Wednesday, May 29, 2013
The Demon in the Freezer Part II
So far the book is covering the development of biological weapons in the former Soviet Union as told by Dr. Vladamir Pasechnik, who was a part of Biopreparat which is a large secret program devoted to research, development, and production of biological weapons in the USSR. Pasechnik wanted out of this program because he could not sleep at night due to his knowledge of all the horrible things being developed in this program. Page 103 discusses how the Soviets had genetically modified (GM) plagues by exposing it again and again to powerful antibiotics to force the rapid evolution of drug restraint strains known as "heating up". Biopreparat scientists were trying to come up with even more powerful strains by inserting foreign genes into a plague to further heat it up, does this work because these foreign genes are like nothing we've ever seen before and are therefore harder to defend against? These powerful strains of viruses could be loaded onto missiles, George W. Bush and Margaret Thatcher were informed of these ICBMS (intercontinental ballistics missiles) Thatcher freaked out and immediately contacted Mikhail Gorbachev, the head of the Soviet Union, and forcefully asked to see their bio warfare facilities but the inspectors found nothing. The thing that really shocked me was on page 110 at Corpus 6 in Russia which handles and preforms experiments with the smallpox virus and located there is an aerosol test chamber where bombs that release a biological agent in the air is tested. Sometimes they will hook up monkeys or other animals to this test chambers to test the effects of the air inside the chamber, I can't even imagine animals subject to this, much less humans (Corpus 6 aren't supposed to have stocks of smallpox in their laboratories, at the time only the CDC and an institute in Moscow were allowed to carry the virus) inspectors asked to see this chamber and take swab samples but the technicians refused saying that our vaccines won't protect us implying that they have developed viruses that are resistant to American vaccines. The head of Corpus 6 denied experimenting with smallpox and said they only had the DNA of the smallpox and not the actual virus (Page 111). The missiles the Russians were working on had bomblets inside the warhead which could hold 200 grams of liquid smallpox that was pressurized with carbon dioxide to blow out mists of variola. The strain of smallpox in the warheads is called India-1 collected in India by the KGB, the Russian Federation refused to share this strain with any scientists outside of Russia and so it's characteristics and means to defend against it are unclear. I could not put this book down while reading all this information, as interesting as it is, it is truly to frightening to read about. What if there are a lot of laboratories out there that lied about destroying their stock of smallpox viruses when they were ordered to and have developed a very powerful strain, enough to wipe out a small country? I find all this biological warfare so fascinating but the repercussions of it can be so devastating I don't even want to think about what it could do.
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5 comments:
This is a perfect example of the advantages of science being abused. The fact that the Soviet Union was genetically modifying plague's to their advantage is terryfing. This goes to show that the power that scientists hold is amazing. Could there possibly be a strain of a virus created that is made to be resistant to almost everything? The possibilities of the technology that could be developed in the future are endless.In the future, could it be possible that humans could develop resistance to every strain of virus or bacteria?
Um... You talk of genetic modification as something that a state (or perhaps a well-funded laboratory) needs to oversee to carry out.
...what do you think we have been doing in Molecular Biology class over the past month.
I have heard a few teachers affectionately call us "The Colonie Bioterrorists". Glad that there is a prerequisite GPA needed for that class. (Note - that last statement is dripping with sarcasm.)
This seriously scared me, the fact that there could be genetically modified plagues out there is so scary. Will this be the new form of warfare? Is biological warfare going to be part of future conflicts? The possibilities of this are scary and hopefully this never happens to us.
Susan-
I totally agree with you, it's crazy that the Vector scientists are dumb enough to toy with this virus, knowing what it could do to not only their enemies, but themselves. It's like in Bio when we engineered ampicillan resistant E.coli- we had to be so careful because if we accidentally ingested it, we'd be in big trouble. Imagine doing that, but with the biggest viral killer of humans. On a much bigger scale. Engineering the virus to be completely untreatable and allowing us no way to protect ourselves. This was dangerous stuff they were dealing with, and what blew my mind was the reckless abandon with which they performed these experiments. For goodness sake, they were using old weapon-production tanks to make flavored alcohol... that was meant to be consumed! To me, this is not only crazy, it's cocky. The scientists acted like they had a total hold on smallpox; they manufactured tons of it, literally, like it was nobody's business. No one has a right to act like they own smallpox; smallpox owns us, and if one of those Russian scientists had made one tiny mistake, it could have showed the entire human race just how dangerous it is.
I find countries building these biological weapons interesting because they know that their people will die too and that is something that they have to consider. Already we are dealing with nuclear weapons and only less than 10 countries are known to have them. The world would have to watch out because creating biological weapons may be easier, or not. Nevertheless, I believe that it will be a future problem and who knows if survival of the fittest will apply to some strains of viruses and bacteria.
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