Hysteria is Contagious. An article on the 50-year effort by scientists to revive the 1918 Spanish flu virus reads like a Michael Crichton novel:
He chose three villages in the permafrost zone -- where the ground never thaws -- that had mass graves containing corpses from an epidemic that sounded like influenza.
The young graduate student surveyed the sites, all on the Seward Peninsula, which stretches westward into the Bering Sea. Of the three, a place called Teller Mission looked promising. Seventy-two of the 80 residents of Teller Mission died between Nov. 15 and 20, 1918.
Hultin went to the village, whose name has since been changed to Brevig Mission, and requested permission to excavate the grave. Through a translator, he emphasized the benefit of making a vaccine. The villagers had been vaccinated against smallpox, so they knew what he was talking about. At the meeting were three of the eight survivors from 1918.
Columnist Charles Krauthammer believes it's more of a Steven King:
We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes New Scientist magazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested.
Though he cites New Scientist, Krauthammer omits a few facts from the magazine's flu coverage that are worth considering before completely losing your shit, as do Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy, who call this flu's published genome a "recipe for disaster."
The laws of probability suggest that if Earth sticks around long enough, scientists will eventually stumble upon a discovery that wipes out humankind and gives the rest of the universe one less thing to worry about. That's why we must colonize other planets as soon as possible. Our genes need places to store backups.
But I'm not ready to hit the panic button about the return of the killer of 1918. Most people have been exposed to milder descendants of that flu or vaccinated against them, both of which provide natural protection. Existing antiviral drugs also are likely to offer resistance.
The more pressing concern is the next pandemic flu, which hasn't been filtered through survivors and weakened by the collective might of antibodies and evolution. Learning from the publication of the Spanish flu's genome also may enable researchers to devise an effective response to the next killer flu or biological terror attack.
Besides, if hiding information from bad, bad people is Earth's best hope, we might as well max out the credit cards and stock up on beer, medicinal marijuana, and fatty foods, because we're screwed. As technologists like Kurzweil and Joy must realize, security through obscurity never works. [Workbench]
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