the US.
24. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by torsmo · 2014-08-14 17:35 · Score: 1
  
  Why? Aren't there other modes of travel available? Or is the virus too snooty to travel via road and would instead prefer to be airborne?
25. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by sjames · 2014-08-14 19:05 · Score: 1
  
  TFA is saying that it might be smarter to knock the gene out of the deadly virus first and see if it becomes benign. That too tests the hypothesis without creating a superbug in the process.
26. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-15 05:40 · Score: 0
  
  Intentions are irrelevant. The proverbial Road to Hell is paved with good intentions. At the very least, all of these people need to be in jail for a long, long time. The fact that anyone thought this was "ok" is extraordinarily disturbing.
27. Re:Homeland security would like a word... by mellon · 2014-08-15 14:00 · Score: 1
  
  Interestingly enough, while 99.9% of the world isn't in jail, quite a few of them are here in the U.S., many for "crimes" that nearly all Americans think aren't crimes. It's a sad irony that crimes that could actually cost people their lives aren't prosecuted, while "crimes" that have no victim fill our jails with "criminals."
So ... by gstoddart · 2014-08-14 04:00 · Score: 5, Insightful

They essentially are making biological weapons in violation of international treaties, but they're saying it's all OK because it's for research?
Sorry, but what? If someone in Iran was doing this people would be calling for airstrikes.
The hubris of thinking "it's OK, I'm a trained professional, nothing bad can happen" is mind boggling.
How is it even legal to be making deadlier strains of viruses?

--
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
1. Re:So ... by symes · 2014-08-14 04:06 · Score: 1
  
  There has to be a balance between the risks associated with this research and possible gains. Given the potential cost to human life it is hard to understand why this research should continue. Particularly as it is the community in which the lab is based that will inevitably suffer most should there be an incident.
2. Re:So ... by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2014-08-14 04:08 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Yes that has to be it. It couldn't possibly be because biological research is amazingly difficult, and of the tools we have to study cells (few) we have even fewer to study viruses.
  The entire point of gain-of-function studies is that you need to do them in order to confirm a hypothesis about what genes in a virus are actually doing. If you don't do them, you can't know. Knock-out studies aren't enough - you can easily break a certain system, but it doesn't tell you that you actually understand how it functions.
  Sensationalist articles like this are incredibly stupid and dangerous to boot. We only have the slim number of effective anti-viral drugs we do because of research like this. How else do you think they figure out which biological pathways are worth targeting to shutdown a virus?
  And that's not all: the other side of gain-of-function is of course to try and predict future vectors. Since treating the common flu is usually a losing prospect at the moment, and it takes time to manufacture things, its important to determine if any given species could trivially gain extra functionality which would make it dangerous - since that affects decisions about what strains to grow up for the yearly flu vaccine.
3. Re:So ... by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2014-08-14 04:14 · Score: 5, Interesting
  
  I mean seriously. Skip the stupid article and actually read the abstract:
  
  Wild birds harbor a large gene pool of influenza A viruses that have the potential to cause influenza pandemics. Foreseeing and understanding this potential is important for effective surveillance. Our phylogenetic and geographic analyses revealed the global prevalence of avian influenza virus genes whose proteins differ only a few amino acids from the 1918 pandemic influenza virus, suggesting that 1918-like pandemic viruses may emerge in the future. To assess this risk, we generated and characterized a virus composed of avian influenza viral segments with high homology to the 1918 virus. This virus exhibited pathogenicity in mice and ferrets higher than that in an authentic avian influenza virus. Further, acquisition of seven amino acid substitutions in the viral polymerases and the hemagglutinin surface glycoprotein conferred respiratory droplet transmission to the 1918-like avian virus in ferrets, demonstrating that contemporary avian influenza viruses with 1918 virus-like proteins may have pandemic potential.
  The entire point of this research was to test whether we're at risk of something like the 1918 flu virus reoccurring, since the current avian flu virus is strikingly similar. This strikes me as kind of an important thing to know, since it informs almost every aspect of disease-response planning.
  The research was about taking avian flu, performing some fairly likely gene splicing of the type we know can happen during viral replication or incubation, and seeing if the observations of similarity are a problem. Turns out they are. But that also suggests that we might be able to make drugs which target the specific genes which confer the worst effects.
  Unless of course we do something really stupid, like letting sensationalist bullshit convince people to go all anti-science.
4. Re:So ... by sillybilly · 2014-08-14 04:14 · Score: 1
  
  It's against the law but people do it anyway. Like going over the speed limit. Of butt fucking in Texas, or wherever there still are anti sodomy laws on the books. No matter what the law says, people will do whatever they want, even if temporarily before the cops catch up with them.
  The solution is simple. Run away. To where? Outer space. It's not that far. Then on the space station the vacuum that surrounds you irradiated by UV and cosmic rays is a pretty good protectant against spreading of infection, even if not foolproof, but orders of magnitude better than the interconnected atmosphere down here.
5. Re:So ... by enjar · 2014-08-14 04:15 · Score: 1
  
  people would be calling for airstrikes.
  Let's hit that lab with a high explosive, exposing the pathogen to the environment and letting it leave whatever containment it might be inside in a completely uncontrolled manner. What could possibly go wrong?
  If there was military intervention, I'd hope it was a bit more thought out than an air strike.
6. Re:So ... by sillybilly · 2014-08-14 04:16 · Score: 1
  
  Make sure you take a piece of mini jungle with you, Noah's Ark style. Other lifeforms may come in handy down the road.
7. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:18 · Score: 1
  
  Gain of function can be tested on any virus.
  Doing it on a virus known to spread airborne and that easily infects humans is questionable.
  You can learn to program editing a "hello world" C++ sample code, or you can learn to program in a "fdisk" sample code.
  mistakes on "hello world" will be harmless, yet you'll gonna learn the basics of how the program works.
  mistakes on fdisk are not trivial and can render your system useless.
  get the point?
8. Re:So ... by NotInHere · 2014-08-14 04:18 · Score: 1
  
  If someone does it in the US, the USA would have just yet another humanity-endangering weapon. If someone does it in Iran, it would be Iran's only one. Therefore the risk is greater that the weapon will actually be used. And if it were only used as deturrent, Iran would emerge as new power. US already has a UN security council veto chair, so there is nothing to disturb here in the world's country hierarchy.
9. Re:So ... by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2014-08-14 04:21 · Score: 2
  
  Go and read the actual abstract. Or look above where I posted it. Because the article buries it under "PANIC", whereas the reasons to do this research are actually pretty obvious. I'll give you a hint: they didn't actually add anything. All they did was re-arrange the existing genome, and do some site-specific mutation tests.
10. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:22 · Score: 0
  
  Sounds like Silent Running.
11. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:23 · Score: 0
  
  so there is nothing to disturb here in the world's country hierarchy
  You're right, America is still full of elf entitled douchebags who hold a double standard for what they do versus what someone else does.
12. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:24 · Score: 0
  
  How is it even legal to be making deadlier strains of viruses?
  More lethal, not necessarily deadlier.
  For the disease to spread effectively the victim has to be alive long enough to spread it and preferably lack symptoms.
  Worldwide common flu kills between 250,000 to 500,000 people every year. Ever since the Black Death was active common flue has killed more people making it "more successful" in that regard.
  Creating a supervirus is a tricky balance. If you make it kill off the victim too quickly it won't spread very far.
13. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:28 · Score: 0
  
  in violation of international treaties
  
  You should read the summary again, it states quite clearly that the research is done by the U.S., international treaties do not apply.
14. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:28 · Score: 1
  
  Particularly as it is the community in which the lab is based that will inevitably suffer most should there be an incident.
  A weapons-grade bioagent lab in the middle of downtown Boston? Sure, why not!
15. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:51 · Score: 0
  
  My example is still valid. "Hacking" genome on a virus makes sense from a biological standpoint, choosing influenza virus or any easily transmited -airbore transmited ffs- one is questionable.
16. Re: So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:54 · Score: 0
  
  ...and of course, once the important research is done, written up and understood the experiments are incinerated, right?
17. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:55 · Score: 0
  
  The problem with both of your conclusions, however, is why don't they destroy the deadly virus they've created after they get their results. They refrigerate it and keep it around so they can use it at some point in the future. In a weapon. Ultimately, the point of these modified diseases is to kill people. Not research.
18. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 05:09 · Score: 0
  
  Maybe look into the actual laws and treaties against biological weapons:
  
  "Each State Party to this Convention undertakes never in any circumstances to develop, produce, stockpile or otherwise acquire or retain:
  (1) Microbial or other biological agents, or toxins whatever their origin or method of production, of types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes;
  (2) Weapons, equipment or means of delivery designed to use such agents or toxins for hostile purposes or in armed conflict."
  They don't say it is illegal to ever have any such biological agents, only that you can't make it in large quantities, where small quantities are allowed if being used for peaceful research purposes. This is no different than various labs using chemical components of chemical weapons not running afoul of chemical weapons treaties. The treaties are there to stop mass production, stockpiling, and distribution methods. They don't make the agents illegal under any circumstances, especially in small quantities.
19. Re: So ... by Immerman · 2014-08-14 05:18 · Score: 1
  
  Obviously. All samples are shuttled to the Federal weapons-grade biology incinerator for thorough decontamination. What's that? The incinerator looks suspiciously like a cryonics facility? Don't be ridiculous, you're imagining things.
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
20. Re:So ... by Immerman · 2014-08-14 05:19 · Score: 1
  
  So would I. I'm not sure I'd bet on it though.
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
21. Re:So ... by theshowmecanuck · 2014-08-14 05:19 · Score: 1, Insightful
  
  We already know nature can create deadlier viruses. These are a bunch of irresponsible geeks seeing if they can make the most deadly strain for the mental masturbation and bragging rights. They don't need to do this to plan for disaster. And the only way their biology is likely to be of use is if their own strain escapes. Nature will make its own version which they will need to analyze for possible treatments. You don't need to create a potential civilization killer to learn those techniques either. Hubris is the right word for this.
  
  --
  -- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
22. Re:So ... by Immerman · 2014-08-14 05:20 · Score: 1
  
  I really hope you're being facetious...
  
  --
  --- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
23. Re:So ... by mellon · 2014-08-14 05:26 · Score: 1
  
  Um. Yes, it would be nice to know if we were at risk. But if the way to find out if we are at risk is by massively increasing the risk, maybe ignorance really is bliss in this case. That's the point the authors of the article are making, and I think it's an important point.
24. Re:So ... by pla · 2014-08-14 05:26 · Score: 1
  
  They essentially are making biological weapons in violation of international treaties, but they're saying it's all OK because it's for research?
  
  The difference between using explosive in mining and construction, vs using them to make a bomb, reduces to nothing more than a matter of intent.
  
  The hubris of thinking "it's OK, I'm a trained professional, nothing bad can happen" is mind boggling.
  
  Much better to naively pretend that if random microbiologist guy can do it, ISIS can't?
  
  IMO, only a matter of time before some rogue state or terrorist group manages to breed their own superbug. We therefore have a race occurring that we must win, at all costs. Engaging in this sort of core functionality research gives us a fighting chance when something eventually makes it into the wild. Not doing it means the 1% of the human race that survives the plague won't even know what the hell just happened.
25. Re:So ... by mellon · 2014-08-14 05:27 · Score: 1
  
  Why does it make a difference how they made the virus more transmissible?
26. Re:So ... by mellon · 2014-08-14 05:31 · Score: 1
  
  Mod parent "Funny!" Only maybe s/he was serious. Sigh.
27. Re:So ... by Goldsmith · 2014-08-14 05:36 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  It's not fair at all to link opposition to gain in function research to an "anti-science" mindset. You should be ashamed that you're resorting to that argument.
  This is something which is seriously debated in the pages of serious journals, at scientific conferences and by government program managers. To link valid concerns to an "anti-science" crowd is political bullshit maneuvering.
  There is a very real and valid cost/benefit analysis to be done on pursuing this work. As biology catches up to the physical sciences in scope and function, you're going to deal with the same issues we have dealt with (I am a physicist). One of those lessons is that scientists don't get to decide the purpose of our work. It doesn't matter what you write in your paper, or what the program manager tells you the purpose of the work is. It doesn't matter WHY someone does the work, all that matters is WHAT the work is. It's extremely naÃve to think an abstract in a research paper can properly define the purpose of a piece of research.
  There are experiments and research paths we do not follow because the intellectual benefit does not outweigh the very real possibilities for misuse. You asked how you expect people to validate these hypothesis without the work? Take a page from physical science and learn to use computer modeling and limited experimental work in lieu of full studies. Do some tool development. Don't just throw up your hands and insist this is the only way. It's not.
  This will require a cultural change, and there will be lots of hand-wringing over whether new results are valid, but biology will be a more mature field for it.
28. Re:So ... by radtea · 2014-08-14 05:52 · Score: 1
  
  The hubris of thinking "it's OK, I'm a trained professional, nothing bad can happen" is mind boggling.
  What is mind-boggling is that anyone takes a virulently anti-science organization like the dishonestly-named "Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists" seriously as a source of news about anything.
  All you have to do is look at the source, and dismiss the claims as hysteria and lies.
  This is not to say there might not be a story here, or something worth discussing, but until it is sourced from something other than an outlet for anti-science, anti-technology political shills it is all noise and no signal.
  
  --
  Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
29. Re:So ... by wes33 · 2014-08-14 05:52 · Score: 1
  
  nuke the entire site from orbit - it's the only way to be sure
30. Re:So ... by meta-monkey · 2014-08-14 05:55 · Score: 1
  
  Fuel-air bomb maybe? Kill it with fire?
  
  --
  We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
31. Re:So ... by Hotawa+Hawk-eye · 2014-08-14 05:56 · Score: 1
  
  Make the orbital facility completely unmanned. If you're worried about the delay in sending control signals to robotic manipulators with which researchers can perform experiments, send the researchers to the space station. If the orbital facility becomes contaminated, destroy it and let the heat of reentry sterilize the pieces or send it on a trajectory into the sun (which again will sterilize it.)
  If it is just an unmanned experiment station, I wonder how small and how inexpensive we could make it.
32. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:00 · Score: 0
  
  Wait, I thought to sound all Insightful and such around here we're supposed to use oligarchy, not hierarchy. Apparently I went on vacation and missed the memo. At least we're still shitting on the US; it wouldn't be Slashdot if we weren't.
33. Re: So ... by MmmmAqua · 2014-08-14 06:10 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Okay, I hope I've misunderstood you. I work in genomics research, and your post seems, on its face, misinformed at best. Are you seriously suggesting that the computer modeling common to physics and chemistry can be applied to biological systems? Even in the case of something as "simple" as a virus (which may consist of tens to hundreds of thousands of kb pairs, specifying dozens or hundreds of RNA transcripts), simply modeling the virus is meaningless. You would also have to completely model host organisms and their immediate environments. Not even the NSA has that kind of compute power. You're dealing with emergent behaviors in interdependent systems far beyond the scope of what computer modeling can handle. There is no "model it as a simple sphere" approach in biology that can yield meaningful results at this level. Until we can phone up whatever god you happen to believe in (if any), the only way to find out what changing a virus will do to the virus, is to change the virus. The information gained is valuable enough that it is worth the minor risk involved in gaining it.
  
  --
  Arr! The laws of physics be a harsh mistress!
34. Re:So ... by Barack+Nigama · 2014-08-14 06:14 · Score: 0
  
  Nope. The slashdot hivemind has spoken. Even this karma whoring, low UID loser believes the researcher and his associates should all be put in prison for life:
  http://science.slashdot.org/co...
  And I was modded down within minutes for disagreeing with him and calling him out for encouraging the rapid decline of this country into a police state that prosecutes thought-crime.
  Congrats, slashdot.
35. Re:So ... by DeathByLlama · 2014-08-14 06:14 · Score: 1
  
  I mean seriously. Skip the stupid article and actually read the abstract:
  But it makes for so much better hype if you DON'T read (or understand) the science!!
36. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:16 · Score: 0
  
  "maybe ignorance really is bliss in this case"
  And maybe building something we have no idea how it works, then tearing it down and determining WHY it works helps us cure cancer.
  This is very much one of those "if you don't agree with medical progress, you may disagree with this".
  Keep in mind that whether you like the idea or not; we as human beings are constantly at war with at least 100,000 different viruses at any given time. (this is a gross underestimate) each of these strains is in a constant evolutionary arms race to try to kill us and consume everything we have. The only long term chance we have of maintaining control of the situation is to determine HOW and WHY they work, and determine what we can do to combat them.
  Though I PERSONALLY kind of agree that the earth is grossly overpopulated and a major virus would do wonders for getting people to work together, uniting people over a common goal, and a LITTLE population control, I also have a humanitarian side that yells "won't someone think of the children!"
37. Re:So ... by BronsCon · 2014-08-14 06:22 · Score: 1
  
  I disagree. What they're doing in that lab is rearranging bit of virus and seeing what happens; analogous to rearranging bits of code and seeing what happens. That is, they want to know, given what already exists, and its propensity for auto-morphology, how worried should we be? It's essentially the same as asking "what's the worst that can happen if the instructions of Hello World are executed out of order?" except that we can't read the code for the virus (well, we can, but we don't understand enough of the biological "instruction set" it runs on to know what any of it means) and, so, we can't just rearrange it in our editor and step through it like we can with Hello World, we have to compile and execute.
  
  That's why Hello World is not a viable replacement for fdisk in this type of research.
  
  --
  APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
38. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:24 · Score: 0
  
  And I was modded down within minutes for disagreeing
  
  No, you were modded down for being a troll and an asshole.
  Just like you are now.
  There's a reason you post at zero.
39. Re:So ... by carbonUnit42 · 2014-08-14 06:29 · Score: 1
  
  I understand what you're implying, but unlike chemical weapons, a virus is self replicating, and therefore, no need to make large quantities. Although my natural reaction is to 'panic' at the thought of these scientists doing this type of research, and all the imagined scenarios that run though my mind, I understand the importance of their work and the need to understand how the genetic mutations work, and the eventual interruption of the mutation process which would hopefully result in a cure. But my main concern is the experiment being replicated by someone with the intention of destruction, rather than research based on an eventual cure or vaccine.
40. Re:So ... by Jason+Levine · 2014-08-14 06:29 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Because nature does that sort of thing all the time. If we do it in a controlled, lab environment, we can understand what happens when genes get switched up and how to stop viruses. The alternative is sitting around until a lethal virus appears and then trying to quickly do research on it while people die. If the story was about some guy who did this research and didn't exercise proper safeguards on the viruses, I'd agree that this was stupid, but as long as proper safety protocols are followed, the risk of the virus getting out can be pushed to nearly zero.
  Before someone says "but it's not zero and until there's zero risk you shouldn't do this", that's the same argument that the anti-vaxxers use against vaccines. "They aren't 100% safe so until they are we shouldn't use them." In the case of vaccines, the small risk of the vaccine causing some harm is dwarfed by the huge risk of the disease it prevents. In the case of this virus research, the tiny risk of the virus escaping is dwarfed by the benefit of knowing just how viruses work and how to defeat them.
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
41. Re:So ... by Jason+Levine · 2014-08-14 06:33 · Score: 1
  
  Not to mention that nature is constantly messing with genes and creating new, deadlier viruses. Knowing more about how viruses work and how to defeat them means that we'll be better protected against a superbug whether it comes from a terrorist group or from some random natural mutation.
  Not doing any research because there's a small risk of the virus escaping the lab is the equivalent of covering our eyes and assuming that a hungry carnivore can't see us because now we can't see him.
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
42. Re: So ... by gizmo2199 · 2014-08-14 06:36 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  Until one day the Level 1 vial ends up in the incinerator, and the Level 4 vial ends up in the trash can, because, you know, shit happens; end result, millions dead.
  
  --
  This Sig does not Exist.
43. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:37 · Score: 0
  
  I understand what you're implying, but unlike chemical weapons, a virus is self replicating, and therefore, no need to make large quantities
  There was no implying, as it was a straightforward, explicit post pointing out that such work is not illegal under biological weapons treaties. The ability for a virus to reproduce or for others to redo the experiment somewhere else with different intentions doesn't factor into that.
44. Re: So ... by Oligonicella · 2014-08-14 06:38 · Score: 1
  
  You would also have to completely model host organisms and their immediate environments.
  Does this suggest you would be in favor of trying out this virus? Not on yourself of course, but on some other human in a city, as that would be the one and only way to determine how it works inside a human body and spreads?
  
  I am not.
  
  The information gained is valuable enough that it is worth the minor risk involved in gaining it.
  The risk is not minor, it is pandemic.
45. Re:So ... by Oligonicella · 2014-08-14 06:44 · Score: 1
  
  Controlled lab environments at times fail to control. The risks in this particular case do not warrant the dicking around with the virus.
  
  the risk of the virus getting out can be pushed to nearly zero
  So you agree, the risk is not zero. What was that recently discovered lost sample of deadly pathogen again?
46. Re:So ... by Zalbik · 2014-08-14 06:56 · Score: 2
  
  There are experiments and research paths we do not follow because the intellectual benefit does not outweigh the very real possibilities for misuse.
  
  And do you have evidence that the possibility of misuse in this case outweigh the benefits?
  This research is specifically designed to gain an understanding of how viruses mutate in the wild. This is something we must know if we intend to continue on as a species. Mother nature (in her infinite wisdom), doesn't give a flying fig whether the viruses she is continually developing and improving are dangerously lethal to the human species. If we don't outrace her at this game, our time on this planet is limited.
  TL;DR: This type of research is already going on all the time in nature. Unless we can understand how and why these changes occur, eventually one of them is going to kill a heck of a lot of us anyways.
47. Re:So ... by drinkypoo · 2014-08-14 07:29 · Score: 1
  
  The entire point of this research was to test whether we're at risk of something like the 1918 flu virus reoccurring, since the current avian flu virus is strikingly similar. This strikes me as kind of an important thing to know, since it informs almost every aspect of disease-response planning.
  I think there's a valid concern, however, in just who's holding the keys. But I'm sure they'd never, ever abuse any of these technologies.
  
  --
  "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
48. Re:So ... by HiThere · 2014-08-14 08:13 · Score: 1
  
  I'm not sure that it's exactly a weapon. It's hard to control, it's hard to aim, and it's hard to keep it from attacking *you* if you use it on someone else. O, and your population doesn't have a greater immunity than does anyone else's. (Smallpox and measles were used as weapons by US settlers against the Indians...but they were *relatively* immune.)
  So I don't think it's a biological weapon. Just an insanely dangerous piece of biological research. And a good argument for a base on the moon where such experiments can be safely contained.
  
  --
  
  I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
49. Re:So ... by Jason+Levine · 2014-08-14 08:18 · Score: 1
  
  The risk is never zero. Even the most well designed controlled environment can fail. One would hope that enough safeties would be put into place that a failure of one safety system would be covered by another system. Similar to how you don't just toss an anti-virus program on your computer and call it secure. You have multiple layers of security on your computer/network to prevent malware/hackings/etc. However, no matter how many security programs you put on your computer, your risk of being hacked/infected never drops quite to zero. However you can drop it low enough that you can say with reasonable safety that you are protected from hacking/malware. So too the lab's controlled environment might not have zero risk of failure, but they might have multiple redundant systems to push that risk as low as it could possibly go. If you demand zero risk from any medical research lab, you'd effectively shut down all medical research.
  
  --
  My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
50. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 08:36 · Score: 0
  
  So you agree, the risk is not zero.
  The risk is never zero. It is naive to think that if you make something dangerous, it is impossible for something to go wrong. It is also naive to think if you do nothing, that is equivalent to zero risk. You can't just talk of risks in a vacuum, but need to evaluate risks of something going wrong from trying to learn something new against the risks of what could go wrong without that knowledge. Evaluating that is a lot more effort and involves a lot more subtly than some forum post, especially when a bunch of the posts here are knee-jerk and lack any subtly at all.
51. Re:So ... by infinitelink · 2014-08-14 08:51 · Score: 1
  
  They essentially are making biological weapons in violation of international treaties, but they're saying it's all OK because it's for research?
  No, they are seeing what happens with certain changes that occur in viruses that are not improbably to occur in the wild (e.g. any single human that picks-up two strains of flue viruses could be the incubator for a fused variety--and the odds are actually pretty good) so that we know how to respond; I was going to write more but someone else beat me to it, http://science.slashdot.org/co...
  
  AND by doing this sort of work they can also develop novel methods of treatment or ideas on how to do so for viruses with characteristics and behavior that haven't appeared in the wild *yet*. This is the only way to do it, really. The problem now is how to beat the **** out of the level-1 maturity bipolar psychopathic egos who run biology labs like little kingdoms and flagrantly ignore safety rules (a buddy of mine is actually a primary auditor for universities' science programs who receive government funding and he is almost never not floored with how egregiously endangering these operations are to their participants, those on the unversity, and all those around not because "OMG I'M A F***ING IDIOT AND NOTHING THAT COULD BE POTENTIALLY VERY DANGEROUS SHOULD EVER BE DONZ!!!" but because of things like "um, you do realize you're committing a felony by storing 1000 gallons of that kind of alcohol in water jugs, right?"
  
  The hubris of thinking "it's OK, I'm a trained professional, nothing bad can happen" is mind boggling.
  Ordinary mortals should never be taught the word "hubris", they always use it wrong/inappropriately.
  
  --
  Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
52. Re: So ... by infinitelink · 2014-08-14 08:54 · Score: 1
  
  Okay, I hope I've misunderstood you. I work in genomics research, and your post seems, on its face, misinformed at best. Are you seriously suggesting that the computer modeling common to physics and chemistry can be applied to biological systems?
  Obligatory, https://xkcd.com/793/
  
  Always keep in mind that physicists operate on a different plane in their own world dealing with quite different formal objects (or aspects) of "things" but they don't know it.
  
  --
  Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
53. Re:So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 10:51 · Score: 1
  
  seeing if the observations of similarity are a problem. Turns out they are.
  Turns out this is a no brainsr.
  Where comes the stupid attitude in american minds from that everything a scientific theory predicts, must explicitley be tested?
  When the kettle of water on the stove is boiling, I observe steam is produced. I observe the level of water in the kettle is droping. I conclude if it boils long enough the kettle will be empty. There is no fucking need to place 100 kettles of water on stoves and watch them boil away.
  I make a virus more deadly, then I teast if it is, I figure, wow it is more deadly: scientific progress!
  I rather call that a new peak of stupidity.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
54. Re: So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 10:59 · Score: 1
  
  the only way to find out what changing a virus will do to the virus, is to change the virus.
  If that is what you believe you should change your job.
  Yes, I saw the line that you work in genomic research, but it seems I as a layman know more than you about it.
  "simple" as a virus (which may consist of tens to hundreds of thousands of kb pairs, specifying dozens or hundreds of RNA transcripts),
  A flu virus has roughly 100 genes ... go back to school.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
55. Re:So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:04 · Score: 1
  
  And do you have evidence that the possibility of misuse in this case outweigh the benefits?
  
  What benefit are you exactly having in mind?
  This type of research is already going on all the time in nature.
  So nature is a mythical beast intentionally combining a fast spreading virus with the most deadly thinkable one all the time? Lucky that nature is so bad at it ...
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
56. Re:So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:11 · Score: 1
  
  I don't find anything about "not adding anything" in the article.
  As far as I understod it they combined genes from two viruses.
  Your idea that they only rearanged somehtig is bullocks anyway.
  A flu virus is very simple, it encodes less then 100 proteins (I bet lots of thems are the same anyway). Rearanging them does not change anything on the end result. There is quite a difference in gene expression of simple viruses or more complex mamals etc.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
57. Re:So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:22 · Score: 1
  
  Because nature does that sort of thing all the time. If we do it in a controlled, lab environment, we can understand what happens when genes get switched up and how to stop viruses. You talked about a more transmissible virus here.
  So: you can check that with a non deadly virus, or a plant virus.
  The alternative is sitting around until a lethal virus appears and then trying to quickly do research on it while people die. No, that is not the alternative, this is nonsense, see Ebola or the 1918 flu, do you really believe we can craft a remmedy or even a vaccine (the later actually is more easy) to a pandemic in a few weeks or a few months?
  Before someone says "but it's not zero and until there's zero risk you shouldn't do this", that's the same argument that the anti-vaxxers use against vaccines. "They aren't 100% safe so until they are we shouldn't use them."
  That is nonsense.
  If I don't vaccine my child the risk is a) it gets ill, b) it infects other non vaccined children. Perhaps up to a thousand in my country. Ofc more dangerous, it infects adults that did not have the disease as a child, you know, many of those are much more dangerous for adults especially pregnant women, than children.
  So you like to compare the risk of catching a simple 'child illness' with a pandemic that might kill bilions?
  In the case of this virus research, the tiny risk of the virus escaping is dwarfed by the benefit of knowing just how viruses work and how to defeat them.
  No it is not. There is no benefit. We actually learned absolutely nothing about how to defeat the next flu with this bpenis masturbation of said scientist. He has a bpenis? Or do you still call it an epenis?
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
58. Re:So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:27 · Score: 1
  
  You do know that ine counter example is enough to disprove a general claim?
  Ordinary mortals should never be taught the word "hubris", they always use it wrong/inappropriately.
  Your parent actually is that counter example, you failed to comprehend it.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
59. Re:So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:33 · Score: 1
  
  Sending a space station from earth orbit into the sun costs more fuel than the whole Apollo program together ... nice idea but beyond our current scope of space fare. But perhaps you can figure some nice sling shots around other plantes and make it fuel wise less expensive?
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
60. Re:So ... by sillybilly · 2014-08-14 12:10 · Score: 1
  
  Why the heck do you need an experiment station in space? That does not help you in anything, other than curiosity. I'm talking a space station that guarantees the future of life from Earth, including when the Sun is out of juice and ready to blow and swallow up Earth and the inner planet. Sooner or later people have to live in outer space anyway, but there is a while til the Sun runs out of fuel, but there may not be too long a while before some biotech weapon wipes out all DNA on the planet and lets a single, unicellular lifeform dominate and take over everything, like it happens in the business world with monopolies. Same with nuclear holocaust, though the Cold War is over, but we get idiots like Pyongyang(who are btw puppet to China) waving their nukes at us even today. So going to space is about survival of humanity, and hopefully survival of other life too, by being there yourself, and living there through many generations, not just sending stupid robots into space. Robots are maybe for Moon excavation and the like, but the Moon does not have enough gravity to be comfortable, plus it has issues with days and night cycles, so a free floating, rotating cylinder space station about say 300 yards radius and 1/2 mile length, could be good for starters, with many floors in it, and a solar parabolic light collector piping the light in through the axis at the ends of the cylinder, always facing the sun, while the cylinder behind it spins, I don't know, going round once every 3 minutes or so, to create the artificial gravity like centrifugal action on the inside walls of the cylinder. I'm repeating myself on /, too much nowadays, so soon I gotta stop writing at all, or all the repetition gets annoying.
61. Re: So ... by timnbron · 2014-08-14 13:33 · Score: 1
  
  A gene has thousands, sometimes millions of base pairs.
  
  --
  There are some who call me ... Tim.
62. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 13:36 · Score: 0
  
  The problem is that 19-year-old supergenius Wiley is tenting his bunny suit, thinking about how well Dr. Hottie is filling hers out.
  He forgot to put that one last piece of tape on, because he was in a hurry to get suited up and work next to her.
  And don't forget the scads of comments that seem to be appearing on just about every site (including this one), screaming HALLELUJAH! that pot is finally legal in so many places.
  You're 100% sure that they didn't have a couple of bong hits before coming into the lab, eh?
  Also, don't forget that these labs and their Principal Researchers have 2 main priorities:
  1) Funding
  2) Publishing
  Actual science comes in under that, somewhere. In many cases, WAY under that.
  Suppose a certain...4-letter US government agency, whose acronym starts with a "D", and ends with an "A", and whose Director is often heard muttering under his breath about being "laughed at" in Heidelberg, were to offer to help with Priority One up there, with the caveat that they get to peek at the research papers a bit before they are submitted for peer review?
  There was a comment thread on Ars that showed a photo of a bundle of $100 USD bills, and mentioned that this is how everything gets done in the US. We have already seen countless stories in the last couple of years about how extremely reputable scientists are willing to go way outside ethical bounds in order to get funded and/or published.
  Now, THAT threat is certainly more than 0%.
  Captcha: "bribed" (I am not making this up).
63. Re: So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 15:34 · Score: 1
  
  Depends on the species, for humans afaik it is 800 - 1200, I'm not aware of a gene with millions of base pairs (in humans).
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
64. Re: So ... by eli+pabst · 2014-08-14 16:01 · Score: 1
  
  the only way to find out what changing a virus will do to the virus, is to change the virus. If that is what you believe you should change your job. Yes, I saw the line that you work in genomic research, but it seems I as a layman know more than you about it. "simple" as a virus (which may consist of tens to hundreds of thousands of kb pairs, specifying dozens or hundreds of RNA transcripts), A flu virus has roughly 100 genes ... go back to school.
  100 genes is fairly big as far as viruses go. The influenza genome is actually much smaller, it has 8 genes total. The OP is correct though, trying to computationally model just a single protein structure is fairly challenging particularly if the structure of related proteins are not available to guide the model. Trying to model interactions between 8 flu genes and the ~2,000 or so host immune genes in a complex environment would be ludicrously beyond the scope of anything that could be done right now.
65. Re:So ... by eli+pabst · 2014-08-14 16:49 · Score: 1
  
  Because nature does that sort of thing all the time. If we do it in a controlled, lab environment, we can understand what happens when genes get switched up and how to stop viruses. The alternative is sitting around until a lethal virus appears and then trying to quickly do research on it while people die. .
  My concern here is how controlled that lab environment is. I did my fellowship in an ID research group that had a BSL3 lab in the unit and given the number of containment breaches they had, you should seriously question the the wisdom of conducting the kind of research that has the very real possibility of wiping out 1/3 or more of the earth's population in a containment unit that was mostly likely built by the lowest bidder. Something like this should be done at USAMRID or Rocky Mountain Labs, not a BSL3 on a college campus.
66. Re:So ... by kwbauer · 2014-08-14 17:26 · Score: 1
  
  Maybe that has to do with the government of Iran having, for decades, repeatedly called for the total annihilation of another country. Have US administrations been doing that?
  Maybe we can actually say that the stated intentions of a countries leaders can be used against that country and don't need to be ignored.
  Maybe we can actually and honestly say that some countries simply can't be trusted to the same extent that others can be and that the US really is not as evil as certain misguided assholes believe.
67. Re: So ... by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2014-08-14 19:34 · Score: 1
  
  You would also have to completely model host organisms and their immediate environments.
  Does this suggest you would be in favor of trying out this virus? Not on yourself of course, but on some other human in a city, as that would be the one and only way to determine how it works inside a human body and spreads?
  I am not.
  
  The information gained is valuable enough that it is worth the minor risk involved in gaining it.
  The risk is not minor, it is pandemic.
  And so once again: you have no idea how biological research works. Like you do realize tissue culture is a thing right? That you grow up viruses in suspensions of cells in a petri dish and study them, or in the case of this research (which is stated, plainly, in both the article and abstract of the paper) they infected mice and ferrets with the virus to study the effects.
68. Re:So ... by Neil+Boekend · 2014-08-14 21:54 · Score: 1
  
  Don't be so sure. People seem to think nukes can destroy hurricanes: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/C5c.html. Maybe some think an airstrike on such a lab would be a good idea.
  
  --
  Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
69. Re: So ... by Goldsmith · 2014-08-14 23:51 · Score: 1
  
  Tissue culture is definitely a thing.
  Does that mean it's the only way to gather that information? Would it be possible to develop alternate tools?
  Look. Whether you like it or not, we are developing the measurement techniques and hardware that are going to make this antiquated approach to biology obsolete. Feel free to yell and scream while the field passes you by.
70. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-15 01:39 · Score: 0
  
  If ignorance really is bliss, you could always move to Africa, stop washing your hands, and start practicing voodoo. Though I hear that isn't working out too well in stopping the evil spirits from making people sick and die.
  Personally I'll take understanding over making up bullshit that isn't even coincidentally right any day, and all of the medical advancement we have here in the first world.
  In case you haven't noticed, our evil science has reduced infant deaths 80% and increased our healthy useful lifespans nearly three fold.
  No matter how vast the lack of understanding of science you want or actually have, don't the results speak for themselves?
71. Re: So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-15 04:11 · Score: 1
  
  As far as I understand the influenza genome, it has 8 chunks of genes, roughly the equivalent of a chromosome, not 8 genes. But perhaps I misunderstood that? And each of those chunks has estimated (based on base pairs) 8 to 14 genes. So in total we are in the range of 100 +/- I had guessed. But that might be wrong :) It seems regarding viruses we did not do much genome mapping.
  The most researched and very primitive tobacco mosaic virus. It produces roughly 160 different amino acids. OTOH, the hull around the RNA strand is constructed from a single repeating peptide. I would assume that that peptide is constructed from those amino acids, but that sounds unlikely. So: how many genes do you need to produce 160 different amino acids? I thought 160 genes, but perhaps a gene can code several amino acids in a row, without stop markers and without causing them to 'stick together'.
  Regarding modeling: depends what you want to model, chemical interactions, likely challenging. High level production and accumulation and assembly of proteins? Not so challenging.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
72. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-15 04:15 · Score: 0
  
  Well, it is actually not a weapon if it lacks methods of targeting and control. It belongs more to the prestigious class of global catastrophes in a test tube.
73. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-15 05:48 · Score: 0
  
  Yeah, bullshit. This was an incredibly stupid thing to do and saying so is by no means "anti-science". If one of the so-called scientists was black, am I now a racist? If one was a jew, am I now anti-semetic? Opposition to something, especially something as ridiculously stupid as this, does not imply "anti-science". I agree that there needs to be a cultural change, one that results in idiocy like this being seriously and decisively sanctioned.
74. Re:So ... by sillybilly · 2014-08-15 08:37 · Score: 1
  
  By the way on a rotating space station people jogging in the morning can vary their body weight based on which direction they run. If they run along the straight length of the cylinder, there is no weight chance of course. But if they run along the round circumference against the spinning direction, they lose centrifugal force and become slightly weightless, and start feeling like flying up in the air. If they run in the same direction as the spin, they increase in weight, to where they might build really huge leg muscles or get tired really fast and collapse to the ground. Such is an artificial gravity that's not true gravity, but centripetal acceleration, motion, and on top of it comes the Coriolis force, a sideway pull when you try to walk straight. But life adapts, and the Coriolis force is piece of cake to adapt to compared to having to adapt to some biotech combo virus freshly set loose down below on Earth.
75. Re: So ... by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2014-08-15 14:50 · Score: 1
  
  And so we circle back around to the rather thorough explanation given elsewhere in the comments on why you can't even get remotely close to computer simulations of biological systems, let alone infectious agents.
  You clearly don't understand the field, its techniques or limitations because you've just dismissed literally every single molecular biology research technique and have just dismissed the vast majority of modern experimental methods.
76. Re:So ... by infinitelink · 2014-08-15 16:59 · Score: 1
  
  Your parent actually is that counter example, you failed to comprehend it.
  How so? Hubris meant an especial sort of ignorance for imagining one is godlike, like the gods, may ignore the gods...it's use as mere insolence, overconfidence, or neglect of the dangers one may encounter, is to empty the word of any special meaning and make it superfluous--but people then proceed to use it because it SOUNDS educated and special. :\
  
  --
  Intelligent idiots are we. | Evil men do not understand justice.
77. Re: So ... by eli+pabst · 2014-08-16 05:44 · Score: 1
  
  As far as I understand the influenza genome, it has 8 chunks of genes, roughly the equivalent of a chromosome, not 8 genes. But perhaps I misunderstood that? And each of those chunks has estimated (based on base pairs) 8 to 14 genes. So in total we are in the range of 100 +/- I had guessed. But that might be wrong :) It seems regarding viruses we did not do much genome mapping. .
  You are correct that it has 8 "chunks" that are essentially the equivalent of a chromosome. How ever each chunk/chromosome only encodes a single gene. Three of those genes can express 2 different proteins, either through alternatively splicing or frameshifting resulting in a total of 11 possible protein sequences expressed from the entire influenza genome. 100 genes is big for viruses, usually those are large, complex viruses like the herpesviruses which have all kinds of special viral proteins that are designed to subvert the host immune system. Here is a good illustration of the influenza genome: http://www.virology.ws/2009/05...
  
  The most researched and very primitive tobacco mosaic virus. It produces roughly 160 different amino acids. OTOH, the hull around the RNA strand is constructed from a single repeating peptide. I would assume that that peptide is constructed from those amino acids, but that sounds unlikely. So: how many genes do you need to produce 160 different amino acids? I thought 160 genes, but perhaps a gene can code several amino acids in a row, without stop markers and without causing them to 'stick together'.
  Amino acids are just the individual components that are linked together to form peptides/proteins, there are only 20 possible amino acids in eukaryotes. The Tobacco Mosaic virus capsid protein is indeed 160 amino acids in length, but there are still only 20 amino acids used to make that protein, some are used more than twice. Here is the actual amino acid sequence of the protein, each letter represents a single amino acid, so you can see that some are used more than once: http://www.uniprot.org/uniprot...
  
  Regarding modeling: depends what you want to model, chemical interactions, likely challenging. High level production and accumulation and assembly of proteins? Not so challenging.
  Modeling protein structures is hard, look at the "Folding at Home" project, they've got petaflops of computational power cranking away on modeling a handful of structures. And that's just individual 3-D structures, to ask how changing a single amino acid in a protein would influence the structure and then how that new structure would interact with the 20,000+ other proteins is impossible right now. I wish it were, it would make my job a hell of lot easier.
78. Re: So ... by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-16 06:27 · Score: 1
  
  Thanx for the info.
  Perhaps you should take your time to 'correct' a few of the wikipedia articles :)
  E.g. I was well aware that humans only have only 20 amino acids. However both the english as the german article about the tobacco mosaic virus implied that said virus has 160 different ones. Or I simply misread it. It did not occur to me that they perhaps talked about a 160 amino acids long peptide (repeating the same amino acids)
  Thanx for the info though!
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
79. Re:So ... by AK+Marc · 2014-08-17 17:50 · Score: 1
  
  They aren't making biological weapons. They are weaponizing germs to then figure out how to protect against weaponized germs.
  
  How do you test whether protections against biological weapons work, if you don't have access to those biological weapons?
  
  Note, I'm not saying I like or support it, but I'm just stating the official line for how they get around bans on things. They claim to not be weaponizing it, as they are just trying to defeat weaponized versions.
  
  --
  Learn to love Alaska
80. Re: So ... by AK+Marc · 2014-08-17 17:54 · Score: 1
  
  the herpesviruses which have all kinds of special viral proteins that are designed [...]
  Intelligently designed?
  
  --
  Learn to love Alaska
81. Re:So ... by AK+Marc · 2014-08-17 18:25 · Score: 1
  
  My concern here is how controlled that lab environment is. I did my fellowship in an ID research group that had a BSL3 lab in the unit and given the number of containment breaches they had, you should seriously question the the wisdom of conducting the kind of research
  The real problem is that the security levels are lax. They are more design rules, not operational ones. You can design for any level and get a certification, but so long as the gear is working, if the processes and people don't work well, you'll end up with a significantly reduced actual safety level. Properly done, you end up with breaches being events like "meteor struck building, destroying air handling systems, and creating a large breach in the envelop" events. Triple redundant power isn't uncommon, but no amount of redundancy can ever be "100%". 100% is impossible. There's always the chance of something almost impossible happening. But when you are examining the chances of an airplane crashing on the building during a hurricane, and alien invasions for the most likely breaches, you are doing good.
  
  --
  Learn to love Alaska
82. Re:So ... by AK+Marc · 2014-08-17 18:26 · Score: 1
  
  But it's not against the law. Or so the government says. It's illegal to weaponize diseases, but not illegal to alter them in a weaponized-like state to test defenses.
  
  --
  Learn to love Alaska
83. Re:So ... by LienRag · 2014-08-18 18:10 · Score: 1
  
  In the case of vaccines, the small risk of the vaccine causing some harm is dwarfed by the huge risk of the disease it prevents.
  Actually, the costs/benefits analysis has to be done for each vaccine: it was obvious for vaccines against highly epidemic lethal diseases, even with the badly prepared nurses of the time (I believe that it's for the polio vaccine that many lost leg mobility after a badly done injection touched the nerve?), it may not be for vaccines against rare diseases.
84. Re:So ... by AK+Marc · 2014-08-19 11:02 · Score: 1
  
  I was always taught Hubris from the Greek tragedy perspective. Hubris is pride, especially when that pride leads to their own downfall. A sitting king who makes bad choices because they are too prideful isn't "hubris" until one of those choices becomes their downfall.
  
  So in the Greek Tragedy definition, it can't be hubris until after the bad decision results in a problem. Aside from some bad P.R., I don't see any problems caused by the excessive pride of the US, or those who work for it, so hubris can not yet be the accurate word.
  
  --
  Learn to love Alaska
85. Re: So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-26 06:19 · Score: 0
  
  Influenza A has 11 genes, not 100.
86. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-26 06:22 · Score: 0
  
  This isn't limited to America. Any country that is good at virology does this. They weren't sure that the mutations would make the virus more deadly; they thought they knew some of the reasons the 1918 strain was more deadly, and then looked at the H5N1 strain to see if it could easily mutate to have some of those changes. They then tested the ones that were reasonable candidates for natural mutations. Biology isn't like Legos; you can't just change things and have them automatically work. You need to test them first.
87. Re:So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-26 06:28 · Score: 0
  
  You can't check these sort of things on any other virus, because it's related to the specific structure of these viral proteins and the specific target receptors they use. Putting it on a plant virus won't do anything. There are only a small number of viruses you can swap proteins around and still have them work; the flu can't be interchanged with another virus, especially in this case.
  Realistically, we can't make a remedy or a vaccine in a few months, not if you want it to go through clinical trials and safety testing. If it's a new strain of flu, we don't have to do safety testing, but production is slow. And your claim that a vaccine is easier isn't always true either.
  We did learn something about this strain of flu; we know that it could realistically occur in nature, and we know what kinds of properties it might have. It's not as useful as it could be, but it's still not useless.
88. Re: So ... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-26 07:44 · Score: 0
  
  Dystrophin (the gene that is defective in Duchenne and Becker muscular dystrophies) is about 3 MB if you include introns (non-coding sequences that often contain regulatory elements). There are no genes that have a coding region close to 1 MB.
Ethics committee asleep at the wheel by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:02 · Score: 1

Hell, common sense MIA.
Tube Neck... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:03 · Score: 0

Did no-one read "The Stand"...
phew! by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:03 · Score: 1

I thought for a minute that this was an 'Ask Slashdot' article and that we as a species were screwed.
1. Re:phew! by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:52 · Score: 0
  
  LOL!
Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:03 · Score: 0

What is the point of this research? Is there any benefit or are we taking risks for the fun of it?
1. Re:Why? by mellon · 2014-08-14 05:32 · Score: 1
  
  There is potential benefit. The problem is that the costs appear to outweigh the benefit by many orders of magnitude.
2. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 08:45 · Score: 0
  
  The problem is that the costs appear to outweigh the benefit by many orders of magnitude.
  No, the problem here is thinking we should base any such decision on superficial appearances, instead of a carefully evaluated cost-benefit analysis...
Huh by koan · 2014-08-14 04:04 · Score: 1

Link to Chinese lab incidenrt?

--
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
1. Re:Huh by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:08 · Score: 1
  
  http://thebulletin.org/making-viruses-lab-deadlier-and-more-able-spread-accident-waiting-happen7374
2. Re:Huh by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:10 · Score: 1
  
  It's a misreading of the (poorly worded) article, which says:
  
  China’s poor track record for laboratory containment means that it was "appallingly irresponsible" (in Lord May’s words) for a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.
  It was H1N1 which caused the pandemic in 2009, not the hybrid.
3. Re:Huh by Rob+Riggs · 2014-08-14 04:39 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  http://thebulletin.org/making-viruses-lab-deadlier-and-more-able-spread-accident-waiting-happen7374
  Reading comprehension is such a lost art these days. It was the H1N1 virus that caused the pandemic, which the Chinese scientists used in their research; not the results of the Chinese research that caused the pandemic.
  From the cited article:
  
  a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.
  For those challenged individuals, this sentence fragment should be parsed as:
  
  (a team of Chinese scientists) ... (create a hybrid viral strain) (BETWEEN) (the H5N1 avian influenza virus) AND (the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives).
  
  --
  the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
4. Re:Huh by iggymanz · 2014-08-14 04:49 · Score: 1
  
  you must be new here. Slashdot articles have devolved into tabloid trash level sensationalist nonsense. Read for entertainment value.
5. Re:Huh by RDW · 2014-08-14 05:00 · Score: 1
  
  Slashdot editors - please fix the submitter's grotesque misreading of the linked article in the summary! Creating fictional outbreaks of lab viruses leading to thousands of deaths should be left to bad movies, not 'news' sites. Which isn't to say, of course, that there aren't genuine risks to consider. High level containment of various viruses in China and elsewhere has been breached on a number of occasions in the last few decades, sometimes with fatal consequences, e.g.:
  http://thebulletin.org/unaccep...
  "... there have already been three escapes from BSL-4 containment since 1990: a Marburg virus laboratory-acquired infection at the Vector facility in the Soviet Union in 1990, a foot and mouth disease virus escape from the Pirbright facility in England, and a SARS virus laboratory-acquired infection from a BSL-4-rated biosafety cabinet in a Taiwan laboratory."
  http://thebulletin.org/threate...
  "SARS has not re-emerged naturally, but there have been six escapes from virology labs: one each in Singapore and Taiwan, and four separate escapes at the same laboratory in Beijing."
  Luckily, none of these incidents involved 'gain of function' strains, but the potential for a catastrophic incident is certainly there.
6. Re:Huh by koan · 2014-08-14 05:21 · Score: 1
  
  As I suspected.
  
  --
  "If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
7. Re:Huh by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 07:06 · Score: 0
  
  or choose to use grammar.
  FROM:
  a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.
  to:
  a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between H5N1, the avian influenza virus, and H1N1, the human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.
8. Re:Huh by jeffmeden · 2014-08-14 07:23 · Score: 1
  
  http://thebulletin.org/making-viruses-lab-deadlier-and-more-able-spread-accident-waiting-happen7374
  Reading comprehension is such a lost art these days. It was the H1N1 virus that caused the pandemic, which the Chinese scientists used in their research; not the results of the Chinese research that caused the pandemic.
  From the cited article:
  
  a team of Chinese scientists to create a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives.
  For those challenged individuals, this sentence fragment should be parsed as:
  
  (a team of Chinese scientists) ... (create a hybrid viral strain) (BETWEEN) (the H5N1 avian influenza virus) AND (the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives).
  There aren't enough modpoints, they should just let you edit TFS. Good thing the Slashdot moderators fact checked that juicy little detail. Apparently "Lasrick (2629253)" is beyond reproach.
9. Re:Huh by Rob+Riggs · 2014-08-14 08:06 · Score: 1
  
  or choose to use grammar.
  ...
  Fuckin' commas, how do they work?
  
  --
  the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
10. Re:Huh by microTodd · 2014-08-14 08:11 · Score: 1
  
  Thank you. I was fairly surprised when I read that line in the summary and tried to Google it but couldn't find anything. I guess I should have RTFA instead of just RTFS
  
  --
  "You cannot find out which view is the right one by science in the ordinary sense." - C.S. Lewis on Intelligent Design
11. Re:Huh by HiThere · 2014-08-14 08:16 · Score: 1
  
  That's a tricky one. I'm told that my usage, to signify phrases and pauses, is incorrect. Nobody has been able to explain what correct usage is, however. So I still use them, commas, to signify phrases or pauses (or changes in emphasis).
  
  --
  
  I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
12. Re:Huh by Areyoukiddingme · 2014-08-14 08:52 · Score: 2
  
  Nobody has been able to explain what correct usage is, however.
  The Chicago Manual of Style has detailed explanations of correct comma usage. So does Strunk and White's Elements of Style. You can also look up individual recommendations. Things like the Serial Comma have Wikipedia articles that quote both of those sources as well as half a dozen more.
  Commas to delimit prepositional phrases have only recently been deprecated. I was taught to use them as well.
13. Re:Huh by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 10:23 · Score: 0
  
  Link to Chinese lab incidenrt?
  If you're searching for the truth, you came to the wrong place.
I think this is where they say by Speedcraver · 2014-08-14 04:04 · Score: 0

Just because you can, does not mean you should! I am sure sometimes good things can come out of this type of exercise, but is it worth it once you weigh the risk / benefit ratio?
1. Re:I think this is where they say by HiThere · 2014-08-14 08:18 · Score: 1
  
  Good things definitely can, and have, come out of this kind of research. But it's walking along close to the edge of a high cliff. Sometims it feels as if they are seeing how close to the edge they can walk without falling over.
  
  --
  
  I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
WHY by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:04 · Score: 0

>>he had taken genes from the deadly human 1918 Spanish Flu and inserted them into the H5N1 avian flu to make a new virus—one which was both far deadlier and far more capable of spreading than the original avian strain.
What, why?
>> the same scientist was conducting another study in which he genetically altered the 2009 strain of flu to enable it to evade immune responses, 'effectively making the human population defenseless against re-emergence.'
Whhhyyyyyyy?!
Sounds like a genuine "mad scientist". Next thing we know he'll be demanding millions, if not billions of dollars while holding the whole world ransom. He probably makes laser beams in his free time...
1. Re:WHY by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:04 · Score: 0
  
  From Phineas and Ferb and the Temple of Juatchadoon:
  Isabella: Isabella Garcia-Shapiro. Femme fatale, ingenue, amateur archeologist, and licensed tile and grout installer. (A Tarzan-like figure in a loincloth swings from a vine behind them) A girl has to earn a living!
  Ohio: Pleased to meet you! Do you know anything about...this? (Removes the amulet from around his neck)
  Isabella: (Gasps) The Amulet of Juatchadoon! The legend says it can awaken an evil corn colossus with the power to destroy the world!
  Ohio: Makes you wonder why ancient people were always making stuff like that...I mean, what's the upside? (A number of arrows fly behind them)
WHAT? 2009 pandemic came from Mexico, not China by dtolman · 2014-08-14 04:05 · Score: 2

Why should anyone take this seriously when the lede itself contains conspiracy fodder? The 2009 swiine flu outbreak started in Mexico - it wasn't some lab virus and it certainly didn't escape from China.
1. Re:WHAT? 2009 pandemic came from Mexico, not China by jovius · 2014-08-14 04:24 · Score: 1
  
  Yes, that "thousands of people" doesn't even appear in the referenced articles. In the referenced article it's only speculated that IF the strain would escape from the lab there would be serious consequences. That article is about the justification of doing the said research in the first place, but also quotes the original researchers and their findings.
2. Re:WHAT? 2009 pandemic came from Mexico, not China by oodaloop · 2014-08-14 04:40 · Score: 1
  
  Can there be only one pandemic in a year or something? The fantastic summary said nothing about swine flu.
  
  --
  Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
3. Re:WHAT? 2009 pandemic came from Mexico, not China by HiThere · 2014-08-14 08:27 · Score: 1
  
  There's usually only one pandemic of flu per year, though I don't believe that there's a rule about it. However just because it killed thousands doesn't mean much when the population is as large as it is. I would guess that most people who caught it (assuming it was a pandemic) were mildly sick for a few days, some people had a bit worse case, and one in a million died of it and was counted.
  FWIW, I don't really remember the 2009 swine flu, and that's only 5 years ago, so it can't have been very noticable...in the US. My wife's mother was already frail and around 90, and she's still around, so it can't have been all that devastating.
  OTOH, this doesn't mean that when crossed with another strain it wouldn't be highly contagious bad news. If it was a pandemic, then it is good at spreading among humans, even if it's usually so mild that they don't notice it.
  
  --
  
  I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The solution is quite simple... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:05 · Score: 0

STOP IT!
If they stop creating deadly pathogens, these problems go away.
1. Re:The solution is quite simple... by Alejux · 2014-08-14 04:19 · Score: 4, Insightful
  
  No one made the Spanish Flu, yet it appeared and killed millions of people. This type of study, while dangerous if not done safely, will help protect us from future occurrences of similar types of virus. The best way we can protect ourselves from an enemy, if to understand them. This is much needed research.
2. Re:The solution is quite simple... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:48 · Score: 0
  
  No one made the Spanish Flu, yet it appeared and killed millions of people. This type of study, while dangerous if not done safely, will help protect us from future occurrences of similar types of virus. The best way we can protect ourselves from an enemy, if to understand them. This is much needed research.
  Another good way to protect ourselves from the enemy is to not create a bigger more powerful one, especially when it outgrows any vaccine or cure, intentional or not.
3. Re:The solution is quite simple... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-15 09:04 · Score: 0
  
  And if a bigger and more powerful one comes along anyway? We need to understand this stuff. The population was much lower when this flu killed millions. Today it could kill hundreds of millions.
Redundancy or illiterate attempt at intensifiers? by Samantha+Wright · 2014-08-14 04:07 · Score: 4, Funny

in 2009, a group of Chinese scientists created a viral strain of flu virus

a viral strain of flu virus

Well, at least it wasn't a... eukaryotic strain of flu virus?

--
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It's nuts, and everyone is doing it by Bearhouse · 2014-08-14 04:09 · Score: 2

http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
http://thebulletin.org/making-...
Madness...as if Ebola was not enough.
Safest approach by Alioth · 2014-08-14 04:11 · Score: 0

The safest approach is to not fscking do this kind of insanity in the first place.

--
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
1. Re:Safest approach by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:20 · Score: 0
  
  The safest approach is to nuke the planet from orbit .... it's the only way to be sure.
2. Re:Safest approach by Alejux · 2014-08-14 04:26 · Score: 1
  
  The best way to protect the human race from future occurrences of deadly pathogens, such as ebola and Spanish flu, is to study them and understand why they are so deadly so we can find ways we can counteract them if similar epidemics occur in the future.
3. Re:Safest approach by Rich0 · 2014-08-14 04:30 · Score: 1
  
  The safest approach is to not fscking do this kind of insanity in the first place.
  Certainly. If the research is likely to have a public health benefit (likely, not tenuous connection), and there is NO other way to obtain the benefit, then I could see room for debate and careful consideration.
  Short of that, this is just playing with fire. It seems like we have more controls over using primates in experiments than creating civilization-destroying viruses...
4. Re:Safest approach by Oligonicella · 2014-08-14 06:59 · Score: 1
  
  The Spanish Flu killed upwards of 5 percent of the world's population in one year in a world with much slower travel. Do you really think something like this, purposely designed to be far more lethal, would be counteracted in time to to help? If this gets out, the *remaining* five percent will understand why the other ninety-five died. Keep in mind, it it escapes, the researchers will be the first to go.
  
  Here.
5. Re:Safest approach by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:43 · Score: 1
  
  The Spanish Flu killed upwards of 5 percent of the world's population in one year in a world
  Repeating this bullshit 100 times on this article does not make it true.
  The spanish flu killed 3 - 8% of the infected people, depending on source. The more agreed consent is: 50 million dead out of 500 million infected.
  Some judge up to 25% (70 - 100 million out of roughly 500 million infected). In nations like germany the infection rate was about 60% of the population, but the death toll was relatively low.
  The fact how much that is regarding the world population is irrelevant as 3/4th of the world population luckily never got infected!
  In our days with planes and such, very unlikely. If a new kind of flu brakes out we easy can have hundreds of infection nests all over the planet in less than a week. Before anyone even notices what is going on.
  Good luck ...
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Kill the researcher by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:11 · Score: 0

It's the only way to make the labs safer.
There's "ZERO" reason to be fucking around with viruses to make them deadlier.
Biological weapons were banned for a reason. Anyone trying to make them deadlier needs to be shot immediately and left to rot.
1. Re:Kill the researcher by alw53 · 2014-08-14 04:39 · Score: 1
  
  Absolutely agree. This is just bio weapons research under a different name and I'll bet you anything it's funded by DARPA.
2. Re:Kill the researcher by Alejux · 2014-08-14 04:49 · Score: 1
  
  This is NOT a fcking biological warfare research! For fucksake, read about the research! It's about understanding why the Spanish Flu was so deadly. This research helped us identify the genes which made that disease so deadly in the first place, so we have a better fighting chance to prevent other similar diseases from killing millions of people like that one did.
3. Re: Kill the researcher by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 05:00 · Score: 0
  
  Of course it isn't a bio weapon. It just happens that a byproduct of this importan research is er, a bio weapon
4. Re: Kill the researcher by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 05:04 · Score: 0
  
  No officer I wasn't speeding I was just stretching my leg... Well that's ok then
5. Re:Kill the researcher by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 05:13 · Score: 0
  
  Biological weapons were banned for a reason.
  Biological weapons are only banned in the sense that you can't stockpile or produce biological agents beyond an amount reasonable for peaceful (e.g. research) purposes.
6. Re:Kill the researcher by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:11 · Score: 0
  
  And no, it's not a nuclear enrichment plant, it's just a power plant. Who cares that it can be used as such.
The Holmes quote needs to die by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:18 · Score: 0

U.S. v. Schenck was an atrocious anti free speech case. Brandenburg v. Ohio subsequently overturned any authority from Schenck.
[url]http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/[/url]
1. Re:The Holmes quote needs to die by GameboyRMH · 2014-08-14 05:28 · Score: 1
  
  Interesting, but completely off-topic.
  
  --
  "When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Viral strain of flu virus? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:20 · Score: 0

Isn't "viral" implied by it being a virus?
Typhoid Mary as a scientist rather than a cook by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:21 · Score: 0

This guy is the scientific equivalent of the infamous Typhoid Mary.
From Wikipedia:
"Mary Mallon (September 23, 1869 Ã" November 11, 1938), better known as Typhoid Mary, was the first person in the United States identified as an asymptomatic carrier of the pathogen associated with typhoid fever. She was presumed to have infected 51 people, three of whom died, over the course of her career as a cook.[1] She was twice forcibly isolated by public health authorities and died after a total of nearly three decades in isolation."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_Mary
It took public health officials far too long to realize what they needed to do with the utterly irresponsible Mary Mallon. The same, I suspect, might be true for this scientist, although in his case the death toll could run in the millions rather than just three.
By all means read the article that's linked. This guy really does seem to lack both common sense and any moral compass. He's all ambition and little else.
http://thebulletin.org/making-viruses-lab-deadlier-and-more-able-spread-accident-waiting-happen7374
Note especially the closing: "As David Relman of the Stanford School of Medicine recently pointed out in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, the time has come for a balanced and dispassionate discussion that 'must include difficult questions, such as whether there are experiments that should not be undertaken because of disproportionately high risk.'"
Haven't they read The Stand??? by Hamsterdan · 2014-08-14 04:22 · Score: 0, Redundant

Why are they doing this? there is absolutely *nothing* to be gained from this, except weaponization. (which is against the convention)
Let's say someone does the same in MIddle East, they would be carpet-bombing the place in the name of "but terrorists".
Seriously, could someone explain to me what could be gained from creating a deadlier critter?
While we're at it, let's add anthrax,HIV and Ebola into it, just to be sure it's deadly enough. Hey, let's bring smallpox back (altough I wouldn't be surprised if there was still some in test tubes somewhere)

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I've got better things to do tonight than die.
1. Re:Haven't they read The Stand??? by Electricity+Likes+Me · 2014-08-14 04:28 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Seems pretty obvious you didn't try and click through to the freely available abstract, which explains exactly why they did this. It's linked in the article in the OP (who notably also probably didn't read it).
2. Re:Haven't they read The Stand??? by TubeSteak · 2014-08-14 05:05 · Score: 1
  
  Most countries that ratified the Bioweapons Convention just moved all their offensive research under the umbrella of defensive programs.
  The difference between "we're making this stuff to kill people" and "we're making this stuff to design defenses against killing people" is one of semantics.
  
  --
  [Fuck Beta]
  o0t!
3. Re:Haven't they read The Stand??? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 05:42 · Score: 0
  
  They may have. They may have also realized that The Stand is a fucking fiction novel written by a cocaine addict and decided that basing their strategies around handling deadly pandemics on Stephen King's wet dream about the apocalypse.
  If you seriously believe there is nothing to gain, then you're too ignorant to be participating in the discussion in the first place. It's a pretty damn simple concept. In order to determine how best to treat an infectious disease like the avian flu, they need to know how it works in the first place. How does it spread? What potential mutations could cause it to cross over into the human population? What potential mutations could make it more lethal? There's no way of answering _any_ of those questions by looking at the dead people after the fact. We're still not sure exactly how Ebola is carried from place to place, for example, because it appears, kills so quickly that there's little to no opportunity to even study it, then it disappears again. The only way to practically create a vaccine for ebola is to successfully grow it in a lab...step one, you know how it grows, what makes it grow, what's more likely to make its growth accelerate or decelerate. The only other option, the one you seem to think is more sensible, would be to sit back, let the disease run its course then take guesses at what the hell was happening. That's your solution. That's your plan. I hate to break it to you, but that's also really, really fucking stupid.
  Oh sure, I'm guessing you're wrapping more tinfoil around your head as I write this, with the idiotic question still rattling around in your baked potato of a skull -- why make it more lethal than it was in the first place? Again, simple concept. If you don't know what turns a regular, run of the mill flu into the sort of monster that was the Spanish Flu...then you have no idea when that will actually happen, or where, or why. You just know that it will, at some point...and if you're not prepared for it millions of people die. It's the same reason doctors, researchers, the WHO and all have been raising the red flag about overuse of antibiotics and the resistant strains of bacteria that are cropping up as a result... Likely if you have children (and I seriously hope you're not polluting the gene pool at the same time you want it to be protected), they'll grow up in a world where a papercut could kill them from an infection. Fun diseases like syphilis will no longer shrink back in fear from the strongest antibiotics on the shelf, so it will go back from being a minor health threat to the sort of disease that literally leaves the victim's flesh and muscle rotting away from their bones.
  Since you seem to like post-apocalypse garbage, how about this line from 28 Days Later? "In order to cure, we must first understand." That means taking controlled risks in order to avoid uncontrollable ones...and yes, that includes making a pre-existing disease more deadly, because it's the only way to find out _how_ it becomes more deadly. Oh sure, we could all take your tree-hugger attitude and do no biological research on any sort of bacteria, virus etc. In your version of the world, we'd study lethal diseases and pathogens by...observing the aftermath? That's your plan? "No, we shouldn't be doing this research, it's dangerous and there's no good reason for it! It's only made for weaponization! We should wait until the bodies start piling up and then...I don't know, take a guess at it. Blame it all on the 'miasma' because we don't have any other credible ideas."
  You want a good reason? Here's one. The research they're doing might actually _save_ your worthless life one day, because when some superbug does make its way into the population, if it does spread across the globe...we'll have researchers who have been beating down laboratory-created pathogens ten times as deadly. They'll know what makes it lethal, which is the first step to determining how to make it _less_ lethal, which is one step in the long road toward creating cures or vaccines.
  You're welcome, you fucking twat.
4. Re:Haven't they read The Stand??? by gizmo2199 · 2014-08-14 06:41 · Score: 1
  
  Except if there's ever an accidental release, it's going to matter very little what their intentions were in creating the strain.
  
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  This Sig does not Exist.
5. Re:Haven't they read The Stand??? by Trailer+Trash · 2014-08-14 08:08 · Score: 1
  
  Seems pretty obvious you didn't try and click through....
  Welcome to Slashdot.
  
  --
  Do you have ESP?
6. Re:Haven't they read The Stand??? by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:48 · Score: 1
  
  The difference between "we're making this stuff to kill people" and "we're making this stuff to design defenses against killing people" is one of semantics.
  Not really. To make a weapon you need a carrier.
  A simple bomb does not work. So you need suicide assassins that 'poison' the target. Would probably work for brain washed 'islamists', or not.
  Or you have to do real weapons research and figure how to distribute it with a 'bomb'.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
7. Re:Haven't they read The Stand??? by messymerry · 2014-08-15 04:47 · Score: 1
  
  Richard Preston wrote a book called, "Demon in the Freezer". Read it...
  
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  Dear Microlimp: I give you 2 valid product keys for win7 and you reject both of them. Piss off you wankers!!!
8. Re:Haven't they read The Stand??? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-15 05:42 · Score: 0
  
  Not really. To make a weapon you need a carrier.
  A simple bomb does not work. So you need suicide assassins that 'poison' the target. Would probably work for brain washed 'islamists', or not.
  Or you have to do real weapons research and figure how to distribute it with a 'bomb'.
  That really doesn't seem difficult. You develop an airborne virus, you infect a host bacteria with the virus, fire a rocket with said bacteria in solution in a pressurised container, and you spray the contents of said container into a major waterway or a crowded city street.
  This has been done in enough sci-fi films, such as the Japanese film: 20th Century Boys, that it should be obvious to everyone how trivially a "defensive prototype" can be turned into an offensive and deadly weapon.
  What is far less obvious is how anyone could hope to use a biological weapon of this type without it blowing back on them with the prevalence of international travel today.
Re:Redundancy or illiterate attempt at intensifier by Pope · 2014-08-14 04:29 · Score: 1

They just mean that everyone on Twitter and Youtube shared it :D #goviral #yolo

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It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
Disease - deadly vs wide spread by gurps_npc · 2014-08-14 04:29 · Score: 2

Most of the time, something that is deadly is by definition NOT dangerous.
Why? Because it kills before it spreads. That is why Ebola is not particularly scary.
The real 'dangerous' virus kill about 20% of the time, and in the rest of the population it just makes sick - so it can be passed along to other people.
Now, there are exceptions. Prime examples are diseases that spread by air and can also reproduce in non-humans. Another prime example is a disease with a long incubation and minimal symptoms until it kills. Aids is a good example of this. It suffers from the difficulty in transmission, but otherwise is dangerous.
But back to the original dangerous virus. Something that kills 20% of the time, but otherwise lives in you without killing you. This is really nasty. Think of one out of every five people you know being killed by something they caught from YOU.

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excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
1. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 05:42 · Score: 0
  
  Most of the time, something that is deadly is by definition NOT dangerous.
  Why? Because it kills before it spreads. That is why Ebola is not particularly scary.
  Yes, technically you are correct. Ebola is so deadly it works against itself with regards to spreading.
  In its current form.
  And now that I've stated that , fucking around with viruses like Ebola and end up with a goddamn level-4 airborne pathogen is EXACTLY what would turn it into one of the scariest things mankind has ever come across.
  And once something like that goes airborne, good luck even trying to deploy a vaccine before it wipes out half the fucking planet. The speed at which it would kill would turn your pathetic global logistics plans into a comedy routine.
2. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by gurps_npc · 2014-08-14 06:10 · Score: 1
  
  Airborne means we quarantine the area and let people die. But the rest of the world lives on. Nasty, but not really dangerous. Isolation kills the disease.
  People think that airborne means it wafts from pole to pole. No. Airborne means it travels short distances. Measles for example spreads by air - up to 2 hours. Generally in the same room.
  The deadliest virus in the past 100 years was the 1918 Spanish Flu. 75 Million dead. Less than 7% that got sick died. Source Over 60% of the population got sick, and most that did die died from complications. Airborne is not super nasty. A toxicity of about 20% would in the US kill 20 Senators, almost 100 congressmen, and 2 Supreme Court Judges (possibly more, SCOTUS are old and fragile).
  Twenty percent toxicity would destroy our civilization. The fears of airborne are true, but overblown,
  
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  excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
3. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:33 · Score: 0
  
  Think of one out of every five people you know being killed by something they caught from YOU.
  Where do I sign?
4. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by Oligonicella · 2014-08-14 07:11 · Score: 1
  
  The Spanish Flu. The effects were as bad as Ebola and much faster. Even the military couldn't quarantine their bases fast enough to prevent spreading. This one would be even "better". Yes, purposeful scare quotes because an estimated 5% of the world population *did* die.
  
  That 7% lethality stat was true for SF, not this thing purposefully designed to be more lethal. Makes that 20% look more feasible, doesn't it?
5. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by jbmartin6 · 2014-08-14 07:36 · Score: 1
  
  It is unclear (at least to me) how much the alteration of the original pathogen might affect it in other ways. Biology often involves trade-offs. The changes might make it less resistant to current antibiotics, or make it easier for humans to resist naturally. So you could take Ebola and make it airborne somehow, but that change would likely involve tradeoffs that would reduce the impact.
  
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  This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
6. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by gurps_npc · 2014-08-14 08:03 · Score: 1
  
  My point is that the thing that made The Spanish Flu so dangerous was the LOW death rate, not the high death rate. The military could not quarantine fast enough because they had a World War on, not because of the disease. .
  The effects of the Spanish Flue were no where near as bad as Ebola and in fact often do not kill. Ebola kills 90% of the time if treated with the same level of skill as found in 1918. The 7% death rate was for people receiving 1918 modern medical care and counted for all ages.. The Spanish Flu's death rates above 7% were generally caused either by idiots trying to use magic to cure people that had an infections disease, or worse in populations that were already vulnerable. (i.e. pregnant women).
  My main point is if I wanted to kill the most amount of people, I would design a much lower death rate, to encourage spreading of the disease, than Ebola's high 90%.
  Truly the ideal killing disease is one that has a long period of incubation during which it is infectious but has few if any symptoms. Say a month to kill you with nothing more than a cough till the last couple of days. Now THAT would be dangerous.
  The quicker a disease kills you, the LESS dangerous it generally is.
  
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  excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
7. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:54 · Score: 1
  
  Oh my god, what an idiot are you?
  Why? Because it kills before it spreads. That is why Ebola is not particularly scary.
  Ebola is exactly the opposite. The infection is 'harmless' up to 21 days, the second half of it you are already spreading the virus. Luckily it is not very infectious, unlike flu.
  It is high infectious via body fluids when it starts to make you ill, that is roughly after 20 days ... perhaps 14.
  And: it kills slowly.
  Perhaps you should read up about some of the viruses, you mention and their way of spreading before posting such bulshit.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
8. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 11:59 · Score: 1
  
  Perhaps you should read the articles you link.
  75 Million dead. Less than 7% that got sick died.
  Wrong ... first paragraph: up to 100 million died.
  Total infected about 500 million, so roughly 20% - 25% of the infected died.
  The world population was a bit less than 2 billion, so people accidently calc down to total population and come to numbers around 5% ... which is obviously wrong.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
9. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-14 12:08 · Score: 1
  
  You mix up some things.
  Ebola is a very slow killing desease.
  And luckily it is also spread very slow, unfortunately depending on strand it is between 40% and 90% lethal.
  In our days it does not really matter ... if once a bioweapon is released we can safely asume that everyone who is not on an isolated island will die. Or will be the lone survivor when around him 90% of the people died. Spreading via water or aerosol bombs or simpy relying on natural distribution/infection will distribute it over the whole continent in days.
  Imagine germany where 80 million people are infected, perhaps 10 million are not ... that will be less than 20 million survivors.
  Distribution will be fast. I worked in Frankfurt last months, a city living from fairs. Millions of people come there in less than a month to do business.
  I live in Karlsruhe, thousands of people travel every day to Paris. Or come from there.
  Yippy, finally a castle for me :) If I don't end upmas a slave for a warlord ... who knows.
  
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  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
10. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 23:40 · Score: 0
  
  A toxicity of about 20% would in the US kill 20 Senators, almost 100 congressmen, and 2 Supreme Court Judges ... Twenty percent toxicity would destroy our civilization.
  With those examples, you make a fair argument that 20% toxicity might actually benefit (if not outright save) civilization.
11. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by gurps_npc · 2014-08-15 01:45 · Score: 1
  
  I am not an idiot, everything you said I knew and still say you are wrong.
  Ebola only spreads by body fluids. The fact that it is infectious for a mere 10 days - by fluids - does not make up for it's main weakness, being too deadly.
  I repeat my main statement, that a fool ignored:
  KILLING EVERYONE IS A BAD STRATEGY TO SPREAD DISEASE.
  
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  excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
12. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by angel'o'sphere · 2014-08-15 02:59 · Score: 1
  
  We all know that in theory killing everything or killing to fast is bad to spread fast.
  And you miss the point that Ebola is the perfect cou ter example: as it is not spreading fast and as it is not killing fast ...
  So stop making an idiot anout yourself and a) learn to read, b) find a better example ... e.g. the spanish flu would have been a good one.
  
  --
  Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
13. Re:Disease - deadly vs wide spread by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-26 06:36 · Score: 0
  
  You have a real ability to tell others they are wrong about biology (viruses especially) while being wrong yourself. Ebola has one or two days where you can be contagious and not have obvious symptoms.
worse than nukes by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:36 · Score: 0

Great. Now just leave it to some malevolent group to increase the incubation period to a few months and send a carrier to each major city.
When They Mess With Mother Nature... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:36 · Score: 0

They'll Get Burned
how about ... by YoungManKlaus · 2014-08-14 04:37 · Score: 1

not trying to create fucking deadly viruses in the first place?
Excellent way to kill off 5 or 6 bil by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 04:51 · Score: 0

And make it look like an "accident"..
Re:Redundancy or illiterate attempt at intensifier by stoploss · 2014-08-14 05:09 · Score: 1

Well, at least it wasn't a... eukaryotic strain of flu virus?
Thank you. Now I don't have to post this.
deadlier? by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 05:18 · Score: 0

If the lab is safe, how would we know the virus is deadlier?
WhatMeWorry!
You call it research... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-14 06:07 · Score: 0

I call it bio-terrorism.
The above post is riddled with errors by Rob+Carlson · 2014-08-14 06:20 · Score: 1

The introduction above is full of errors. First, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) piece falsely claims that the Watanabe paper describes taking "genes from the deadly human 1918 Spanish Flu and insert[ing] them into the H5N1 avian flu to make a new virus." Rather the paper, with the title "Circulating Avian Influenza Viruses Closely Related to the 1918 Virus Have Pandemic Potential", describes assembling a new virus from genes similar (displaying homology) to the 1918 virus. This may be scary in itself, but it is nothing like what either the BAS or the slashdot piece describe. Second, the slashdot post asserts that "in 2009, a group of Chinese scientists created a viral strain of flu virus that escaped the lab and created a pandemic, killing thousands of people." To my knowledge, this is A) completely wrong, and B) appears to be based on a misunderstanding of the BAS text. The Dando and Novossiolova piece in BAS uses the following verbiage "a team of Chinese scientists [created] a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives." The naturally occurring H1N1(2009) strain killed people; the laboratory hybrid did not. Again, creating that hybrid might be scary, but the slashdot post gets the facts completely wrong.
Spacestation by SuperDre · 2014-08-14 06:38 · Score: 1

Any of these kinds of experiments/research should be done on spacestations (or maybe deepsea-stations) where it isn't a threath to populations and enviroments.. Scientists are crazy to even try these kinds of experiments..
Risk vs Reward by joocemann · 2014-08-14 06:56 · Score: 3, Insightful

The inherent risks in producing excessive virulence via human synthesis, not nature, are very high. The reward of studying these types of phenomenon are very low. The virulence factors can be studied in their natural forms, or individually. Studying the impact of excessive synthetic virulence may give some useful insights, but the risks are far too high. I personally would like to see an internationally agreed ban in the following way:
- It is illegal, and criminal, to knowingly increase the virulence of live or replicating versions of bacterial, fungal, or viral forms. Even under the most stringent biosafety level facilities and care, a deliberate increase in virulence is criminally punishable.
As people we should hold this very serious. A person with a mere bachelor's degree in molecular biology can initiate extremely dangerous things. I am a cell biologist and I have experience in immunity and have personally engaged in the application of individual virulence factors for research purposes. I have seen what the application of even one virulence factor can do to cell immunity. I am extremely fearful of people gluing these factors together. I consider their work ego driven and not very helpful in the scope of human health research.
OP is wrong, as is the linked article by jerel · 2014-08-14 07:41 · Score: 1

The title of the paper is "Circulating Avian Influenza Viruses Closely Related to the 1918 Virus Have Pandemic Potential" and only talks about CURRENTLY CIRCULATING viruses. I have not read the paper, only the abstract, but even the abstract indicates that all they are doing is studying the behavior of currently circulating viruses that are similar to the Spanish Flu of 1918. Sensationalizing a random paper is a great way to make headlines, but the truth will always out. In this case, the sooner the better. This is not to say we don't need to be careful and follow the suggestion to seriously review all "gain-of-function" virus research and don't do it if it can be avoided. But this article is quite flamboyant and inflammatory, probably just to draw attention to this risk. However, credibility has been sacrificed. Too bad.

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Some days it's just not worth chewing through the restraints.
So ...you are justifying creation of pandemic? by See+Attached · 2014-08-14 08:20 · Score: 1

You are certainly the fool who thinks that we should do something just for the sake of doing it...: "The entire point of gain-of-function studies is that you need to do them in order to confirm a hypothesis" Ok so, you hypothesize that people will drop like flies if I do 'THIS' DON'T DO IT, And don't put thoughts in other peoples heads that its so great or easy to do it. A meaner idiot will do this and send you a copy. Hey.. its ok.. it just had to be done. This is truly the worst case of pandoras box.

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Time for a new Political party in the US (or two!) One is off the rails Other cant pony up a leader.
Citation Needed by statemachine · 2014-08-14 08:46 · Score: 1

The parent needs to be modded up and Timothy needs to mod himself down for allowing such an inflammatory, unfounded submission blaming the Chinese.
It is no wonder readership is down over the last 10 years.
Slashdot Propaganda Machine by statemachine · 2014-08-14 08:59 · Score: 2

10 years ago, there were regularly 800-1000 comments on articles. Now, a highly commented article gets around 200.
It's a shame that the editors have stopped doing their jobs and post anything without checking it (at best!). But this isn't the first time I've seen it.
This submission is obviously false, and it needs to be pulled down or with the inflammatory and false sentence deleted. Since it's been up for hours, and there are numerous posts above that debunk the submission, it leads me to believe that Slashdot wants the clickbait and is leaving it up on purpose.
Do the right thing. Pull the article. Save what's left of your reputation, Slashdot.
Slashdot: It's like FOX News for Liberals by Sanians · 2014-08-14 10:45 · Score: 1

My guess is that the problem is that they sold out.
Simple fact is that the type of person Slashdot used to appeal to is like 1% of the population. The moment a web site catering to 1% of the population decides to become profitable, it's faced with a choice: Continue to serve that 1%, or change your content and appeal to a different but larger 2%, and after that, change it even more and appeal to 4% of the population. Never mind that you lost that original 1%, since you're only in it for the money.
Can't say I blame them. If I had a cool web site, and got to choose between having a cool web site or having a lot of money, I'd probably choose the money too. Of course, I'd probably also just go make another cool web site so that I could have both. It'd be nice if the Slashdot editors would do that so that the small portion of that original 1% which remains here can stop reading BS like this and just read their new site. It probably wouldn't even be any extra work for them, they could just take the Slashdot submissions they normally discard for being too intellectual and insufficiently emotional and just post them to their own site at the end of the day.
Pandemic????? by Neil+Boekend · 2014-08-14 22:08 · Score: 1

How can an outbreak that killed only thousands be considered a pandemic? It was quite worldwide but thousands spread over billions just isn't an epidemic or pandemic or whatever.
By that reasoning we probably have yearly common cold pandemics.

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Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
What kind of moron... by Anonymous Coward · 2014-08-15 03:22 · Score: 0

What kind of moron would even consider doing that? This guy should be executed.