I must not have got the memo about the standard historical narrative, because I was aware of the 1918 flu epidemic and that it had killed more people than WW1.
I wonder if it's different in Europe, but also I'm not claiming that no one knew about it. I'm claiming that pre-COVID if you asked a random sampling of people about the 1918 flu pandemic, north of 90% would have no idea what you were talking about.
You may well be right. I've no idea if British people are more historically aware than anyone else., I know about it because I'm interested in history; I know plenty of people who aren't and couldn't tell you who fought in WW1 and on what side.
I know it's not the same thing, but I'll just say that my students were recently floored when I showed them that the entire SARS-CoV-2 genome was published online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/1798174254
So chess is something I've been studying for a bit. An interesting aspect of it is particular problems can be analyzed by brute force computing. In other words map out every possible move 4 or 5 steps ahead and whatever produces the best outcome is the answer.
But since the number of possible games is so huge, beyond individual problems and openings, the advice is usually more general principles. Develop back pieces early, bishops should control large diagonals, rooks files, offer trades at strategic points etc.
I bring up this analogy because bioengineering is raised a lot yet seems to never actually happen and I think the question that should be asked is why? Why are computer viruses designed and released often for fun that they are considered just a reality of the digital ecosystem but not actual viruses.
You can easily kill people with a virus if you wanted. Rabies is a good candidate, if you injected it into someone, odds are they aren't vaccinated unless they work with animals often like at a vets. By the time symptoms appear and doctors figure out what's going on, it's likely too late to stop it. Granted it's not easy to just go up and inject stuff into people, but in principle you could create the circumstances where you could pull it off.
But I think the lack of engineered viruses in the real world relative to our sci-fi has to do with the nature of biology being more like chess than engineering. Drug development often consists of a very isolated problem, like a bacteria cell that is causing an infection and a molecule that will rupture its membrane if it gets close enough to it. That part often does yield well to simple computation but the rest does not. There are some general ideas about compounds that can survive the stomach and get into the bloodstream to then release their 'cargo'. You piggyback on stuff that worked in other cases but even then you get to a point where you are basically trying out a hundreds of variations to get the one that seems to execute this plan well. It's simply not possible to compute your entire path there. You will be 'just trying things' in a controlled manner. There is, of course, also the complete accident that just happens to work often for reasons it will take decades to even figure....the person who eats a moldy piece of bread and clears something up.
A nice thing about drugs, however, is that they are stable. While you can't predict ahead of time what happens to them in the body and what they will do (if anything), what they are is constant. Their reproduction doesn't happen in the body but in the manufacturing process where six sigma keeps them essentially identical from one batch to the next.
There have been some attempts to do stuff with viruses. Gene therapy either 'edits' DNA when you're an egg or fetus or it tries to fix a full grown person by giving them a modified cold virus that will introduce a missing gene. There progress is pretty slow. At best the virus only modifies some of your cells. If that's enough to relieve the genetic disease by allowing you to make some of the protein you normally would, great. More often the body shuts out the attempt pretty hard and since a person died in one of the trials progress has been slowed down even more. A critical problem here is that viruses are a bit like children, once grown they do their own thing and will have every reason to ditch any 'code' you give them that they don't see as useful.
Where we go here is there doesn't seem to be much barrier at all to going out in nature and collecting viruses. In terms of usefulness this is like collecting books from the library of Babel. Almost all of them would do nothing to a human, some would kill you far to fast and others would briefly infect you and you may not even notice them.
We probably should have kept the sampling program. We don't really know what wild virus populations do and it would be very useful to know if, say, the bat virus population 20 years ago looks more or less exactly like the population today or are viruses wildly changing in the wild. If it's the former, we could probably narrow down the families of viruses that could possibly harm us and either move towards universal vaccines for them or at least know what to look for in our own monitoring.
You make a good point about the dog that hasn’t barked. But most experts in the relevant areas believe that you could, for instance, reconstitute the 1918 flu virus based on it’s DNA sequence. And they’ve definitely done it with lesser viruses. The AI overlords I’ve queried indicate that the only difficult part is getting the necessary segments synthesized, since there are some protections against creating dangerous DNA, but everyone seems to agree that these protections are very porous.
Which is to say I strongly disagree with your second point, that we should gather natural viruses. To extend your analogy, this is like collecting a bunch of mate in three puzzles and publishing them. You’re already looking at a virus that has a lot going for it in other words.
My friend, you had a chance to use 'decimate' accurately in a Roman context and you forbear. I admire your focus. ;)
I wish I was that perspicacious.
I must not have got the memo about the standard historical narrative, because I was aware of the 1918 flu epidemic and that it had killed more people than WW1.
I wonder if it's different in Europe, but also I'm not claiming that no one knew about it. I'm claiming that pre-COVID if you asked a random sampling of people about the 1918 flu pandemic, north of 90% would have no idea what you were talking about.
You may well be right. I've no idea if British people are more historically aware than anyone else., I know about it because I'm interested in history; I know plenty of people who aren't and couldn't tell you who fought in WW1 and on what side.
I know it's not the same thing, but I'll just say that my students were recently floored when I showed them that the entire SARS-CoV-2 genome was published online: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/1798174254
So chess is something I've been studying for a bit. An interesting aspect of it is particular problems can be analyzed by brute force computing. In other words map out every possible move 4 or 5 steps ahead and whatever produces the best outcome is the answer.
But since the number of possible games is so huge, beyond individual problems and openings, the advice is usually more general principles. Develop back pieces early, bishops should control large diagonals, rooks files, offer trades at strategic points etc.
I bring up this analogy because bioengineering is raised a lot yet seems to never actually happen and I think the question that should be asked is why? Why are computer viruses designed and released often for fun that they are considered just a reality of the digital ecosystem but not actual viruses.
You can easily kill people with a virus if you wanted. Rabies is a good candidate, if you injected it into someone, odds are they aren't vaccinated unless they work with animals often like at a vets. By the time symptoms appear and doctors figure out what's going on, it's likely too late to stop it. Granted it's not easy to just go up and inject stuff into people, but in principle you could create the circumstances where you could pull it off.
But I think the lack of engineered viruses in the real world relative to our sci-fi has to do with the nature of biology being more like chess than engineering. Drug development often consists of a very isolated problem, like a bacteria cell that is causing an infection and a molecule that will rupture its membrane if it gets close enough to it. That part often does yield well to simple computation but the rest does not. There are some general ideas about compounds that can survive the stomach and get into the bloodstream to then release their 'cargo'. You piggyback on stuff that worked in other cases but even then you get to a point where you are basically trying out a hundreds of variations to get the one that seems to execute this plan well. It's simply not possible to compute your entire path there. You will be 'just trying things' in a controlled manner. There is, of course, also the complete accident that just happens to work often for reasons it will take decades to even figure....the person who eats a moldy piece of bread and clears something up.
A nice thing about drugs, however, is that they are stable. While you can't predict ahead of time what happens to them in the body and what they will do (if anything), what they are is constant. Their reproduction doesn't happen in the body but in the manufacturing process where six sigma keeps them essentially identical from one batch to the next.
There have been some attempts to do stuff with viruses. Gene therapy either 'edits' DNA when you're an egg or fetus or it tries to fix a full grown person by giving them a modified cold virus that will introduce a missing gene. There progress is pretty slow. At best the virus only modifies some of your cells. If that's enough to relieve the genetic disease by allowing you to make some of the protein you normally would, great. More often the body shuts out the attempt pretty hard and since a person died in one of the trials progress has been slowed down even more. A critical problem here is that viruses are a bit like children, once grown they do their own thing and will have every reason to ditch any 'code' you give them that they don't see as useful.
Where we go here is there doesn't seem to be much barrier at all to going out in nature and collecting viruses. In terms of usefulness this is like collecting books from the library of Babel. Almost all of them would do nothing to a human, some would kill you far to fast and others would briefly infect you and you may not even notice them.
We probably should have kept the sampling program. We don't really know what wild virus populations do and it would be very useful to know if, say, the bat virus population 20 years ago looks more or less exactly like the population today or are viruses wildly changing in the wild. If it's the former, we could probably narrow down the families of viruses that could possibly harm us and either move towards universal vaccines for them or at least know what to look for in our own monitoring.
You make a good point about the dog that hasn’t barked. But most experts in the relevant areas believe that you could, for instance, reconstitute the 1918 flu virus based on it’s DNA sequence. And they’ve definitely done it with lesser viruses. The AI overlords I’ve queried indicate that the only difficult part is getting the necessary segments synthesized, since there are some protections against creating dangerous DNA, but everyone seems to agree that these protections are very porous.
Which is to say I strongly disagree with your second point, that we should gather natural viruses. To extend your analogy, this is like collecting a bunch of mate in three puzzles and publishing them. You’re already looking at a virus that has a lot going for it in other words.