No, a biology degree isn't even required—just a well-concealed sample imported from a third-world country in your carry-on luggage, like a mosquito with malaria. No exposure to academia of any kind needs to be involved, and it certainly doesn't make sense to harass researchers who are likely to wind up in the middle of the quarantine area. With nuclear weapons this all makes sense because the transfer of technology could give a vulnerable country a bartering chip in world politics, and a scientist giving up this information does not put himself or herself in danger to do so. But with biology, the resources are already available.
They do get higher—there are a handful of BSL-4 labs where everything is vacuum-sealed, and personnel suits have life support systems that are kept under positive pressure. It sounds like you're describing a BSL-2 lab, which can be used to study (for example) hepatitis, but not tuberculosis or anthrax, which are BSL-3. BSL-3 labs require either constantly working under a hood or special safety equipment. Different safety levels may be found in adjacent rooms, so it's easy to get confused.
Multiple antibiotic-resistant bacteria are not found in the wild unless there is an excess of antibiotics significant enough to justify the metabolic cost of wasting energy on keeping the resistance alive. What bacteria do not need, they do not keep. Take the patients out of the hospitals and they will do just fine. You should have picked a better example, like Russia's tuberculosis epidemic, but I get the feeling that if you had anything more than surface knowledge about this subject, you wouldn't be throwing such childish words around. Engineered mutations are fragile.
The reality is that the real biological threats to human health don't need us to enable them. Malaria kills millions of people a year, and has been doing so since the beginning of human history—it kills so many, in fact, that most deaths go unreported and it's believed that the real figures may be ten times higher than what we can verify. And it does it without any engineering or mentally unstable biochemists getting in the picture. This proposal is a complete waste of money that will only bring misery to the researchers it affects.
So, really, take your paranoid babytalk and go back to your basement.
That's merely a popular misconception of cult leaders—they're not that short-sighted. Even North Korea's current sabre-rattling is an attempt to get something out of the UN and the US.
Oh, yes. A doomsday device that gets preyed upon by every protozoan, yeast, and bacterium in the world. How brilliant. At least that rules out any organization other than a lunatic from employing it!
Why do you think MRSA—by all means a real, legitimate biological threat that isn't the fantasy of a powerhungry politician—is only found in hospitals and factory farms? The metabolic cost of the antibiotic resistance makes it vulnerable to the environment. The more radically efficient a disease is, the worse it is at killing. Even exceptional pathogens are meagre: "during the outbreak the fatality of SARS was less than 1% for people aged 24 or younger, 6% for those 25 to 44, 15% for those 45 to 64, and more than 50% for those over 65."
Furthermore, what would controlling American researchers accomplish? The United States does not have a monopoly on disease research. Surely a much greater threat comes from disease research laboratories in less developed countries with more corrupt governments rather than the exceptional person in a generally healthy, secure, and safe working and living environment. Moreover, despite the lack of a direct oversight mechanism, there is still a great deal of internal review, and it is implausible that an academic would have the resources to work on a project such as this without scrutiny and authorization.
Ultimately, this approach seeks to treat with suspect people who do sensitive work. In less fortunate populations that has been shown very thoroughly to induce criminality. Ivins, the prime suspect of the "Amerithrax" case, was known to be mentally unstable and once saw a counsellor, who was apparently terrified of him. He should have been directed to another therapist, but wasn't.
So there you have it. The only real scenario that has ever occurred, which this policy seeks to prevent, and it was caused by a failure of the psychiatric system. And no one died.
It's not. There aren't. And if there were, it would be cheaper to do anything else, like one of the many missing Russian nukes. All things die when left alone in the wild. This fearmongering is the product of years of zombie fantasies in popular culture. All of it is utter nonsense.
The plague took months to spread around Europe when there was no sanitation whatsoever. As a weapon of mass destruction, diseases are (a) wildly impractical and (b) much less convenient than many alternatives.
It's because no biological weapon could ever be as effective as a chemical one. You want something to worry about? Think about all of the millions of gallons of hydrofluoric acid used every day in glass etching. That is dangerous. Not some little bug that takes four days to incubate and can be eradicated with antibiotics and ultraviolet light.
That's got its own internal history, and was actually started by Gateway (the only thing they did with the IP.) It's kinda an irrelevant footnote, though. It was essentially a Java imitator that was practical for multimedia, at a time when Java was not practical for multimedia. Development was abandoned some time before 2007. I realise that if you head straight through amiga.com and start looking around, it seems like a big deal, but really it's just the tail end of a dot-com convergence fantasy that never amounted to anything. Worrying about it is comparable to including Microsoft BOB in the Windows family tree.:)
Thanks for the update. I work with microbe ecology (metagenomics) most of the time, so it's hard to keep up on the actual neat parts of biology in humans.
Caffeine dependence goes away after a week or so. Many people are so tolerant of caffeine that the stimulant doesn't give them much more energy than they'd normally have in a day; it's just that you get it more rapidly and can control when it's available.
They're not turning off anything, actually; they're restoring normal function that's destroyed by the addiction. This is the sort of stuff that stays behind after recovery and that makes it easy to relapse. The behavioural studies they performed more-or-less modelled the situation you describe: the researchers found that after four doses of cocaine, rats would normally ignore electric shocks in order to get at the drug. After treatment, the rats became less obsessed with the high and would not risk getting electrocuted again in order to have it. It wasn't as much of a return to normal function as a rat that had only had cocaine once, but it took a while to return to full addict behaviour.
So, yes, it does address the functional problem that normal rehab fails to remedy. The area they chose to stimulate was specifically implicated as being responsible for loss of control in addicts.
We may never know! It all depends on who sets the NIH funding agenda and who has deep pockets. Cocaine addiction seems to be the primary focus of most addiction research, presumably because the effect is so sudden and there's no one to lobby against its prohibition.
Actually, the target and rhodopsin chosen causes stimulation of normal functions that atrophy in an addiction state. Nothing gets suppressed or removed.
And the award for most horrifically insane misinterpretation of an optogenetics paper goes to... Geek.com!
Based on actually skimming the paper, I would guess that the kind of excitation they're doing is probably safe in humans, although likely to cause interesting sensations.
Also, the blood-brain barrier makes it rather hard to perform gene therapy on the human nervous system, doesn't it?
Taking Star Trek as a foil again: humans are portrayed as having gone through a long period of war in the 22nd century and afterwards attaining an enlightened state which, although not quite post-scarcity, somehow leads to everyone becoming generally pleasant. Money is abolished, suggesting a fundamental shift in how people view property.
The writers (in any TV or film incarnation, at least) were never quite good enough to actually present characters that conform to the real ramifications of a society that has undergone such a fundamental self re-evaluation. The Federation is contrasted against the Ferengi, for example, but human colonists (the Maquis) are shown as having no problem engaging in petty fights over territory that is certainly not their ancestral home, and Voyager's EMH gets quite possessive about his art (Author, author) in part for reasons that the open culture movement would already consider petty. The topic of how Starfleet officers deal with money on DS9 is completely ignored (indeed, as is how the Federation trades with other nations) although some are shown handling currency and gambling.
I think Banks looked beyond this and tried to re-evaluate, at a core level, what it would really mean. Culture people aren't generally snobby, or vain, or selfish; they're simply adjusted to an environment where all of the things we take for granted—all of the struggles to survive—are irrelevant. It is, as you say, an absurdity to consider them elitist, except when they are judging themselves against another society, in which case it is hard to fault them for pitying those who are bound by a finite lifespan and finite resources.
As a biologist, I think Banks has done very well in identifying the consequences of an immortal civilization. Maybe the biggest mystery is what still motivates them to live at all; I suppose the author is also pushing an argument that says self-actualisation is something transcendent of the toils of life. Not that there isn't lots of supporting evidence—present-day rich snobs (and for the record I'm a penniless graduate student) really are good measuring sticks of the same thing. There's a great deal of literature that asserts that many people born into circumstances where the idea of needing to work for survival is alien become frustrated with lives of leisure and eventually grow obsessed with trying to figure out who they are. This, no doubt, is why the seer Fal (in Consider Phlebas) not only goes mountain-climbing without proper safety equipment, but lets herself lie around in pain for a day while waiting for rescue, even though she can shut off the pain at any time.
Maybe that's why you assumed they were particularly arrogant? Although Horza does call them that a few times.
Slashdot Mirror
And they're all similarly non-perilous in the face of modern medicine.
...and let's be honest, if nature was going to do it, it's had fifty million years to make a move, y'know?
No, a biology degree isn't even required—just a well-concealed sample imported from a third-world country in your carry-on luggage, like a mosquito with malaria. No exposure to academia of any kind needs to be involved, and it certainly doesn't make sense to harass researchers who are likely to wind up in the middle of the quarantine area. With nuclear weapons this all makes sense because the transfer of technology could give a vulnerable country a bartering chip in world politics, and a scientist giving up this information does not put himself or herself in danger to do so. But with biology, the resources are already available.
Ebola and TB could be imported from Africa by anyone, though. Why harass researchers?
They do get higher—there are a handful of BSL-4 labs where everything is vacuum-sealed, and personnel suits have life support systems that are kept under positive pressure. It sounds like you're describing a BSL-2 lab, which can be used to study (for example) hepatitis, but not tuberculosis or anthrax, which are BSL-3. BSL-3 labs require either constantly working under a hood or special safety equipment. Different safety levels may be found in adjacent rooms, so it's easy to get confused.
I don't think you know a thing about evolution.
Multiple antibiotic-resistant bacteria are not found in the wild unless there is an excess of antibiotics significant enough to justify the metabolic cost of wasting energy on keeping the resistance alive. What bacteria do not need, they do not keep. Take the patients out of the hospitals and they will do just fine. You should have picked a better example, like Russia's tuberculosis epidemic, but I get the feeling that if you had anything more than surface knowledge about this subject, you wouldn't be throwing such childish words around. Engineered mutations are fragile.
The reality is that the real biological threats to human health don't need us to enable them. Malaria kills millions of people a year, and has been doing so since the beginning of human history—it kills so many, in fact, that most deaths go unreported and it's believed that the real figures may be ten times higher than what we can verify. And it does it without any engineering or mentally unstable biochemists getting in the picture. This proposal is a complete waste of money that will only bring misery to the researchers it affects.
So, really, take your paranoid babytalk and go back to your basement.
Pretty sure it's past your curfew.
That's merely a popular misconception of cult leaders—they're not that short-sighted. Even North Korea's current sabre-rattling is an attempt to get something out of the UN and the US.
Oh, yes. A doomsday device that gets preyed upon by every protozoan, yeast, and bacterium in the world. How brilliant. At least that rules out any organization other than a lunatic from employing it!
Why do you think MRSA—by all means a real, legitimate biological threat that isn't the fantasy of a powerhungry politician—is only found in hospitals and factory farms? The metabolic cost of the antibiotic resistance makes it vulnerable to the environment. The more radically efficient a disease is, the worse it is at killing. Even exceptional pathogens are meagre: "during the outbreak the fatality of SARS was less than 1% for people aged 24 or younger, 6% for those 25 to 44, 15% for those 45 to 64, and more than 50% for those over 65."
Furthermore, what would controlling American researchers accomplish? The United States does not have a monopoly on disease research. Surely a much greater threat comes from disease research laboratories in less developed countries with more corrupt governments rather than the exceptional person in a generally healthy, secure, and safe working and living environment. Moreover, despite the lack of a direct oversight mechanism, there is still a great deal of internal review, and it is implausible that an academic would have the resources to work on a project such as this without scrutiny and authorization.
Ultimately, this approach seeks to treat with suspect people who do sensitive work. In less fortunate populations that has been shown very thoroughly to induce criminality. Ivins, the prime suspect of the "Amerithrax" case, was known to be mentally unstable and once saw a counsellor, who was apparently terrified of him. He should have been directed to another therapist, but wasn't.
So there you have it. The only real scenario that has ever occurred, which this policy seeks to prevent, and it was caused by a failure of the psychiatric system. And no one died.
It's not. There aren't. And if there were, it would be cheaper to do anything else, like one of the many missing Russian nukes. All things die when left alone in the wild. This fearmongering is the product of years of zombie fantasies in popular culture. All of it is utter nonsense.
The plague took months to spread around Europe when there was no sanitation whatsoever. As a weapon of mass destruction, diseases are (a) wildly impractical and (b) much less convenient than many alternatives.
It's because no biological weapon could ever be as effective as a chemical one. You want something to worry about? Think about all of the millions of gallons of hydrofluoric acid used every day in glass etching. That is dangerous. Not some little bug that takes four days to incubate and can be eradicated with antibiotics and ultraviolet light.
Well that's the problem, isn't it? If he went with Amon Tobin, he'd feel insecure about having only built a two-ton model.
That's got its own internal history, and was actually started by Gateway (the only thing they did with the IP.) It's kinda an irrelevant footnote, though. It was essentially a Java imitator that was practical for multimedia, at a time when Java was not practical for multimedia. Development was abandoned some time before 2007. I realise that if you head straight through amiga.com and start looking around, it seems like a big deal, but really it's just the tail end of a dot-com convergence fantasy that never amounted to anything. Worrying about it is comparable to including Microsoft BOB in the Windows family tree. :)
Actually, you're not even allowed to joke about that.
That's what I meant by "the effect is so sudden," yes.
Hollywood?
Thanks for the update. I work with microbe ecology (metagenomics) most of the time, so it's hard to keep up on the actual neat parts of biology in humans.
Caffeine dependence goes away after a week or so. Many people are so tolerant of caffeine that the stimulant doesn't give them much more energy than they'd normally have in a day; it's just that you get it more rapidly and can control when it's available.
They're not turning off anything, actually; they're restoring normal function that's destroyed by the addiction. This is the sort of stuff that stays behind after recovery and that makes it easy to relapse. The behavioural studies they performed more-or-less modelled the situation you describe: the researchers found that after four doses of cocaine, rats would normally ignore electric shocks in order to get at the drug. After treatment, the rats became less obsessed with the high and would not risk getting electrocuted again in order to have it. It wasn't as much of a return to normal function as a rat that had only had cocaine once, but it took a while to return to full addict behaviour.
So, yes, it does address the functional problem that normal rehab fails to remedy. The area they chose to stimulate was specifically implicated as being responsible for loss of control in addicts.
We may never know! It all depends on who sets the NIH funding agenda and who has deep pockets. Cocaine addiction seems to be the primary focus of most addiction research, presumably because the effect is so sudden and there's no one to lobby against its prohibition.
Actually, the target and rhodopsin chosen causes stimulation of normal functions that atrophy in an addiction state. Nothing gets suppressed or removed.
And the award for most horrifically insane misinterpretation of an optogenetics paper goes to... Geek.com!
Based on actually skimming the paper, I would guess that the kind of excitation they're doing is probably safe in humans, although likely to cause interesting sensations.
Also, the blood-brain barrier makes it rather hard to perform gene therapy on the human nervous system, doesn't it?
And yet they already have been. If Slashdot headlines defined the evolution of English, by this time next week all "H"s will have disappeared.
Taking Star Trek as a foil again: humans are portrayed as having gone through a long period of war in the 22nd century and afterwards attaining an enlightened state which, although not quite post-scarcity, somehow leads to everyone becoming generally pleasant. Money is abolished, suggesting a fundamental shift in how people view property.
The writers (in any TV or film incarnation, at least) were never quite good enough to actually present characters that conform to the real ramifications of a society that has undergone such a fundamental self re-evaluation. The Federation is contrasted against the Ferengi, for example, but human colonists (the Maquis) are shown as having no problem engaging in petty fights over territory that is certainly not their ancestral home, and Voyager's EMH gets quite possessive about his art (Author, author) in part for reasons that the open culture movement would already consider petty. The topic of how Starfleet officers deal with money on DS9 is completely ignored (indeed, as is how the Federation trades with other nations) although some are shown handling currency and gambling.
I think Banks looked beyond this and tried to re-evaluate, at a core level, what it would really mean. Culture people aren't generally snobby, or vain, or selfish; they're simply adjusted to an environment where all of the things we take for granted—all of the struggles to survive—are irrelevant. It is, as you say, an absurdity to consider them elitist, except when they are judging themselves against another society, in which case it is hard to fault them for pitying those who are bound by a finite lifespan and finite resources.
As a biologist, I think Banks has done very well in identifying the consequences of an immortal civilization. Maybe the biggest mystery is what still motivates them to live at all; I suppose the author is also pushing an argument that says self-actualisation is something transcendent of the toils of life. Not that there isn't lots of supporting evidence—present-day rich snobs (and for the record I'm a penniless graduate student) really are good measuring sticks of the same thing. There's a great deal of literature that asserts that many people born into circumstances where the idea of needing to work for survival is alien become frustrated with lives of leisure and eventually grow obsessed with trying to figure out who they are. This, no doubt, is why the seer Fal (in Consider Phlebas) not only goes mountain-climbing without proper safety equipment, but lets herself lie around in pain for a day while waiting for rescue, even though she can shut off the pain at any time.
Maybe that's why you assumed they were particularly arrogant? Although Horza does call them that a few times.