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Victor Ganata
The story of Stuxnet and how it wasn't supposed to ever escape into the wild really creeps me about our stockpile of weaponized infectious disease. (I know the program was supposedly cancelled, but who really believes that?) If we can't safely quarantine electronic viruses, how the hell are we going to succeed in stopping biological viruses?
June 9, 2012
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Gimminy, Zulema ❧ spicy cocoa tart, SteVe C and Stephan Planken liked this
Killer bees anyone?
- SteVe C
Stuxnet, as I understand it, had some safeguards so it would only attack its intended target (and to better conceal itself). You can't say that of biological viruses.
- Stephan Planken
There are stealth viruses (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrock...) and they are targeted to particular beings.Tit for tat exchanges have been going on for a long time in nature. Digitally we are still merely infants.
- Todd Hoff
It's the Jurassic Park scenario. How do we know that weaponized Ebola won't revert to wild-type once it's out in the wild interacting with people's immune systems and parts of its genome are getting infiltrated by other virus's nuclei acids? We do have experience with sticking in kill switches and stripping out virulence factors from viral genomes but once that stuff is out in the wild, there's no predicting what sorts of things will happen.
- Victor Ganata
At they rate we are consuming antibiotics. Real bacteria may be the more imminent threat.
- Eric
You can weaponize bacteria, too. And they can be a lot more virulent, and a lot harder to turn off.
- Victor Ganata