101–110 of 131 posts
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It sure killed a LOT of people in the process though, so I wouldn't say that that's quite so reassuring.
Yeah, but we're definitely safe from an extinction level event.
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If you "cannot trust regulators or legislators at the federal level" how can you trust the laws? Who writes them, and who enforces them, if not legislators and regulators, respectively?
Right but they're not saying they don't trust regulators and legislators as a concept, they're saying they don't trust them when they're basically writing what lobbyists tell them to. It's right they don't trust the law, but their criticism isn't of law and regulation. It's of lobbyists.
You know how when you watch movies and because you know so much about tech you can tell that most of the stuff done in movies regarding hacking etc is bullshit and not real. Now I have a lack in knowledge of biology at this level, but can someone maybe explain to me how all those disease mass extinction movies cannot be real? I feel like my lack of knowledge here causes my concerns when reading stuff like this articl…
Use the enhance feature to magically unblur images to clarity? I've seen ML demos of stuff like that.
Giant realtime database of all phone calls meta data and recordings? Realtime facial/license plate recognition search of millions of people/cars? Not so funny anymore.
Tracking peoples movements in realtime. Sure just cary this phone wherever you go.
Realtime overhead imagery of an entire city? There's a company that flies drones around that lets them rewind the movements of all cars in the city throughout the day...
Magic black box that can decrypt all encryption? Sure, funny only if you overlook underhanded C planted by the NSA.
Hacking into industrial machinery and power systems?
Having millions of computers all under your control to launch attacks?
This was all funny Hollywood BS and conspiracy theories two decades ago. Elaborate animated "hacking" scenes are still funny but what they accomplish is possible.
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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.
I'd prefer if drilling for oil in the gulf were illegal, not legal with regulatory oversite, for example. I don't think a pessimistic outlook on the reliability of federal oversight is unwarranted, given my (admittedly dim) view of how the process has worked in the past.
To be more constructive: I'm up for substantive suggestions for ensuring more transparent and reliable oversite than exists today.
Now, 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…
For more background, and since this article is surprisingly short: This is a better article: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/12/nih-lifts-3-year-ban... This ban that's being lifted stems from a few incidents, but really the driving force was Ron Fouchier's [0] gain-of-function study where his lab made a few mutations that enabled transmission of the bird flu (H5N1) virus between ferrets. All they had to do was m…
Yes. That should be the assumption. No matter how good the safety procedures are, they are implemented by people. People not only make mistakes, they can be subborned, become suicidally depressed, resentful against the world in general, all sorts of things.
It seems to me that the most important thing is to learn defence against the dark arts, not the dark arts themselves. i.e. vaccines/countermeasures, not bioweapons.
Saying 'there must be no safer way to do the research' is begging the question, since research is about finding new ways of doing things and looking at things.
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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…
Maybe. Evolution selects for virulence, not death toll. After all, your hosts can't spread you if they're dead.
Humans can suffer very high death rates due to diseases for which we aren't a host. See the Black Death [1]. The host was fleas, riding rodent vectors.
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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.