Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

US Asks Universities To Flag Risky Pathogen Experiments

Posted by samzenpus on from the a-little-notice-please dept.

sciencehabit writes 'Academic scientists with federal funding who work with any of 15 dangerous microbes or toxins will soon have to flag specific studies that could potentially be used to cause harm and work with their institutions to reduce risks, according to new U.S. government rules released today. The long-awaited final rule is similar to a February 2013 draft and is "about what we expected," says Carrie Wolinetz, a deputy director of federal relations at the Association of American Universities (AAU) in Washington, D.C., which represents more than 60 major research universities. Those schools see the rules as replicating other federal security and safety rules, Wolinetz says, but will adjust to them. But some observers have concerns, such as that the rules do not apply to other risky biological agents. In a conference call with reporters today, a White House official said the government is open to a "broader discussion" about whether it should expand the list of 15 regulated agents.

39 comments

  1. I call this BS by thieh · · Score: 2

    Any science that can be developed into technology can be used to do harm.

    1. Re:I call this BS by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      If the university has a nuclear science department, it probably has a nuclear research reactor in the basement. Although not big enough to trigger a nuclear chain reaction, they still have enough radioactive material for a dirty bomb.

    2. Re:I call this BS by rubycodez · · Score: 2

      By definition a nuclear research reactor is big enough to trigger a chain reaction, as all nuclear reactors do.

    3. Re:I call this BS by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      The professor at San Jose State University who gave my intro chemistry class a tour of the nuclear lab reassured us that a Three Mile Island chain reaction wasn't possible if an earthquake compromised the research reactor.

    4. Re:I call this BS by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      It may not be able to create a runaway reaction that can damage the reactor, but it must, by definition, create a chain reaction.

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    5. Re: I call this BS by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 1

      How many atoms must we split over the definition of a chain reaction?

    6. Re: I call this BS by K.+S.+Kyosuke · · Score: 1

      I vote for two.

      --
      Ezekiel 23:20
    7. Re:I call this BS by mysidia · · Score: 1

      They can make it not possible to have a serious event by restricting and limiting the amount of fissile material, and ensuring the containment procedures will be massively excessive.

      It's different from commercial applications, where the reactor needs to operate at scale and produce electricity at a profit, and the level of safeguards can't be scaled up as efficiently as the resulting impact of an incident would increase.

    8. Re:I call this BS by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      If true that was a wrong and ignorant statement. Three Mile Island had melting due to coolant system failure. All operating commercial reactors have a "chain reaction" inside. If there is inadequate cooling they can overheat. But there is no notion of some special "chain reaction" going on.

    9. Re:I call this BS by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      but a certain minimal amount of fissile material is required to have critical configuration (a running reactor), and it's a LOT. The TRIGA reactor is very popular with over 50 installatios (35 in the USA) and it has 110 tons of fuel

  2. Direct Link to DURC by Defenestrar · · Score: 2

    Here's a direct link to the dual use research of concern (DURC) policy.

    My main concerns will be whether it's going to have a chilling effect on research; especially when it's also unclear to me whether this will have any useful impact beyond another layer of red tape. We already have IRBs, biosafety committees, and select agent lists, and I'm unsure that such a "volluntary" system of a PI tagging their own research for extra bureaucracy will make much headway before a problem occurs.

    1. Re:Direct Link to DURC by Defenestrar · · Score: 2

      For those interested in the list but too lazy to read federal documentation (who isn't?) - here you go:

      a) Avian influenza virus (highly pathogenic)

      b) Bacillus anthracis

      c) Botulinum neurotoxin

      d) Burkholderia mallei

      e) Burkholderia pseudomallei

      f) Ebola virus

      g) Foot-and-mouth disease virus

      h) Francisella tularensis

      i) Marburg virus

      j) Reconstructed 1918 Influenza virus

      k) Rinderpest virus

      l) Toxin-producing strains of Clostridium botulinum

      m) Variola major virus

      n) Variola minor virus

      o) Yersinia pestis

    2. Re:Direct Link to DURC by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      what, no new botox research? wrinkled middle-aged women everywhere, arise!

    3. Re:Direct Link to DURC by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      It just seems like it's Just One More Federal Agency jumping on the bandwagon. In a sense, this is good news. As has been pointed out, the information is already out there - if the NSA and other mysterious, dark agencies in the US Federal Government actually had their act together, they would already know this. The fact that they're asking suggests that nobody can connect the dots.

      Or perhaps, nobody wants to own up that they can do this, or they're having dominance games over whatever department or agency is asking for the info (TFA is a biti vague as to who's clever idea this was).

      It's only more paperwork....

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
    4. Re:Direct Link to DURC by sillybilly · · Score: 0

      The NSA, FBI and the CDC can have a collective branch or task force focused on this topic, and they probably already do. But the only true long term answer guarantee is to run away to the safety of self sufficient, sustainably livable, rotating cylinder artificial gravity space stations, at least for some people, and for whoever stays down here cross their fingers and hope for the best. And even then you have to limit physical contact to say once a generation, such as once every 100 years, between space stations, as it's hard to see a disease with an incubation time that long, that would not surface and be appearant under a 100 year time frame. Even syphilis manifests itself in 30 years or so, at max, as its stages of secondary, tertiary, etc. But long term biosafety for space stations doing physical contact with the outside world has one keyword: incubation time that lasts decades.

    5. Re:Direct Link to DURC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Botox is botulinum neurotoxin.

    6. Re:Direct Link to DURC by sillybilly · · Score: 0

      For instance there is a bee infection, or ant infection, I forget - and these creatures have been around a couple hundred million years longer than mammals like humans, so their diseases, especially for the highly social and congested kinds, have had time to become very sophisticated, so one of these infections does not manifest itself in the hive, except in the queen laying only sterile eggs and unable to produce a fertile offspring queen. Life goes on, like a walking dead, every day in the hive, but unbeknownst, the hive is doomed, because it cannot pass on the chain of life, because of the lurking and stealthy long incubation time disease. One wonders why such a parasite would arise in the first place, as the #1 rule of any long terms successful parasite, like a predator, is that you do not senselessly kill the host you're feeding off of, you do not drive your food supply to extinction. But life is blind when it comes to such things, and there are wide oscillations in population, predator- grazing prey-plantfood systems, as neither the predator, nor the grazing prey have an instinct not to overfeed, though they do get satiated with food per individual, but there is no limit on the amount of offsprings they all try to rear, and even if each individual gets satiated with food, when there are gazillions of them that often leads to a local eco-catastrophy.

    7. Re:Direct Link to DURC by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      yes item C on that list

  3. I'm so sick of this by kruach+aum · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Yes, the number one medical threat facing America right now is research scientists tipping smallpox down the drain. Not, I don't know, THE MASSIVE OVERUSE OF ANTIBIOTICS THAT WILL LITERALLY END IN A NEW FLESH EATING BACTERIA POWERED DARK AGE.

    1. Re:I'm so sick of this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Relax, Deep-Throat.

    2. Re:I'm so sick of this by ColdWetDog · · Score: 1

      This is insightful? Did I miss a funny?

      You guys gotta stop that. It's confusing enough here as it is..

      --
      Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
  4. Thats funny by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    A couple microbe in a lab is childs play.

    Your local sewage treatent plant is a weapon of mass destruction.

    "treatment" does nothing to inactivate virii.

    Ebola is a virii.

    Game over when it hits US - no one will be safe.

    Go read up on what they do with the resultant "sewage sludge".....one hint - it is used as fertilizer. Its all about money, human health be damned.

    Bon appetit.

    1. Re:Thats funny by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      > Ebola is a virii

      Wrong. It ARE one.

    2. Re:Thats funny by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Viruses (virologists don't use the term virii) vary in resistance to different innactivation treatments. Ebola is an enveloped (surrounded by a lipid coat) virus and they are typically more fragile than non-enveloped viruses. Also, Ebola does not pose a significant health threat to the US as we have enough medical infrastructure to contain an outbreak and people wouldn't be handeling dead bodies without taking precautions.

      P.S. Before it gets mentioned: No, Ebola is not going to become airborne. Yes it mutates, but HIV and HCV also mutate rapidly and are in a lot more people and haven't become airborne. Also, the experiments with Reston only showed that pigs could cough-up (bodily fluids not aerosol) very large droplets that could spread virus to Macaques (not humans), but the Macaques couldn't spread the virus via aerosols either.

    3. Re:Thats funny by sillybilly · · Score: 0

      If people lived like the Amish, who recycle their own poop, grown your own food yeoman farmer style, with relatively little contact to all over the world, the spread of diseases would be more cut down. But with all the airline industry, and people vacationing abroad, and massive metropolises congested with human biomass, that is presently not possible. Perhaps there is a good side to the coming global energy crunch. It will stop people from moving all over the place so much, and stay put where they are, and then spread of slow incubation time diseases will be slower, when it knocks somebody out sick laying in bed, or even dead, on it's way to spreading it distance wise.

    4. Re:Thats funny by sillybilly · · Score: 0

      You could inactivate all lifeforms in sewage by either massive amount of NaOH, sodium hydroxide lye, at a massive cost, or with formalin, formalin having the advantage of some of it that is unbound distilling back out. Some kind of heat treatment might work too, in an air-liquefaction counter current heat exchange way, where there is a hot zone, and the stuff on the way there gets heated by the stuff coming from there, saving some heat, but it's all very expensive compared to what's done today, such as biotreatment, letting nature take care of whatever it can take care of, by using bacteria to digest up the sewage. Blessed be the long gone days of yeoman farmer outhouses, where your poop stays put in one place, and composts there, as opposed to the sewer system where millions of poop get mixed together, then treated, but pathogens can still survive treatments, then sent to a river or lake from which people drink their tap water, that often simply gets filtered through green sand. Remember, always drink upstream from the herd, if you can afford to live upstream. There is something healthy about being a highlander, as opposed to coast megapolis resident. At least NYC gets its water from the mountains, not their nearby rivers, but I do drink lake water coming through my tap, downstream from a lot of megapolis sewage systems.

  5. Sciarntists by Hognoxious · · Score: 1

    Sciarntists is an anagram of tairsts. Well, nearly. Better safe than sorry.

    SHOOT ANYONE WEARING A WHITE COAT

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    1. Re:Sciarntists by rubycodez · · Score: 1

      One communist government did exactly that in the 1970s

    2. Re:Sciarntists by rogoshen1 · · Score: 1

      and once in a wintry war as well.

  6. My eyes are playing tricks on me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I totally thought the headline said: "US Asks Highschools To Flag Risky Pythagorean Experiments"

  7. Thug Obama by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    Ah yes -- the USA without any scrupules, they want to own your universities and research and whatnot. all in the name oif security (whose?), terrorists (where?) and bad guys in general (except their own). At the same time have a free licence to kill, destabilize, drone, torture, spread nuclear weapons, bio weapons, lie cheat and subert even its own policies, encourage child murder, at the same time yet again be a big mouth on human rights abroad, the CO2 of China, kliings in the Middle East ans so on and so forth. Hold on -- backtrack, I take that back -- killings in the Middle East-except-those-commited-by-Israel. Looks like I'm ciring a farce? Sadly, this is reality today. Degenerate. I call Rogue State, the Ugly American incarnate.

  8. silly rules by confused+one · · Score: 1

    Silly people, don't they know the Zombie Apocalypse begins with an accidental release from a Government lab? It's not from a university lab. Politicians apparently don't watch enough of the right movies.

  9. At Risk by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    It's about time this information was reported to the Feds.
    Now, who will tell the folks living in those college towns?
    Or will it just be leaked like everything else?

  10. I love these vague stories by kuhnto · · Score: 1

    For the love of god, if you are going to post an article about 15 of anything, please do some research and include what the 15 somethings are!! I am tired but even the original article did not list these super dangerous agents. Must be super duper secret! Seems like either the article author or submitter are self-sensoring, or do not give enough credit to the average slashdot reader to understand biological naming conventions.

    --
    "A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
  11. SCIENCE IS A CRIME by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    There is a serious push to stop people from learning. Make it stop.

  12. The riskiest experiment of them all by ThatsNotPudding · · Score: 1

    Moving an animal disease lab from an isolated island to within eyesight of a college football stadium: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Bio_and_Agro-Defense_Facility

    This Pat Roberts pork barrel is pathological.

  13. government is open to a "broader discussion" by tlambert · · Score: 1

    Yes, we know that it pisses you off that we've put these 15 things onto the naughty list, and that you have to think in terms of weaponizing your research to cure cancer in order to know whether or not that research could be Used For Evil(tm), not that we'd ever take this list as a handy list of items to keep on hand for future nefarious purposes ourselves, because, after all, we're The Good Guys(tm).

    To show that our heart's in the right place, we're open to discussion about expanding this list to even more things! See how not-evil we are?!?! What other things, besides these 15 do you think you could weaponize? Think out of the box, folks, we're here to help you!