Gene therapy is, after all, just an infectious virus that reprograms the patient’s DNA. If you’re worried about people making bioengineered plagues, you should be aware that there’s more than one way to end the human race…
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Jacob: Between 2018 and 2079 something changed the base human genome. Must have been one of the global pandemics.
Roger: What kind of changes?
Jacob: Not sure. There are a lot of tweaks, but they're subtle. If anything happens to me, Roger, you need to let the world know about this. But for now, keep it quiet. And don't tell Girii...because she'll assume the obvious.
Roger: The obvious? You mean that -- only the Genocide Project could have done this.
Jacob: Yeah. But that can't be true.
Roger: Who else could have changed the reference standard?
Jacob: No one that I know of. But it couldn't have been us.
Roger: What kind of changes?
Jacob: Not sure. There are a lot of tweaks, but they're subtle. If anything happens to me, Roger, you need to let the world know about this. But for now, keep it quiet. And don't tell Girii...because she'll assume the obvious.
Roger: The obvious? You mean that -- only the Genocide Project could have done this.
Jacob: Yeah. But that can't be true.
Roger: Who else could have changed the reference standard?
Jacob: No one that I know of. But it couldn't have been us.
not worried about it so much as I’m aware the cats already pretty well out of the bag. the aids virus is probably the first famous case, but all the recent cross species flu bugs are highly suspect. when stories like this come out it’s hard not to smell the smoke: http://host.madison.com/news/local/education/campus_connection/biosecurity-experts-fear-uw-s-bird-flu-findings-could-fall/article_a4faff82-575d-11e1-8da3-001871e3ce6c.html
kaze, what exactly are you implying? What is “highly suspect”?
I think he’s implying that we’ve already had gene-rewriting viruses released.
I doubt we have. Gene therapy is in its infancy in 2012; even if we do have the tech to make a gene-rewriting plague (and the bird flu experiments are a big step in that technology) we don’t know how to tweak our genes. We can use gene therapy to correct flaws, but creating new genes to do new things is not yet in our capabilities.
If something is in it’s infancy in public now it has been in black project use for at least a decade. I’m just saying we’ve had human tinkered with viri in circulation since hiv in the ealy 80’s at least. gene rewriting dosn’t seem that far away when you consider what people with unreported military budgets and technology that “dosn’t exist” have the means to do.
I worked in biowarfare and WMD detection in the 1990s, in compartmentalized clearance, black budget stuff. Back then, smallpox and hemorrhagic fever was about the pinnacle of what we were able to do. Maybe we’ve secretly jumped to gene-engineering plagues in the last 15 years, but I doubt it.
However, the tech has been discovered and published, now. So the *next* big disease will arouse my suspicions.