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ask yourself do you really want flesh eating zombies walking about at night? Well do ya???

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ORIGINAL: Sanity


I can't help but wonder how difficult might it be for some well-meaning environmentalists or animal rights activists to create something new that could, for example, wipe out the world's wheat or corn production and thereby starve half the people on Earth. Or to create a super cold or flu strain or some other threat capable of eliminating some percentage of our species outright...

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ORIGINAL: Lorr47

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ORIGINAL: MarsBonfire

"Gene hacking" has been around for at least 15 years, maybe more. You can often find genetic splicing equipment on ebay. It's really no more expensive, or time consuming a hobby that running a model Railroad, or getting seriously into computers.

Experimenting with new forms of life "can't hurt?" Hummm... obviously this poster has never read the first few chapters of Steven King's "The Stand"...

The religious nutcases are so friggin worred about experimentation stem cells... too bad they aren't thinking about what the irresponsible "mad scientist" is doing in his garage across town, tinkering with entirely new forms of cellular life, and viruses. If they did, maybe they'd realize how fucked up their priorities really are.

I have never thought it possible to do this sort of thing other than in an expensive lab.  If someone can do it in their garage, someone will.  That is scary.

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Klebsiella planticola--The Gene-Altered Monster That Almost Got Away The Deadly Genetically Engineered Bacteria that Almost Got Away: A Cautionary Talle Web Note: In the early 1990s a European genetic engineering company was preparing to field test and then commercialize on a major scale a genetically engineered soil bacteria called Klebsiella planticola. The bacteria had been tested--as it turns out in a careless and very unscientific mannner--by scientists working for the biotech industry and was believed to be safe for the environment. Fortunately a team of independent scientists, headed by Dr. Elaine Ingham of Oregon State University, decided to run their own tests on the gene-altered Klebsiella planticola. What they discovered was not only startling, but terrifying-- the biotech industry had created a biological monster--a genetically engineered microorganism that would kill all terrestrial plants. After Ingham's expose, of course the gene-altered Klebsiella planticola was never commercialized. But as Ingham points out, the lack of pre-market safety testing of other genetically altered organisms virtually guarantees that future biological monsters will be released into the environment. Moreover it's not only genetic engineering that poses a mortal threat to our soil ecology, the soil food web, as Ingham calls it. Chemical-intensive agriculture is slowly but surely poisoning our soil and our drinking water as well. Ecological Balance and Biological Integrity Good Intentions and Engineering Organisms that Kill Wheat  by Elaine Ingham, Oregon State University  A genetically engineered Klebsiella-planticola had devastating effects on wheat plants while in the same kind of units, same incubator, the parent bacteria did not result in the death of the wheat plants. Consider that the parent species of bacteria grows in the root systems of every plant that has been assessed for Klebsiella's presence. The bacterium also grows on and decomposes plant litter material. It is a very common soil organism. It is a fairly aggressive soil organism that lives on exudates produced by the roots of every plant that grows in soil. This bacterium was chosen for those very reasons to be engineered: aggressive growth on plant residues....

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That's scary. Yeah, we really need as many people as possible fooling around with this sort of shit in their basements. Let's not stand in the way of progress, people!

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ORIGINAL: Lorr47

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That's scary. Yeah, we really need as many people as possible fooling around with this sort of shit in their basements. Let's not stand in the way of progress, people!

But will passing a bunch of statutes stop them?  I doubt it.  Do you have any suggestions?

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ORIGINAL: bluepanda
You really can't help but wonder that? No shit! Do you think you could help explaining why the fuck, in your worldview, there is any rational reason whatsoever to worry about evironmentalists, of all people, wiping out half the world's wheat production? Wouldn't your time be better spent working yourself into a frothmouthed, glassy-eyed panic over the possibility that stamp collectors will figure out a way to blow up the supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park? Because that makes at least as much, if not tens times more, sense than seriously speculating that animal rights activists would have some motivation to destroy the world's corn production.

Good lord, how do you come up with this shit? Is there some  computer program that just randomly generates them, or do you actually think them up yourself?

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ORIGINAL: CatdeMedici
Correct, it can kill thousands in a matter of minutes or hours.

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Isn't that a bit over dramatic?

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ORIGINAL: samboct

For the people who don't want to believe in sensationalist headlines or the "scare of the month club"- let me point out a few things.

1)  Genetic engineering- i.e. gene splicing in a lab or bathtub, (yeah, right) can only use the tools that nature developed.  Humans may be able to speed up the process some, but genetic engineering can't do anything that nature hasn't already done in the past.
2)  Successful examples of human genetic engineering that are "freaks" of nature: Rover, Spot, Fido, etc.  Dogs have the largest size variation within a species of any animal, so much to the point where although a Great Dane and a chihuahua may share similar enough genes to reproduce successfully, in practice, it's a bit of a long shot.  Note that most breeds were established long before the structure of DNA was known.  Most of the foods we eat are genetically engineered whether plant or animal protein.  Some wildlife such as fish, deer or pinecones (anybody remember Eull Gibbons?) are an exception.
3)  I chuckle at the arrogance that suggests that humans know enough to devise some type of plant/animal/bacteria/virus that's going to wipe us all out.  This shows an incredible lack of appreciation for nature's evolutionary processes which are really rather robust.  Face it- if everything stayed the same, we'd still be a bunch of slime in a pool on a rock.  OK, some of us don't seem to have evolved very far.  There are two major types of genetic mutations- intra species which are the most common, and interspecies (bacterial genes into a plant genome as an example) which I think some of the sequencing has shown may be a bit more common than first realized.  This is where manipulation of DNA directly comes into play, since classical genetic engineering (breeding) kind of runs into a roadblock.  But nature's figured out how to do it.
4)  Nature has devised some absolutely brilliant killing machines.  I work in nanotechnology and some nanoparticles are incredibly dangerous.  I can give you an example of nanoparticle thats about 75 nm long, carries its own programming to build self replicating factories using human cells as starting materials, can hide from the bodies immune system indefinitely, can lie dormant for over a decade, and when it breaks out, is nearly invariably fatal.  Any guesses?  How about HIV- the virus that causes AIDS?  Do we really need to go through the list of nature's killing machines including the bacterias responsible for black plague, TB, smallpox, cholera etc.  Or viruses responsible for things like dengue, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile, etc.?  We're not even close to understanding how to design something like these viruses.  The suggestion to try and ban genetic engineering is on par with trying to ban fireworks because it might lead to spaceships one day that bring the Borg down upon us.... 
5)  We can all do genetic engineering in a bathtub.  Well, sorry, I forgot about some of the folks on this board.  Anyhow, all that's needed is a fertile human female and a working male reproductive system having intercourse in a bathtub.  Voila- random genes being thrown together- who knows what the result will be?  My money is on a normal baby, unless of course you take two people living on top of a toxic waste dump in New Jersey......


Sam