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from the who-rubbed-it-the-wrong-way? dept.
The Genetic Engineering Genie Is Out of the Bottle:
Usually good for a conspiracy theory or two, U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Its release could conceivably have involved an accident, but the pathogen isn't the mishmash of known viruses that one would expect from something designed in a lab, as a research report in Nature Medicine conclusively lays out. "If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness," the researchers said.
But if genetic engineering wasn't behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. With COVID-19 bringing Western economies to their knees, all the world's dictators now know that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles. What's even more worrying is that it no longer takes a sprawling government lab to engineer a virus. Thanks to a technological revolution in genetic engineering, all the tools needed to create a virus have become so cheap, simple, and readily available that any rogue scientist or college-age biohacker can use them, creating an even greater threat. Experiments that could once only have been carried out behind the protected walls of government and corporate labs can now practically be done on the kitchen table with equipment found on Amazon. Genetic engineering—with all its potential for good and bad—has become democratized.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday September 24 2020, @09:00AM (6 children)
???? Significant effort, my left testicle. Any moron (and that term applies here) can put together a fertilizer bomb and drive it in their pick-up truck into the building of choosing. On the scale of effort, it's marginally above simply driving said pick-up into a crowd of people.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'd like to finish reading what the other pro-"bio-warfare" replicants and empathy-impaired here have to say.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @10:05AM (2 children)
Any moron can get two tons of fertilizer without being noticed?
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday September 24 2020, @10:45AM
Congratulations! You have just worked your way down from "moron" to "imbecile" [wikipedia.org]!
Do you think McVeigh just went to the Home Depot singlehandedly one day, credit card in hand, and said "yeh, I'd like 2300Kg of your finest nitrate-based fertilizer...I got a big garden"?
Analysing further, that's really not an unreasonable amount for a commercial farming outfit.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday September 24 2020, @11:07AM
I apologise for the "imbecile" crack...that was uncalled for.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @06:44PM (2 children)
Timothy McVeigh was a true American hero. You don't get to shoot a mom in the head while she is holding her baby, shoot a 10 yr old boy in the back after killing his dog (Ruby Ridge, Idaho), or burn men, women and children alive (Waco, Tx.) and get away with without paying.
(Score: 2) by gtomorrow on Thursday September 24 2020, @06:57PM
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhahahhh...ah, you're serious. That explains that smell...of Michigan Militia.
Don't you have a state capitol to hold under siege in defense of outright stupidity...or maybe a first cousin to make out with?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 24 2020, @06:59PM