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Scientists Are Getting Seriously Worried About Synthetic Smallpox (sciencealert.com)
An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall,
killed hundreds of millions
of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.
Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.
Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.
Yep, it's time to purge the nazi trash. They don't matter, can't be educated, and must be eradicated like the vermin their inbred parentage portends.
If it is possible to synthesize a smallpox vaccine, someone would do it. For every one publishing there are perhaps a few hundred who have had the idea occur to them. If you stigmatize it and drive it underground, when some one unleashes it, we would not even know what hit us.
To borrow a phrase from our second amendment friends, if you outlaw synthesized smallpox only outlaws will have synthesized small pox.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You do realize that when it was declared eradicated we stopped vaccinating against it, right?
Anyone under the age of 30 (and probably a couple of years over, but 30 is a nice round number) is at direct risk if there's a smallpox outbreak - and if the virus was reverse-engineered it may be JUST different enough that even the people who WERE vaccinated would be at risk.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-