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Boffins Closer than Ever to Bringing About Stephen King’s ‘The Stand’ IRL
Scientists in Boston have created a strain of Covid that is 80% fatal in mice. And if you’ve met a lot of people from Boston, you wouldn’t blame them.
In the new research , which has not been peer-reviewed, a team of researchers from Boston and Florida extracted Omicron’s spike protein — the unique structure that binds to and invades human cells. It has always been present but it has become more evolved over time. Omicron has dozens of mutations in its spike protein that made it so infectious. Researchers attached Omicron’s spike protein to the original wildtype strain that first emerged in Wuhan at the start of the pandemic. The researchers looked at how mice fared under the new hybrid strain compared to the original Omicron variant
80 percent of mice died from the new man-made Covid strain, while none died from the milder Omicron variant alone, researchers at Boston University’s National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories found.
We’re all going to die. So vote accordingly.
Published in Science & Technology
I just pretend I know until somebody else asks.
Learned it on Page 3 many years ago.
Not me. Though I admit I was surprised to see it here, and it made me wonder about your nation of origin.
I saw that article and the pictures say it all. If this kind of thing is going to be done (and it is, you can’t un-ring a bell), I’d rather it were done in a country with serious enforcement of Bio-Safety Lab Levels (and I know from direct experience that Mass is serious). Having said that, it sure looks like curiosity will kill us. (Q: Why did you do it? A: To see if I could.)
As in the video clips in #8.
All that kind of stuff needs to be done on the Moon, or at least in orbit. With a self-destruct that can be set off from home base.
Loved that whole Series. Read it before covid. Prescient. More rice, more beans, more ammo!
Well, when it’s done in China, it still * us in the *, so I’m all for no.
I would not be surprised (a mealy way of saying I think this is the case, but what do I know) that the pooh-poohing of the lab-leak hypothesis had two reason: one a matter of craven arse-covering, the other a matter of doing the right thing as the scientists saw it. As for the arse-covering: we outsourced our GoF research, and no one in the Boffin-American community wanted anyone to think that the government was involved in this research, or that there was a supranational health-research community that was tweaking bugs for reasons the deplorable groundlings wouldn’t understand.
As for the Doing the Right Thing: they actually did regard GoF research as essential to getting ahead of a really bad bug, and thought that global health, whatever that is, would suffer if we didn’t research these things. Add some hubris and institutional laxity born of confidence, and toss in a soupçon of inevitable human error, and you have COVID-19.
Better to fob it off on a wet market or some guy from the provinces who staggered into town full of bat spit and just happened to sneeze on someone six blocks from the Wuhan labs. That way they can get back to normal eventually. The money will continue to flow, and the necessary work will continue to get done. It’s a combination of self-interest and actual public-mindedness, with the former ignored as a contributing factor because of the manifest importance of the latter. I mean, just because you want your work to be fully funded and earn prestige doesn’t mean you don’t actually care about stopping pandemics.
Realize of course that if we cut off all funds for this sort of thing, and it happens again, the headlines will be “How the Virus-Denying GOP kneecapped our ability to find a cure.”
Right now we should be running ads that say: “$(However many gazillion) dollars spent and still no cure.”
It appears as though risks have been taken, incalculable funds spent on God knows what, and still no cure.
So let’s save the money.
Oh great. Boston University is willing to risk another great pandemic. How secure is the facility against transmission? Even if they have the best security in the world, human beings make mistakes. It is simply not worth the risk.
I’m about the last guy to go all fire and brimstone on people for exhibiting the myriad human foibles that make us such a wonderfully diverse and eclectic bunch of apes. “Benefit of the doubt” could be my middle name (though my young tutoring students will tell you it’s actually “Fun-crusher”).
But I’m not willing to grant even a hint of a good-intentions exemption to these folks. I’m not even willing to do it in the tongue-and-cheek, damning-with-faint-praise way you do in your comment.
In response to “We’re thinking of seeing if we can increase the lethality of the SARS-CoV-2 virus,” it’s unfathomable to me that someone didn’t say, politely and respectfully, “Are you out of your effing mind? Seriously? Do you have any idea how foolish that is? Do you realize the hell you’re going to bring down on yourself if you succeed and announce the results? Are you really that stupid?”
I’m sure coworkers and loved ones said essentially that, albeit not as graciously as I did.
Look, all the Smart People® are ready to plunge the world into energy poverty based on nothing more than a bunch of dubious computer models. How about the budding plaguemeisters of Boston and Wuhan do their doomsday gene-twiddling on computers as well? Then they can have the satisfaction of simulating the accidental destruction of global prosperity without the rest of us having to participate.
I so enjoy seeing you offer a rant, Hank! Although, of course, you’re speculating on what others might say. Still it’s nice to see.
All of this is addressed rather well in the video clips of comment #8.
Unfortunately, “no” is not an option. It’s going to be done by someone. Fun with CRISPR etc. The future holds a lot of trans-human genetic engineering. It’s going to happen in some form, never have humans pre-emptively discarded a new technology because it was too dangerous. Nuclear weapons are the closest analogy and they are very much with us.
The best of the bad options is that countries that seriously enforce BSLs need to be where this kind of work is done. I agree that that a preference is for outer space as a location, but still under serious BSLs. Perhaps add a new higher BSL5. China is not serious about it’s BSLs, that’s why Fauci and Eco-Health did their work their work there, resulting (probably) in Covid-19 et al. To work fast and to get around Congress’ ban.
However, saying it cannot be done is not a realistic option.
One significant difference is that nuclear weapons pretty much require being “set off.” Virii don’t.
It would become more realistic if the people who do it get shot.
In a BSL4 high containment facility that follows the safety protocols, releasing a virus requires focused and concerted effort. It doesn’t just happen “by accident”. Releasing it into the wild is harder than launching an ICBM. Which makes such work slow and cumbersome (as it should). Again, that’s why Fauci and Eco-Health used Wuhan, the Chinese are much less serious about following safety standards, so work can be done faster, risks be damned.
Boston University has now responded to people’s concerns about the virus project. I don’t understand some of it, but Ricochet readers might be interested in it. This is part of it:
Isn’t it bigotry to call it that?
I saw that too, and it certainly makes a more sensible story than the original — that people were trying to create a super-strain of this virus.
However, they’re still playing with what is arguably the most expensive and disruptive virus of the last century. They’re doing things with it, changing it to see what will happen.
Let’s go back to those computer models on this one. I know they aren’t as great as actually creating new viruses, but, as disruptive as they may be, computer viruses neither kill Granny nor send the kids home from school for a year.
Living in New England, I am more aware than most of scientists’ mistakes. We have a chronic infestation of tree-killing silkworms, the result of an experiment to create worms that spun stronger silk. The worms escaped! :-)
It’s like these people have never watched a movie, read a book, or played a video game :) I fully anticipate zombies being the next threat. Lucky for me, I have a husband and three sons who have spent the last 10 years in “training” and doing research.
What bothers me the most of all the scientists’ irresponsible actions I’ve encountered over the years is the millions of embryos in frozen storage from IVF procedures. At one point GW had a party for a hundred “snowflake babies”: frozen embryos who had been brought to term as babies. These are viable embryos. Lord knows what some Xi-Dr. No like person would do with these human beings. And now what do we do? And it’s a global problem. I’m happy for IVF parents, but at what price?
Hmmm, well if we’re supposed to be heading for Star Trek, we’ll need a Khan Noonien Singh!
I’ve thought for years that our scientific abilities and knowledge were outpacing our ability to deal with the ethics. Not only are our abilities and knowledge accelerating, our “ethics IQ” at a minimum has hit a pause, with some noted reversals.
As my dear old mother used to say, just because you “can” doesn’t mean you “should”.
Jon Stewart covered that too, in the previously-mentioned videos.
Huge topic in a lot of better sci-fi as well.