Mad scientist update

Dr. Krauthammer is not amused.

Which is why we have our own in house mad scientist: LB Buddy, what to make of all this?

LB Buddy---Mad Scientist Extraordinaire---responds:

I read the papers when they came out last week. They did score a GEE WHIZ on my scientist Geek-O-Meter (TM). It is important work to understand how otherwise merely annoying flu viruses can convert to someting much more virulent. IMO, the dangers of publishing genomes of dangerous viruses is generally overstated by a press that is prone to hyperventilation. While it is true that setting up a biolab is much easier than starting a nuclear program, it is very difficult to do what these scientists do. Making a little virus might not be too hard, but making enough to cause any real harm would be very difficult. Nightmares of tainted water supplies are ridiculous. Just to give you an example: the LD50 dose (the dose required to kill ½ of the test subjects) for a mouse (weighing less than ½ lb) is 1000 viral particles directly administered. There is no way to generate and deliver enough viral material to even harm water supplies for a small town (probably not even a private well). Some havoc could be wrought maybe on a chicken farm or something of that sort, but our management of pandemics is much better than it was in 1918. Way more benefit comes from opening the data to all scientists. Actually the extremely virulent strains like this one are actually easier to contain because they work so quickly. Something like HIV is much more dangerous in the long run because people don't know they are infected for years and can spread the disease to multiple people.
Microbiologists these days are in a Catch-22. A bunch of federal money opened up for bioterrorism research, but also a whole bunch of new regulations about whether the research can be published or not also came into play. Publishing is the coin of the realm for scientists, so if they can’t publish their results, their careers are doomed. You are seeing scientists steer clear of these areas even though there is a lot of funding (an open letter to the president from microbiologists from around the world actually said too much money is being marked for bioterror to the detriment of important work like this).

So there you have it.