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“We can say that they are alive, because they move, they eat bacteria on the culture plates, and they reproduce,” Philipp Schiffer, a co-author of the study and evolutionary biologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, tells the Washington Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson.
“To have a complex and multicellular organism that can shut down and go into this state of suspended animation—for all extents and purposes appear dead... that’s mind-boggling,” says Thomas Boothby, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming who didn’t contribute to the research, to the Wall Street Journal’s Dominique Mosbergen.
Scientists Are Creating New, Incurable Diseases in Labs. Is that reasonable?
By Olga Khazan
Nakhon Pathom/Reuters
MAY 20, 2014
Swine flu, or H1N1, had been dead for 20 years when it suddenly re-emerged in 1977 with a curious twist. The new strain was genetically similar to one from the 1950s, almost as though it had been sitting frozen in a lab since then. Indeed, it eventually became clear that the late-70s flu outbreak was likely the result of a lowly lab worker’s snafu.
Lab accidents like that are extremely rare. Still, two scientists are now arguing that it’s not worth continuing to create new, transmissible versions of deadly viruses in labs because the risk that the diseases will escape and infect the public is too great.
The H5N1 avian flu killed two dozen people in Hong Kong in 1997. It has only killed about 400 people worldwide since then, though, because it doesn’t pass easily from human to human.
In recent years, scientists have found a way to make H5N1 jump between ferrets, the best animal model for flu viruses in humans. They say they need to create a transmissible version in order to better understand the disease and to prepare potential vaccines.
www.theatlantic.com...
The US government on Tuesday lifted a ban on making lethal viruses, saying the research is necessary to “develop strategies and effective countermeasures against rapidly evolving pathogens that pose a threat to public health.” Dec 19, 2017
Scientists Revive 46,000-Year-Old Roundworms From Siberian Permafrost
originally posted by: TrueAmerican
“We can say that they are alive, because they move, they eat bacteria on the culture plates, and they reproduce,” Philipp Schiffer, a co-author of the study and evolutionary biologist at the University of Cologne in Germany, tells the Washington Post’s Carolyn Y. Johnson.
“To have a complex and multicellular organism that can shut down and go into this state of suspended animation—for all extents and purposes appear dead... that’s mind-boggling,” says Thomas Boothby, a molecular biologist at the University of Wyoming who didn’t contribute to the research, to the Wall Street Journal’s Dominique Mosbergen.
Much more at link:
www.smithsonianmag.com...
I might have believed 100 years... even 500 years. But 46,000 years?
Now that really is crazy! I sure as heck hope they were in a secured biolab protected against airborne pathogens. That's the part that is troubling to me- that ancient pathogens become awakened and alive with the melting of the permafrost... These things were literally alive getting stomped on by woolly mammoths... Now that's just fricken insane!