I present... the four assed monkey!
Who said, "Just because we CAN doesn't necessarily mean we SHOULD."?
Now, now. These Dutch scientists can just as easily create a pair of wooden shoes to stamp it out.
Yes, Virginia, there is a Captain Trips.
Mike
why would any man do this?
btw, this is the same race of people (euro liberals) who are attempting to create a black hole under the french-swiss border...no worries
Perhaps 2012 will see the Full Monte. Plague, economic collapse, war across the middle east, global famine, everything.
Don’t get overwrought about this. The situation is far worse than what these scientists did. If anything, they just pointed out how precarious our natural situation is.
That is, they didn’t do anything that isn’t happening naturally right this minute. Their “recipe” was just some crude selective breeding that easily produced a superior and deadly strain of the virus.
This exact same thing was seen happening in a herd of pigs in Vietnam years ago, by their chief epidemiologist. He noted that each pig had on average five different strains of Avian flu, in contention with each other for dominance in that pig.
When a strain won these “semi finals”, it would go up against the other “semi finalists” in other pigs. Eventually the herd all shared the same, “grand champion” virus.
This *alone* represents two of the just five generational steps that were used by the Dutch scientists to create their insanely lethal strain. Or, I should say, “they” didn’t create anything. Their test animals did it all by themselves.
The chief epidemiologist of Vietnam realized that this is happening in herds and flocks in much of the world right now, acting like parallel computing, where thousands of computers lend idle processing time to act like a supercomputer.
And many of these biological computers are trying to figure out a way to make Avian flu easily transmissible from person to person. And when they succeed, not if, the world faces the second highest mortality rate after nuclear war.
We seem powerless to stop it.
Jeff Goldblum, Jurassic Park. That didn't turn out too well.....
Jurassic Park
The end of the world!
Or not.
I present... the four assed monkey!
The first question is WHY would you want to create a more deadly strain of a virus? The second question is can we destroy all the lab samples and notes before it gets out?
“A senior source close to the Biosecurity board, who wished to remain anonymous, told The Independent that the National Institutes of Health, which funded the work, is about to make a decision on how much of the scientific paper on the H5N1 super strain should be published, and how much held back.”
OMG
First thing that popped into my mind was the name, Randall Flag.
5.56mm
This is why we need a self sustaining population on the moon, at least ten thousand with ten million being much better. one suicidal microbiologist who doesn’t want to go by himself or a Ted Turner who wants the population reduced by 98% and we are extinct.