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Scientist who helped eradicate smallpox dies at age 89
- treetalker 8mo ago[flagged]
- ks2048 8mo ago[flagged]
- fake-name 8mo ago[flagged]
- tialaramex 8mo agoIt might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
- BigTTYGothGF 8mo ago> AFAIK nobody kept copies Unfortunately this is not the case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63707-z https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63707-z
- tialaramex 8mo ago:(
- Bud 8mo ago[dead]
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- k_roy 8mo agoGood thing that smallpox wasn’t eradicated due to a vaccine.
- Bud 8mo ago[dead]
- olivia-banks 8mo agoVaccinia is very different from Smallpox. Or perhaps I misunderstand you?
- pfdietz 8mo agoThat was sarcasm, right?
- tehjoker 8mo agoFunnily enough, RFK Jr. is doing what he can to bring its human cousin back: "Measles virus evolved from the then-widespread rinderpest virus most probably between the 11th and 12th centuries."
- olivia-banks 8mo ago> Construction of an infectious horsepox virus vaccine from chemically synthesized DNA fragments https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0188453 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
- XorNot 8mo agoYou're going to have to link that for me because I know the longtermism people are nuts about this, but their actual understanding is pretty poor. There's a gulf between assembling a vaccine - which is a commonplace technology, and assembling a viable infectious viral particle. Being able to order all the oligos of a viral sequence isn't even step 1.
- olivia-banks 8mo agoI'm not sure if I understand your comment, but they were able to grow and propagate scHPXV in their lab. Link the sequence? Sure, it's on NCBI https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1 As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher. https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning/gene-synthesis/geneart-gene-synthesis.html https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning... I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- kwhat4 8mo agoJust in time to roll over in his grave.
- quesera 8mo agoSmallpox is not measles! But, point taken.
- sowbug 8mo agoAnd to see himself become the villain.
- junon 8mo agoYeah how dare he... helps eradicate diseases!
- sowbug 8mo agoAt least he went down fighting (https://archive.is/M4nek https://archive.is/M4nek, the op-ed referenced in the article). That's an impressively dignified response to a gobsmacking shift in public opinion. In his position, I might have given up and gone full Two-Face. (https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-dent-quotes/ https://screenrant.com/the-dark-knight-best-two-face-harvey-... for those unfamiliar with the quote)
- blell 8mo ago[flagged]
- olivia-banks 8mo agoPaywall-free link: https://archive.today/Toq4Y https://archive.today/Toq4Y
- m-hodges 8mo agoI don’t think many people know about or remember the 2003 smallpox vaccination campaign.¹ > The campaign aimed to provide the smallpox vaccine to those who would respond to an attack, establishing Smallpox Response Teams and using DryVax (containing the NYCBOH strain) to mandatorily vaccinate half a million American military personnel, followed by half a million health care worker volunteers by January 2004. The first vaccine was administered to then-President George W. Bush. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_vaccination_campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_United_States_smallpox_va...
- cucumber3732842 8mo ago[flagged]
- CaliforniaKarl 8mo agoI'm starting to think that we should be calling it "contained", not "eradicated". Eradication invites the question "Well then, why do we still need the vaccine?"
- yen223 8mo agoMost people nowadays are not vaccinated against smallpox anymore
- quesera 8mo agoWe don't vaccinate against smallpox, but keep in mind that at least two countries maintain live smallpox virus in government labs. The bad actors are predictable. And I suspect at least two others are lying.
- fuckyah 8mo ago[dead]
- dgacmu 8mo agoIt really is eradicated - it's the only human disease we've truly eradicated. There are literally no more cases of smallpox in the wild, period. The problem is that there are samples of viable virus in the labs of the US and Russia. So - it's eradicated but we have to keep stockpiles of vaccine around anyway. But nobody gets vaccined for it any more; it has an unfavorable risk-benefit ratio when the virus simply does not circulate. Smallpox kills ~30% of people who get infected with it; the first-generation vaccine had a mortality rate of about 1 in 1,000,000. (There are newer-generation vaccines developed and being developed that have an even better safety profile but we still wouldn't use them because the cost - the literal cost and the side effects and general "meh, why get another shot?"-ness outweighs the benefit of protection against something you don't need protection against.)
- saalweachter 8mo agoActually, do we need to keep samples anymore? mRNA vaccines go from sequenced DNA to vaccine without any need to store or culture the original virus in the lab. We could destroy our existing stockpile of smallpox and be ready to produce vaccines based on it faster than we could thirty years ago. We couldn't validate new vaccines without access to the live virus, but then, if we aren't willing to expose hopefully-volunteers to a disease with a 30% mortality rate, we weren't really validating it anyway. But yeah, I think we could probably unilaterally "disarm" and destroy our smallpox samples, and from a national security standpoint, I don't think we'd be significantly worse off; if the weaponized strain is significantly different from the old strain, enough to bypass vaccination, we'd need samples of the new thing in any case. I'm not even sure we'd be substantially limiting new research on it, given that smallpox doesn't infect animals, I'm not sure if there's even any animal testing we could do with a live virus. So yeah. Destroy the samples already.
- andrewflnr 8mo agoThat's got to be one of the greatest legacies in all human history. No politician or other empire-builder comes close.
- deadbabe 8mo agoGenghis Khan??
- iwontberude 8mo agoGreatest, not most fucked
- andrewflnr 8mo agoI thought it was clear from my statement about politicians and empire builders that I was talking about people who did good, useful things.
- adastra22 8mo agoNo? That’s not at all obvious.
- lmz 8mo agoGenghis Khan also not too bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Mongolica Whose peace are we now living under and what atrocities did they commit to establish it?
- deadbabe 8mo agoSometimes you have to do a lot of things that look very bad in order to do some greater good that overshadows all the bad you did.
- andrewflnr 8mo agoI think this is a rationalization. Humans are always tempted to look up to power, and what's more powerful than an empire? It goes unquestioned that we should respect the Roman empire, for instance, and you pretty often see an argument for the Mongolian empire. But these days, we know that violence is bad so we have to find other reasons to justify our feelings. So we talk about the "peace" they established after all the war. But is the cost really worth it? How many people not attacked by bandits do you need to justify an innocent murdered by raiding soldiers? Never mind that even the "peace" is often sustained through oppression. The Romans didn't invent crucifixion for Jesus, it's something they did. Never mind that the empire never lasts, and plants seeds of the next dozen wars as it falls, watered with yet more blood. Ask yourself: if you honestly intended to create peace, would a century or more (in the case of Rome) of bloody conquest actually be the optimal plan? I would say no. An actual plan for peace through strength looks more like NATO than Rome. Any good an empire builder does is accidental. Whatever they tell you or even themselves, they do it for glory and power, and their actions are optimized for that over any actual benefits. They were not nobler than the conquerors and colonizers were rightfully decry today.
- fuckyah 8mo ago[dead]
- webdoodle 8mo agoExcept it wasn't eradicated. It's still stored at the US's Fort Detrick, and in Russian and Chinese bioweapons facilities, too be released as a bioweapon, now that no one has natural immunity anymore.
- MagicMoonlight 8mo agoIf you don’t keep it then the first time you’ll get to study it will be when the first bodies are recovered from your cities.
- runako 8mo agoCoincidentally, that would be the first time it would be urgent to study.
- IshKebab 8mo agoIt would be a pretty shoddy bioweapon considering you can't really target it and vaccines are available. Maybe Russia or China are funding anti-vax idiots in the US so that it only affects America :-D
- webdoodle 8mo agoMost people aren't vaccinated for smallpox, and only a very small amount of vaccine is even produced, mostly for medical and military people. Targetting is easy, here's your blanket while the power is out...
- octate 8mo agoHe did a great service to humanity
- krisknez 8mo ago> According to the CDC, there have been no new smallpox cases since 1977. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_United_Kingdom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978_smallpox_outbreak_in_the_...