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Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'?
HughPickens.com writes: Smallpox was one of the most devastating diseases humanity has ever faced, killing more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone. But thanks to the most successful global vaccination campaign in history, the disease was completely eradicated by 1980. By surrounding the last places on earth where smallpox was still occurring -- small villages in Asia and Africa -- and inoculating everyone in a wide circle around them, D. A. Henderson and the World Health Organization were able to starve the virus of hosts. Smallpox is highly contagious, but it is not spread by insects or animals. When it is gone from the human population, it is gone for good. But Errol Moris writes in the NYT that Henderson didn't really eliminate smallpox. In a handful of laboratories around the world, there are still stocks of smallpox, tucked away in one freezer or another. In 2014 the CDC announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in a refrigerator located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. How can you say it's eliminated when it's still out there, somewhere? The demon in the freezer.
Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there's neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science Magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, "I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation." It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?
Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there's neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science Magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, "I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation." It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?
It could be highly useful in future medical research, and the damage it could cause if it gets back into the wild would be minimal.
In an IT business if you delete the only remaining backup, what do you think will happen down the line? What if you needed that backup? Now you don't have it.
It may be a dangerous virus, however, it may come in useful in some way or another in the future.
In 2014 the CDC announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in a refrigerator located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. How can you say it's eliminated when it's still out there, somewhere?
Even if you eliminate all the stocks you know about there's still the stocks you don't know about, if it ever gets out it probably came from a forgotten sample.
I don't think it's a huge deal either way but if we want to understand how a truly nasty virus works then you can't really do it without a really nasty virus to study.
I stole this Sig
Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'?
Because this isn't Resident Evil or some stupid Hollywood movie?
Elok
Why don't we just keep a record of the genetic sequence of the virus? Doesn't the technology exist to rebuild the virus if we know its DNA sequence? Even if it doesn't exist now, it could reasonably be expected to exist in the relatively near future, right?
Then we could destroy all the actual samples, but no information would be lost. If it became necessary for research at a later date, whatever couldn't be simulated could be made from scratch.
Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses
This is the one I have to wonder about.
The vaccine for smallpox is not smallpox, It is vaccinia which is closely related to cowpox.
If someone releases smallpox and you need to vaccinate, then you still don't need to have any smallpox.
If someone makes a new type of smallpox and releases it, then you want the new smallpox to develop a defense against and test and now you have it from the infected people.
And it seems unlikely that the old smallpox (deadly) would be used to make a vaccine against any new smallpox, but I admit the possibility.
Smallpox is a member of the poxviridae family. If you need a virus like smallpox to fool around with in your lab, there are 28 genera and 69 species of pox.
On the other hand, smallpox is not the only disease we have eradicated.
Rinderpest is the other. Rinderpest is closely related to measles and measles probably evolved from rinderpest.
Stocks of Rinderpest remain, but rinderpest vaccine is made from a rinderpest virus variant, so it makes sense that we would keep some of that for just in case.
Because I'm placing my bets on dastardly error and stupid ingenuity.
To kill populations that the US or Europe do not like.
I sorry, but you got it wrong. It's dastardly stupidity
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The biggest risk is from someone accidently releasing it from unknown/unmanaged sources or from an intentional release for malicious purposes, in either case destroying what you know about doesn't help. You never know what the future may bring, perhaps smallpox will be the source of a vaccine for an as yet unknown variant. If we can't possibly keep it safely stored then we are fucked anyway as there are a shitload more deadly diseases that we haven't fully eradicated yet that we also need to store to do research on.
Or the NYT bestseller "I Am Pilgrim". In which the antagonist jihadist steals one of these vials to unleash smallpox on humanity again.
(But he cuts out some guys eyes first to get through the lab's retina scanner and we all know that can't happen IRL.)
sequence it's genome, then destroy all samples of it. If some criminal mastermind breaks out a new strain of it, you culture the strain from the unfortunte souls who have been infected and fight it off with by comparing it to the sequence of the original strain.
If we ever get to the point that we can reconstruct any virus from the digitized sequences, then we've got way bigger problems on our hands than smallpox.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
[blockquote](But he cuts out some guys eyes first to get through the lab's retina scanner and we all know that can't happen IRL.)[/blockquote]
Well theres the Capt America version where a bunch of heavily armored dudes just smash into the CDC through the front door.
Just make sure Scarlet witch stays at home incase she accidently explodes some dudes building.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
This is one of them...
Now that being said... stockpiles of the live virus should not be kept very many places and there needs to be a "destroy plan" in the event these locations become compromised. (such as war, civil unrest, the end of the world, etc.)
Perhaps in the US, UK, France, Russia, and China... Each nation can have stored samples of the virus in known locations under guard.
For the same reason we'll never really get rid of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or anything else, there is a greater than non-zero value to having them. But we don't need "lots" of them.
Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not a virus is 'life' -- this question would apply to a bacterial disease as well -- how is this any different than the attempts in the last century to eradicate the North American wolf? They were dangerous (and quite inconvenient) to humans. Thankfully (to some...) we failed, and many people are happy they are returning. The reasons we wanted them gone haven't changed (although hardly as much an issue with the hugely reduced numbers).
If it's not OK to eradicate a species that looks like the family dog, what about if they were squirrel-sized? Insects? Where's the line, exactly, where we say 'OK, on this side, it's good and right to completely remove this species from existence, but on the other side of the line, it's a 'protected species' to be preserved, and we just control it? One could argue that wolves served a purpose in the ecosystem by controlling deer and other game population -- but honestly, we will never allow the grey wolf population to grow to a number to have any real effect on that anymore.
Not really taking a side on whether or not to eliminate the stocks we have of smallpox, but I feel like there certainly is an ethical question in whether or not it's OK to do so.
(As a side note, I think 'genocide' only applies to killing humans, but you get the idea, I'm sure)
If I'm not back again this time tomorrow...
Because this isn't Resident Evil or some stupid Hollywood movie?
Pretty much. Random people who happen to catch a rare disease that the doctor would never have seen before nor have any real reason to believe the pasient has instead of something more common could spread a while before anyone realizes the severity. The people who work on these kinds of diseases in a lab would quickly raise all the warning flags and the incident be shut down real quick. The only truly dangerous situation would be if someone stole it, mass produced it and intentionally caused a mass infection in say the departure hall of an airport to overwhelm containment efforts. That would require a whole other level of sophistication than IEDs and guns though.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
there is not some colony of wild pigs, horses, or monkeys which are incubating the virus.
Keep it around, you don't know if there is a time when you need it.
Then zap it. They can already create viruses from scratch anyhow - https://www.newscientist.com/a... So, just dump its DNA sequence to a tar file, and then snuff it out. That simple. And no moral dilemas about genocide because well, we can always tar xvf smallpox.tar, if we need to.
The only truly dangerous situation would be if someone stole it, mass produced it and intentionally caused a mass infection
Fortunately, a government lab worker with inside access stealing a deadly bioweapon and using it in a terrorist attack is the kind of thing that only happens in the movies. Right?
HIV and Malaria have also been used to create cancer treatments.
But one would think that folks with Aspergers would learn that they should perhaps think twice...or more before making a literal response.
Would we be able to eradicate smallpox again if it were out in the wild today?
These days you have lots of people against vaccination for various stupid people.
We're already seeing a return of diseases we thought were limited to the third world.
The problem is that you never know when it's meant literal and when it's a figure of speech. The best a "normal" person could relate to it is thinking of it as if you're dealing with a foreign language where you don't know the idioms, and where you'll have to strain your vocal chords when a Russian talks about you having to howl with the wolves.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...or what to wear when he's going to introduce you to Kuzka's mother.
(Hint: Stop thinking and RUN!)
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
They don't just have scabs.
According to the source, they had railroad tanker cars.
Not of V. minor and V. major, but the "heated up" versions of the two.
That...is an awful lot of virus to dispose of. And it's not something you can just let your average grunt hook up to a drain hose, either. You have to use highly-trained and supremely-qualified personnel, who are going to know exactly what they're dealing with.
Highly-trained and supremely-qualified personnel who haven't seen a paycheck in months, aren't likely to see one any time soon, and know how much money other governments would be willing to pay for a cardboard box with a few vials.
[End Of Line]
This discussion is pretty ridiculous.
Whilst I can see the attraction of "wiping it from the face of the earth" - you can't do that by just destroying the biological copies any more.
Wiping out smallpox would involve destroying all digital copies of it too. Since the Smallpox genome is sequenced, what you do with the known biological copies doesn't really matter too much - a biological virus is nothing more than it's DNA sequence
Anyone with the resources to reconstruct the biological form from the digital form (which will be anyone at all within a few years) could do-so if they wanted to. I'd guess it's pretty easy to obtain a digital copy of the DNA sequence of Smallpox, but I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.
I received a smallpox vaccine about 35 years ago when I lived in Singapore - I wonder if it's still effective...
I don't know enough about the smallpox virus, but is it something where we can just map the genome and destroy the real-world copies, then recreate it if we ever need to?
If so, storing it on a USB stick instead of in a test tube might reduce the risk of accidentally killing a few million people.
Real lawyers write in C++
For the love of Dog, compress it! tar cvfz / tar xvfz, how hard can it be ?
And maybe drop the verbose flag...
Real lawyers write in C++
Wordpress is where I go to learn about science....and alien conspiracies.
But one would think that folks with Aspergers would learn that they should perhaps think twice...or more before making a literal response.
We don't even expect women to remember that they get emotional every month and you want aspies to remember that they aren't masters of conversation?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I'm feeding a troll here, but you know that the earliest "vaccine" for smallpox was.... smallpox. The fatality rate for that method, called variolation, was on the order of 1-2% and there are records of intentional smallpox infection to induce immunity going back to at least 1500. The first real vaccine was infection by cowpox and was introduced in 1796. I imagine your dates are a bit cherry picked, but the Jenner vaccine wouldn't have reached places like India and China immediately so I suspect they still used variolation at least for a while. A 2% death rate if enough people were "vaccinated" that way would drive up the death toll for that crappy vaccine but is still better than something like 35% death rates for natural infections.
Cute fur
and only 'Hollywood' thinking leads to the idea that there could be some global agreement to destroy it all. Anybody who thinks that nation-states with official-secrets regimes would actually destroy all of their samples is a special kind of stupid.
The article is as meaningful as asking why scientists don't simply block gravity - all available evidence points to the idea being impossible.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
One missed person is not enough for two big reasons. One, we have a concept of quarantine and how diseases spread, but more critically in this case the vaccine is a different virus. We can produce that virus, vaccinia, in whatever quantity we want without any access to smallpox. People use it for lab research now without a ton of precautions. Even unattenuated vaccinia only calls for biosafety level 2, I.e. the same level as e coli or various hep strains.
Wouldn't that make it an endangered species?
Xaotik Designs
Where have we sustained the largest amount of life lost? To accidents or to "dastardly deeds" (evil)?
You seem to forget that it was a global agreement to eradicate it in first place. Not, Hollywood thinking, but real life. A soviet member of the WHO has suggested this, WHO accepted the suggestion and despite the cold war western countries and ussr worked together to make it happen. In fact, the soviets have donated a large part of the required vaccine. This kind of cooperation was unheard of before.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
And decide which species live or die? I know we have done it before, e.g. wiping out the tasmanian tiger, but is morally and ethically defensible?
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Is medical science at the point where smallpox can be synthesized from gene sequence data and organic molecules? If so, why not kill the batches and keep the data if you ever really need some? And if synthesis isn't possible, why not?
I'm much more worried about what's growing in the back of the fridge at my workplace's lunchroom.
"Janice! Take home your Christmas tupperware containers. It's been 5 months now."
But one would think that folks with Aspergers would learn that they should perhaps think twice...or more before making a literal response.
We don't even expect women to remember that they get emotional every month and you want aspies to remember that they aren't masters of conversation?
Probably because people with Aspergers react a lot better when you remind them.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Smallpox reproduces a lot faster and has killed a lot more people.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
There are also people who died of smallpox who were buried in places where they would be below the permafrost line or at a high enough altitude it is always below freezing. Removing the samples from the NIH and the CDC would not remove all of the permanently frozen people in the Yukon, Siberia or high mountain ranges.
Calvin:Do you believe in the devil? Hobbes:I'm not sure man needs the help.
The 'hundreds' was merely to establish a sense of scale where I believe eradication is acceptable. In fact it's on the high side; I'm quite willing to get rid of some virus to save even a handful of people.
The destroy plan for biological specimens can be fancy but in your examples, cutting the power to the cold storage units and just letting it rot for a week is as good as anything else.
Wasn't Polio eradicated, but then there was a use for it to fight cancer.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/60...
done.
at least, that's what all your elected officials think.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Sure, when hell freezes over!
Fancy is fun in the movies, but rarely works in real life...
How about a box of thermite stored on top of the samples with a remote trigger outside the door protected by thick glass. You set it off by shooting the glass.
Guards with guns who are in trouble can simply turn around and shoot the glass, good bye smallpox (and everything else in the room).
At least 8 strains have had their genomes sequenced, and presumably those genomes are still on file, somewhere.
Unless there's something special about the rest of virus, physical samples are redundant. So destroying the (known) samples wouldn't buy much, and might eliminate something important.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=smallpox+genome+sequenced&t=ffsb&ia=web
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.