Not clear why DOE has any reason to fund such a conclusion.
Whose energy research budget paid for this? There are some guys who need firing.
This should come from CDC, or maybe State, or okay even FBI. Not DOE.
RE: Not clear why DOE has any reason to fund such a conclusion.
This is an example of DUPLICATIVE work that various government d3partments are doing, one agency not knowing what the others are doing.
This is how our tax dollars are being spent.
Owen wrote: “Not clear why DOE has any reason to fund such a conclusion.”
As Stated in the article: “The Energy Department’s conclusion is the result of new intelligence and is significant because the agency has considerable scientific expertise and oversees a network of U.S. national laboratories, some of which conduct advanced biological research.”
Oops someone will be hung for letting the truth out for a fleeting moment.
This will come as a shock, but the Department of Energy is one of the largest funders of basic and applied science in the US. Remember it owns and operates a number of the national labs, including Livermore, Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Berekely, Argonne, SLAC, Fermilab, and Brookhaven. For historical reasons having to do with understanding radition effects it has alwasy funded a lot of work in the biological sciences as a consequence of which is has a large number of unique capabilities. Because of these, and the fact that DOE has lead the large scale high performance computing effort, it was largely responsible for the human genome sequencing effort.
Now, to be clear, DOE itself is just a sprawling federal bureaucracy of middling competence. But the laboratories it operates are first rate.