This is a great thing to hear from an administration that allies itself with advocates of genocide...
US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
31–40 of 131 posts
Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#32Setting the stage for every biohazard movie ever made.
I hope this is only approved in places where the average temperature is below zero and most common form of transportation as snowmobile.
Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#33Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#34Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the US keeping their eyes on it is that you can't trust them. All you need is a few lobbyists and rules and regulations seem to be just words. Hell, Net Neutrality had plenty of people "keeping their eyes on it" too.
If non-reputable agencies wanted to do illegal research, there is literally nothing that would stop them. Look at NSA spying, MKUltra, and the failed nerve gas test that killed hundreds of sheep. The US still has the largest arsenal of nerve gas in the world, much of it which is still in the queue to be destroyed, much of it still leaking.
I haven't heard anything about continued leaking. Any sources on that? Googling turns up nothing besides the sheep incident.
Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#36This is a great thing to hear from an administration that allies itself with advocates of genocide...
???????
Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#37An informative series from pbs narrated by Jeff goldblum on YouTube: search for "dna episode 1 of 5 the secret of life"
It's a great high level overview of dna sequencing from the discovery of its shape through the completion of the human genome project in 2000.
I'm having trouble pasting a link, maybe someone could help me out.
Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#38Now, I don't want to seem anti-science or anything, but this seems like a massive disaster just waiting to happen, in light of the incidents that led to this ban and also, even more to the point, the 2001 anthrax attacks.[1] Couldn't they at least restrict this research to labs far away from major population centers? The analogue with software development, I'd say, is when people periodically point out that nuclear p…
It's possible that it's very difficult to engineer a virus that can do better than anything nature has come up with. Evolution has had billions of years to try all the attack vectors. A worst case 12 Monkeys-style disaster seems unlikely. But I'm ignorant of this topic. Without handwaving or pointing at the worst case, how much should we worry? Is there any evidence that a genetically enhanced virus can be devastatin…
> It's possible that it's very difficult to engineer a virus that can do better than anything nature has come up with
As someone finishing a PhD in computer-aided drug discovery, this seems to be the situation in a lot of cases. Nature often finds it trivial to get around drugs and back to the viral behavior it wants. For example, a lab might make an allosteric drug that reduces the activity of a viral enzyme. In response to treatment with the drug, a few copies of the virus emerge with point mutation that makes them more active. Now a patient has two populations of viruses, and the disease no longer cares about the treatment. The surprising thing isn't just that this happens, but that it happens so rapidly, often requiring just a few days or a single mutation.
A quick example of the above is the I585T substitution in [1]
One big-picture concept is that genes and proteins are more than their immediate sequences/transcripts. On top of their current identity, they all exist on an mutational "landscape". Remember that some codons are redundant, while some amino acid changes would require two or three base mutations. Therefore, the sequence of a virus encodes both its current identity, as well as nearby evolutionary "alternatives". When a recurring threat comes by, the virus might have encoded in its genes a common defense, maybe through a particularly mutagen-exposed gene location or something like that. In the above case, the virus may have had millenia of exposure to weird dietary natural products and whatnot, and encoded easy rate up/down mutations for its essential enzymes, or orthosteric disruptor mutations for its promiscuous binding sites.
This sort of fuckery will have to become a consideration in designing the antivirals of the future.
And, to toot my own horn: In an evolutionary sense, our fight against viruses is particularly interesting. Now that computers are helping us accelerate drug development, our brains and computers could be considered as part of our immune systems. In the same way that metal weapons made us safe against macroscopic threats (lions etc), computers and public health infrastructure will become our arsenal against microscopic threats. If computer-aided drug design can lead to faster approval of cheap drugs, we can design hundreds of antiviral molecules and chase a virus all over its evolutionary landscape, until it has nowhere left to run.
For out-of-field readers -- An anecdote of cancer cells (not viruses) becoming reliant on a drug in [2]
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC296079/ [2] http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/d-brief/2017/10/04/cancer-...
Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#39Now, I don't want to seem anti-science or anything, but this seems like a massive disaster just waiting to happen, in light of the incidents that led to this ban and also, even more to the point, the 2001 anthrax attacks.[1] Couldn't they at least restrict this research to labs far away from major population centers? The analogue with software development, I'd say, is when people periodically point out that nuclear p…
It is a massive disaster waiting to happen.
But the massiveness of that disaster, or its impendingness, has very little to do with some people in Washington DC mouthing words about how you shouldn't do that.
This is definitely one of those cases where I feel like a lot of people are demonstrating some very magical thinking about the effectiveness of regulations, with all due respect to those involved. Does Kim Jong Un care that some people in Washington DC say that it's illegal to make lethal viruses? Does China? Russia? Iran? Europe? Anyone else in the world, really? Or a small criminal lab located in the United States? Or a criminal with access to a lab in the United States? It's not like there's literally people standing on top of every single gene sequencer in the world, or the US, stopping people from doing things.
The regulations were not all that was standing between us and some deadly virus, because anyone who would make a deadly virus and release it, accidentally or otherwise, still has a very simple path to that goal: "Ignore the regulations the US has." This just gives the good guys a chance to possibly learn some things about that before someone else releases it.
Re: US Federal Ban on Making Lethal Viruses Is Lifted
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
The problem with the US keeping their eyes on it is that you can't trust them. All you need is a few lobbyists and rules and regulations seem to be just words. Hell, Net Neutrality had plenty of people "keeping their eyes on it" too.
I'm not sure why this is being downvoted, other than that it isn't precise. I'm general you can't trust regulators or legislators at the federal level.
If you take this argument to its logical conclusion there is no point arguing about the law in the first place.