Pandemic Flu Resurrected
OK...so the best way to learn about a dinosaur is to bring it back from the dead, right?
If it really is a meat eater, we'll find out fast.
This often works with viruses. It's brought back from the dead for the same types of scientists to poke and prod and see if it eats meat.
Now they have brought this 1918 'pandemic' flu back to life. They also estimate it to have killed 50 million people around the world the last time it was out.
Well...this time it's safe. They carefully keep it contained in a research facility in Canada.
OK, and before that in Wisconsin.
OK, and there are a few of the virus in other places for testing.
Oh yeah, and it's now permanently stored in Atlanta so that it can be reproduced for any further testing...like a storage for the future kind of thing.
You know, there are limits to human knowledge. The older you get, the more of them you find. The things we know and the things we control really amount to almost nothing--although some of us think that humanity has learned a lot. A biologist once pointed out that the things we know, true discoveries, are things that are accidental. Everything else we actually set out to prove.
[This idea can be furthered by an experiment that I did in university. I showed that citric acid could prevent a reaction from taking place...the experiment proved what I wanted (with controls even) but the science itself was wrong and the 'lab teacher' wasn't too impressed with the fact that I had done the wrong experiment...and less happy that I had proven something that wasn't true in a valid experiment--and yes, I know it's not true.]
Anyway...the point is that I'm not sure I like the recreation of disease for the sake of research.
Most of all, I don't like the fact that they purposefully resurrected a disease (virus even) from dead human tissues just so that they could not only study it, but store it for 'future use'.
I'm curious what other uses could be possible.
Then again...I guess mother nature and I both understand the need for a population reduction.