DARPA developing “genetic doomsday” weapon to exterminate populations on demand

Why?
Because ze Nazi's won't stop until they complete their Uber Ubersoldat,just like the original Nazi's in WWII wanted to achieve.

I guarantee this will be exploited to make super genetically engineered soldiers among the many other miss uses.

originally posted by: neo96
The ramifications of this tech is insane.

White supremacists could target blacks.

Black supremacists could target whites.

Muslim supremacists could target jews.

And the list goes on.

It's insanity that this is even being explored.

Normal people could target all the Supremacists and things would be ...........normal.

This type of technology will be traded and sold among nations and ideologies like any other weapon system...now even small or rogue nations can be players on the global stage. Nukes are old tech

The phrase, not with a bang, but a whimper comes to mind....

a reply to: 0racle

So your solution is to bury our heads in the sand and hope for the best?

If it's any consolation here....(Seriously guys read the sources, Natural News is about as FAKE NEWS as it gets!)

Guardian
CBD
Gizmodo
Wired

“Darpa is not and should not be the only funder of gene-editing research but it is critical for the Department of Defense to defend its personnel and preserve military readiness,” he said. Darpa believes that a steep fall in the costs of gene-editing toolkits has created a greater opportunity for hostile or rogue actors to experiment with the technology. “This convergence of low cost and high availability means that applications for gene editing – both positive and negative – could arise from people or states operating outside of the traditional scientific community and international norms,” the official said. “It is incumbent on Darpa to perform this research and develop technologies that can protect against accidental and intentional misuse.”

The UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is debating whether to impose a moratorium on the gene research next year and several southern countries fear a possible military application. UN diplomats confirmed that the new email release would worsen the “bad name” of gene drives in some circles. “Many countries [will] have concerns when this technology comes from Darpa, a US military science agency,” one said.

"The primary risk posed by gene drive technology is social," he says. "Unethical closed-door research, unwarranted fears, or unauthorized releases of gene drives will damage public trust in science and governance." He still thinks gene drives have potential to save threatened species and battle public health threats. But researchers will have to invent safer forms of the technology first. That's where the Darpa money comes in. Until very recently, gene drives have been largely theoretical—safe ones even more so. But with the new funds, scientists like Esvelt and Akbari are starting to put together the pieces to test them in real life. That starts with bugs that have a gene editor baked into their DNA from the moment of conception

Teams at the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical school are screening and compiling a suite of chemical off-switches to block gene editors like Crispr/Cas9 and Talens. At UC Berkeley, Jennifer Doudna’s group is hoping to find anti-Crispr proteins to inhibit unwanted gene-editing activity, which would help design resistance-proof gene drives. While the military’s involvement has some in the public concerned about weaponized, Crispr-ized superskeeters, Esvelt sees defense department support as the only way to advance gene drive technologies safely, at least for the time being. The Darpa program explicitly prevents the release of gene-drive organisms and requires participants to work under stringent biosafety conditions—hence Akbari’s six-door entrance and exit routine. Perhaps one day he’ll have the molecular tools to come and go without concern. But for now, they’re still the safest thing between his gene-drives and the world outside.

If none of that makes you feel better then quick, grab your torches and pitchforks!

12 monkeys?

a reply to: Metallicus

One would hope that TPTB would think long and hard about releasing any of these gene-specific weapons. Surely, these days there are populations that seem not worthy of living any longer. Arguments can be made, strong arguments. But let us look at the big, long picture. Suppose we had such weapons at the end of 1945 and used it against the Japanese....killed them all within a generation. From the vision of today, would that have been the thing to do? Would not such weapon be exactly a double standard to what humanity seems to want for itself? Redemption is not allowed but elimination is the way?

We get tasked with the moral decision of making impossible choices: "Well, the bad guys are doing it--as the Nazi effort spurred us to create the atomic bomb in short order--so we must do the same if for nothing more than to be ready to act if we must."

What is clearly needed is a world government that has absolute power to stop such madness when it is detected. Yeah. I know. I'be been preaching for years now that the US will be the most headstrong of the modern world to resist a world government. What we will see and are seeing is the world going ahead along this course without us.

I remember thinking of this kind of thing about 25 years ago, and I eventually came to the conclusions:

1) Biological weapons like this are very ineffective. It's hard to control, and not everybody you target is just going to drop dead because we have medicine and stuff.

2) Whoever sets this off better be very damned sure of their own DNA background. If an Arab wanted to kill all the Jews, for instance (not unheard of), they better make sure that somewhere in the depths of time they don't have a Jewish grandpa hidden away. Everybody in that region is probably related to everybody else by this time. Same with anybody and their ethnicity. These days a lot of people getting their DNA tested are being surprised by what (and who) their ancestors were doing.

a reply to: Metallicus

Horrific but they are not the only one's doing it, there are some that fear the world will be overpopulated and are NOT searching for the correct solution which is to provide more food, job's and living space while preserving and indeed enhancing natural environment's as much as possible, instead they are seeking way's to cull the human population because the initial cost is cheaper, it is easier since they lack imagination and indeed any true intelligence and it offers them other option's such as area depopulation, you want those resources in Africa, China or the middle east but there is that whole problem of a resident population in the way of your action's so why not engineer a plague to kill those people.

When you look at these people making these thing's they are monsters, it is not to prevent the same thing happening to them because they already have the nuclear deterrent - but of course nuke's pollute the world and this will just kill people so it is also a weapon of first strike not a defensive research.

In an ideal world these scientists should be held to account and even executed for there action's but sadly a simple truth is that if one country is doing it then we can damn well be certain that many other's are, indeed Israel did research into this well over a decade ago.

a reply to: Metallicus

Seems pretty self explanatory. They invest in it, probably already have it, and want it on hand in case they want to use it. It isn't as if DARPA is some humanitarian group. Horrible sure, but not entirely unexpected.

Every person has a unique combination of genes, which are a mix of each parents two strands of DNA. Some people are chimeras where they have both parental genes active. Groups of individuals are related by haplotypes, but it's impossible to find one gene that is exclusive to geographic borders. Plus there has been so much migration that finding a match would be impossible and likely to target individuals in the attacking country.

originally posted by: Metallicus

originally posted by: MagesticEsoteric
Wtf??

They are admitting they want to be able to destroy human populations genetically?

Huh?

Why would you develop it if you didn't contemplate using it at some point?

Even scarier, any weapon we've devolved... Our enemies have backwards engineered or figured it out after.

originally posted by: RalagaNarHallas
we still use naturalnews as a source?

www.forbes.com...

ghr.nlm.nih.gov...

What are genome editing and CRISPR-Cas9? Genome editing (also called gene editing) is a group of technologies that give scientists the ability to change an organism's DNA. These technologies allow genetic material to be added, removed, or altered at particular locations in the genome. Several approaches to genome editing have been developed. A recent one is known as CRISPR-Cas9, which is short for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats and CRISPR-associated protein 9. The CRISPR-Cas9 system has generated a lot of excitement in the scientific community because it is faster, cheaper, more accurate, and more efficient than other existing genome editing methods. CRISPR-Cas9 was adapted from a naturally occurring genome editing system in bacteria. The bacteria capture snippets of DNA from invading viruses and use them to create DNA segments known as CRISPR arrays. The CRISPR arrays allow the bacteria to "remember" the viruses (or closely related ones). If the viruses attack again, the bacteria produce RNA segments from the CRISPR arrays to target the viruses' DNA. The bacteria then use Cas9 or a similar enzyme to cut the DNA apart, which disables the virus. The CRISPR-Cas9 system works similarly in the lab. Researchers create a small piece of RNA with a short"guide" sequence that attaches (binds) to a specific target sequence of DNA in a genome. The RNA also binds to the Cas9 enzyme. As in bacteria, the modified RNA is used to recognize the DNA sequence, and the Cas9 enzyme cuts the DNA at the targeted location. Although Cas9 is the enzyme that is used most often, other enzymes (for example Cpf1) can also be used. Once the DNA is cut, researchers use the cell's own DNA repair machinery to add or delete pieces of genetic material, or to make changes to the DNA by replacing an existing segment with a customized DNA sequence. Genome editing is of great interest in the prevention and treatment of human diseases. Currently, most research on genome editing is done to understand diseases using cells and animal models. Scientists are still working to determine whether this approach is safe and effective for use in people. It is being explored in research on a wide variety of diseases, including single-gene disorders such as cystic fibrosis, hemophilia, and sickle cell disease. It also holds promise for the treatment and prevention of more complex diseases, such as cancer, heart disease, mental illness, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infection. Ethical concerns arise when genome editing, using technologies such as CRISPR-Cas9, is used to alter human genomes. Most of the changes introduced with genome editing are limited to somatic cells, which are cells other than egg and sperm cells. These changes affect only certain tissues and are not passed from one generation to the next. However, changes made to genes in egg or sperm cells (germline cells) or in the genes of an embryo could be passed to future generations. Germline cell and embryo genome editing bring up a number of ethical challenges, including whether it would be permissible to use this technology to enhance normal human traits (such as height or intelligence). Based on concerns about ethics and safety, germline cell and embryo genome editing are currently illegal in many countries.

less end of the worldy take on the matter

This was just recently used on a person with a genetic mutation disease. Plenty of diseases or syndromes out there like VHL that this could erase.

a reply to: Blue Shift

Unless there is truth in a certain claim and there is indeed another race of human's whom are genetically quite different to us, not as creative but gifted with mathematics and far more intelligent.
Another race of man whom are genetically different enough that if they mate with a human there offspring will not be able to have kid's and will even likely not survive full gestation.
A race whom have ruled as priestly and royal class and now among the top bankers.
A race whom we no longer worship and whom are threatened by our own growing intelligence to the point that there may well be a secret war already occurring between us and them.
A race that want us dead if we are no longer going to be there slaves.

Chernobyl of Bioweapons

There are rumours the Soviets did similar tinkering with plague bacteria (Yersinia pestis); Francisella tularensis, the bacteria that causes tularemia; and Legionella bacteria, which causes Legionnaire’s disease. That's a problem, because there's evidence that the Soviet Union's bioweapons are still lurking in labs in Russia today.

In theory, facilities such as Compound 19 should have been shut down in 1975, after the international Biological Weapons Convention. But, as the Sverdlovsk accident shows, that wasn't the case. And there are rumours that the biowarfare research continued even after that.

"In fact, reports from Soviet defectors in the 1990s tell of a vast, highly funded program involving tens of thousands of researchers working on biological weapons to lob at America and other targets," writes Mole.

Bioweapons in the USSR

The Soviet Union had the most efficient, sophisticated, and powerful offensive BW program in the world. It developed a completely new class of weapons based on genetically modified agents. For example, during the 1980s, the Soviet Union developed antibiotic-resistant strains of plague, anthrax, tularemia, and glanders. We came closer and closer to developing so-called “absolute” biological weapons.

The 836 strain of anthrax, for example, was extremely virulent, stable in aerosol form, and persistent in the environment. The high virulence of this strain was based on several factors, including a thick protective capsule and an ability to produce large amounts of toxin. In 1985 I compared the 836 strain with strains of anthrax obtained from all over the world, and nothing was better.

What was Soviet military doctrine for the use of biological weapons?

Under Soviet military doctrine, biological weapons were divided into three main categories: strategic biological weapons, operational biological weapons, and strategic-operational biological weapons. Contagious agents such as smallpox and plague were intended for long-range, strategic attacks against the territories of the United States, Great Britain, and some other European countries, because nobody wanted to use these weapons close to our own troops. Smallpox and plague were developed for this purpose because of their high mortality rate, contagiousness, and ability to cause epidemics or even pandemics

History of Soviet Bioweapons

In an effort to enhance the weapons-related properties of BW agents, Soviet scientists spent years working to create a viral “chimera,” which is an organism that contains genetic material from two or more other organisms. Other scientists worked to eliminate the “epitopes” on the surface of existing BW agents in order to make them unrecognizable to regular diagnostic techniques. By using such a modified agent, “the Soviets would have made it considerably more difficult for the attacked population to identify the causative pathogen of the resulting disease outbreak and begin timely treatment.”

A project codenamed Hunter (Okhotnik) sought to develop hybrids of bacteria and viruses such that use of an antibiotic to kill the bacteria would trigger release of the virus. “Unlike other national BW programs, which without exception used only classical or traditional applied microbiology techniques to weaponize agents, the post-1972 Soviet program had a futuristic aspect. By employing genetic manipulation and other molecular biology techniques, its scientists were able to breach barriers separating species….” The Soviet BW program appears to have taken advantage of the declassification in the 1970s of a large number of documents from the United States BW program. Thus, the design of the Soviet Gshch-304 BW bomblet was found to closely resemble that of the declassified US E-130R2 bomblet.

In 2001, the US Government moved to reclassify many documents on the US BW program, but “nothing could be done about recalling reports that had been distributed relatively freely for more than 35 years.” The quality of US intelligence about the Soviet BW program left much to be desired. “Intelligence about Soviet BW-related activities is relatively thin for the pre-1972 period; meager and often of dubious value during 1970-1979; and a little less meager and of better quality during 1980-1990.” After 1990, little has been declassified. “There is an unknown number of still-classified reports concerning the Soviet BW program produced by the CIA and perhaps by other agencies that we do not have,” the authors write.

The state of declassification is such that “we have been able to collect far more information” about the history of Soviet BW activities from interviews with former Soviet scientists and others than from declassified official records. In what the authors term “a horrendous mistake by the United States,” the US government undertook a covert deception and disinformation program aimed at the Soviet Union in the late 1960s which implied falsely that the US had a clandestine biological weapons program.

This unfortunate campaign may have reinforced an existing Soviet belief that the US had never terminated its own offensive BW program, a belief that lent impetus, if not legitimacy, to the Soviet BW program. Today, the situation with respect to BW in the former Soviet Union is “ambiguous and unsatisfactory,” Leitenberg and Zilinskas write. “There remains the possibility that Russia maintains portions of an offensive BW program in violation of the BWC.” Alternatively, “since we do not actually know what is and has been taking place within the three [Ministry of Defense BW] facilities since 1992, perhaps the situation is better than might be feared.”

This is just a taste of how far the Soviets (Russia) got by the 90's....and the technology behind this is light years ahead of where they were at.....

The genie is out of the bottle kids....no amount of hand wringing or "Dont-do-it-ism" is gonna change that fact. Now would any of you care to guess who they have been sharing some of their 'secret recipes" with?

Here's a hint...he's "short and fat" and lives just across the border from Russia....

a reply to: Thorneblood

How this really ought to be viewed is that the Transhumanist Technocrats that run our entire national technogoical / industrial / educational / information apparatus are using "our" system, our tax dollars, to develop the technologies they very well may use to wipe out their looming Anti-Transhumanist opponents.

And believe you me that war is assured, in our lifetime.

But since you're scared to death China might achieve such tech with their fraction of a budget, just for the hell of it, AND then go and use the thing to wipe out non-Chinese, right, then therefore we should pay DARPA to initiate the entire front as the latest arms race thus ensuring the tech becomes reality on Earth when it may not have otherwise.

And that's just such a great idea because its not like there aren't already enough stockpiles etc of Earth Killer weapons out there that accidents etc could go wrong with at any moment. Oh, and especially because we can totally afford to fund more BS.

a reply to: Metallicus

The horror and insanity were ignited in an ancient promise.
The promise that we "Will be like God" is to this very day still
being pursued, thru science. The horrors of thier insane obsession
decend on us not them. Because they already think of themselves as Gods.
If that doesn't make sense of it all. Good luck finding something else.

Should DARPA be developing this tech?

This is the age of CRISPR and bioweapons detente. The detente process occurs through announcements like this. In other words, Russia, China, North Korea, India -- in other words, any country that might have similar plans -- watch out! We got your number, er, genomic profile of the populace. If you exterminate our populace, we'll exterminate yours, from safety of biocontained underground bunkers.

Or so goes my assessment of the thinking behind this announcement.

a reply to: IgnoranceIsntBlisss

But since you're scared to death China might achieve such tech with their fraction of a budget

Nope....

A laboratory in Wuhan is on the cusp of being cleared to work with the world’s most dangerous pathogens. The move is part of a plan to build between five and seven biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) labs across the Chinese mainland by 2025 , and has generated much excitement, as well as some concerns.

The Wuhan lab cost 300 million yuan (US$44 million)

44 Million times five is 220 million dollars, but hey Darpa is US so SCARY!

But worries surround the Chinese lab, too. The SARS virus has escaped from high-level containment facilities in Beijing multiple times, notes Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. Tim Trevan, founder of CHROME Biosafety and Biosecurity Consulting in Damascus, Maryland, says that an open culture is important to keeping BSL-4 labs safe, and he questions how easy this will be in China, where society emphasizes hierarchy. “Diversity of viewpoint, flat structures where everyone feels free to speak up and openness of information are important,” he says.

Nature - A SCIENCE JOURNAL

Maybe you guys should stick to shouting down Anti Trumpers instead of doing exactly what you claim they always do, exercising your own ignorance instead of using FACTS to deny it.

Oh well....MAGA! right? Trump will certainly save us...

Anyway, now for the more hopeful side of things without all the fear mongering nonsense...

Gizmodo

Last spring, a team at Sichuan University's West China Hospital used CRISPR for the first time on an adult with lung cancer. In the new trial, reported by The Wall Street Journal, altered genes were injected into a patient with a rare type of head and neck cancer, called nasopharyngeal carcinoma, at Nanjing University's Nanjing Drum Tower Hospital. The aim is to use CRISPR, which allows scientists to snip out pieces of DNA with greater ease than older gene-editing techniques, to suppress the activity of a gene preventing the patient's body from effectively fighting the disease. On Friday, the university announced that the first patient had received an infusion of altered cells, which are taken from their body and altered in a lab before being injected back in. In all, 20 patients with gastric cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma and lymphoma are expected to participate in the trial. Its first phase is expected to conclude next year. The other Chinese trial, in which scientists modified immune cells to attack lung cancer in 11 patients, expects to release results this year, according to the Journal.

The first US human CRISPR trial is slated to begin this winter at the University of Pennsylvania, after receiving a regulatory stamp of approval to proceed last year. In that trial, scientists plan to genetically alter patients' immune cells to attack three different kinds of cancer. Clearly, a race to cure cancer with CRISPR is underfoot.

And right now at least, China seems to be winning.

Progress in gene editing was slow because developing a way to target each particular sequence is costly and time consuming. All that changed in 2012 when CRISPR genome editing was developed, making it cheap and easy to target almost any sequence. The first clinical trial involving CRISPR began at the West China Hospital in Chengdu in October 2016. Doctors removed immune cells from the blood of a person with lung cancer, used CRISPR to disable a gene called PD-1 and then returned the cells to the body.

The HPV trial, meanwhile, will break new ground. Instead of editing cells outside the body, a gel containing DNA coding for the CRISPR machinery will be applied to the cervix. The CRISPR machinery should leave the DNA of normal cells untouched, but in cells infected by HPV, it should destroy the viral genes, preventing them from turning cancerous.

“Targeting HPVs seems a sensible approach if they can deliver the genome-editing components to sufficient numbers of cells,” says Robin Lovell-Badge of the Crick Institute in the UK.

“It is tricky to do these experiments in animals as they are not infectable by HPV,” says Bryan Cullen of Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina, whose group also hopes to use gene editing to get rid of HPV.

If these trials are successful, it could benefit millions of people. Vaccination against HPV is now possible, but there is no way to get rid of the virus in people who have it already. It can cause mouth, throat and anal cancers in both sexes, as well as being the main cause of cervical cancer.

While the HPV trial looks set to be the first to use CRISPR to edit cells inside the body, it may not be the first ever such use of genome editing. Three trials getting underway in the US will use another genome editing method known as zinc finger nucleases to add genes to liver cells to try to treat haemophilia B, and Hurler and Hunter syndromes.

Newscientist
NewScientist

better hope the dems never get majority again. I could see them killing off some entire ethnicities as much as they hate white folks

a reply to: Thorneblood

And how many bioweapons labs, how much funds have "we" been dumping into bioweapons?

Another place playing catch up is the end of the world, right?


Anyways, you dont even know who you're dealing with any more than you grasp the true enemy of humankind in this Century.

Welcome to the Unpossible Future... The AGI Manhattan Project

And that WAR, it's already being waged against us all economically, technological, psychologically, politically:

Economic World War: Technocratic Plutocrat Elites vs. The People


But oh noes!!! China building biodefense labs that means they're hell bent on wiping out humanity.

The irony at this juncture, I will admit, is that their elites will be there with "our" elites, together, when it all goes down. And as such those labs you cite very well may be for what you assert. Just like "ours" are. BUT not having anything to do with national defense.