Biowarfare Research: Lifting the Lid on America

[nashvillebrook]

That's part of what's interesting (and maybe provable) from a research standpoint -- that different "clients" would seek bio-weapons to target certain populations. With Lyme and fatiguing diseases, the speculation is that release of the bugs (literally ticks) was unintentional. But I can easily imagine that in a research environment, any specific targeting mechanisms (ethnic/gender/etc) would be very key to figuring out how the bugs behave and what value they'd be. And further, what defensive measures can be taken to mitigate an outbreak:

http://news.discovery.com/human/health/experimental-ebola-serum-likely-treating-sick-americans-140802.htm

Experimental Ebola Serum Likely Treating Sick Americans

An American doctor working in West Africa and another health care worker, also American, who contracted Ebola there have both received experimental treatments for the deadly viral disease, according to news reports.

Nancy Writebol, a worker with the charity Samaritan's Purse, received an experimental serum, and Dr. Kent Brantly, from the same charity, received a blood transfusion from a patient who recovered from Ebola, according to NBC News. One or both of the health care workers are also being flown to an isolation unit in an American hospital for treatment, according to news reports.

Though there are conflicting reports, and no one is saying exactly what the experimental serum is, its likely that both of the reported methods contained antibodies to the Ebola virus, said Dr. William Schaffner, a professor of preventive medicine and infectious diseases at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tenn. Delivering antibodies to a patient could slow the virus's replication, and give the immune system time to recover.

Diseases That Just Won't Quit

"There is a long tradition of using immune serum as treatment," Schaffner told Live Science. "You give the person antibodies, and you would hope that those antibodies would then bind the viruses and interfere with their multiplication."

No current treatments

This Ebola outbreak is the largest in history and has so far claimed 729 lives in Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia. Doctors without Borders has said that the crisis is "out of control." Sierra Leone has declared a national emergency, closed all of its schools and is quarantining disease hot spots. [2014 Ebola Outbreak (Infographic)]

There are no treatments or vaccines available for Ebola, though several are in the pipeline. A study in Nature this year reported that one drug improved survival in monkeys who were exposed to a closely related virus, called Marburg virus. Public Health Canada is testing another antibody-based treatment and the company Tekmira Pharmaceuticals has developed an experimental drug that uses a process called RNA interference to block the virus' replication, Forbes reported.

[American Dream]

The U.S. Establishment admits that Biodefense is a big concern and is funded to the tune of billions of dollars but the only supposed culprits are marginal "rogue states" and non-state actors, not Uncle Sam or other such powers. This, of course, is bullshit.

It is this rather obvious secret which makes all the difference in decoding the news...

[nashvillebrook]

Hey have you been checked for Ehrichiosis, now called human anaplasmosis?

My dad in Minnesota had it and it almost took him out. Tick-borne, similar to Lymes but you have to have a specific test for it. It's pretty bad!

I just saw this, sorry for not responding. No, haven't been tested for the non-Lyme tick borne diseases. Ehrichiosis and Bartonella both behave like what ails me. Also, when i take quinine-based antibiotics I get crazy better. So, that argues for infection.

So far they're putting all my symptoms and negative tests into the column that supports "chronic fatigue syndrome" which is a damn near useless dx in the US. I actually pulled this thread up again b/c I had a few days this week where I couldn't move, and started reading Osler's Web which reminded me that "chronic fatigue" behaves as if it's caused by a virus (shows up in clusters then disappears).

[Plutonia]

You may want to try a berberine/Oregon Grape tincture, Nash. I can attest to it's efficacy re infections and parasites. It's a great natural medicine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berberine

If you live in an area where Oregon Grape grows wild, it is really easy and inexpensive to make yourself.

[DrEvil]

The U.S. Establishment admits that Biodefense is a big concern and is funded to the tune of billions of dollars but the only supposed culprits are marginal "rogue states" and non-state actors, not Uncle Sam or other such powers. This, of course, is bullshit.

It is this rather obvious secret which makes all the difference in decoding the news...

Pretty soon you can design your very own plague on the couch:

http://recode.net/2014/05/05/autodesk-b ... fe-itself/
(Tons of links at source)

Autodesk Builds Its Own Virus, as the Software Giant Develops Design Tools for Life Itself

Autodesk, which develops design software for building very big things, just built a very small thing.

Its own virus.

The San Rafael, Calif., company has revealed to Re/code that last month it produced a synthetic Phi-X174 bacteriophage, a virus that infects the E. coli bacteria but is totally benign for humans. They conducted the experiment in a controlled lab setting with the help of Dr. Paul Jaschke of Stanford University.

The effort was a sort of scientific homage to the work of the J. Craig Venter Institute, which first produced the self-replicating synthetic virus back in 2003, following a more than five-year research effort. In Autodesk’s case, it took a little more than two weeks and about $1,000.

That achievement says a lot about how far the science of synthetic biology has come — and a lot about where Autodesk is going.

“These viruses started their existence as a file on my laptop and a [purchase order] number with a DNA synthesis vendor!” said Andrew Hessel, a distinguished researcher with Autodesk’s new Bio/Nano Programmable Matter group, in an email.

“It’s a 3-D printed virus,” he added. “With further development of the process, the designs, the design software — we can help scientists make useful applications, like personalized cancer treatments or new vaccines.”

Autodesk, which is still best known for producing AutoCAD software for architects and engineers, wants to stake a claim in the center of a promising new world.

The company is collaborating with leading scientists on a research effort known as “Project Cyborg.” They’re attempting to build a software platform that could enable greater design complexity as researchers work to engineer self-assembling DNA, proteins, viruses, cells, tissues and more.

The company first revealed its ambitions at TED in 2013 and has been refining its approach since. Hessel told Re/code the company is gearing up for the next phase of product development, putting the tools into the hands of a broader group of researchers.

“There’s never been a comprehensive set of tools in this space,” Hessel said in an interview. “So we’re looking at whether we can build accessible software based on what we’ve learned in order to facilitate laboratory work, bioengineering and nano design.”

In the Ted Talk below, MIT’s Skylar Tibbits discusses how using Project Cyborg assists the design process for what he calls 4-D printing, where the fourth dimension is time — as physical products self assemble after they’re produced:
** Video at link**

A key goal of Project Nano is to connect existing software tools in the field, so that they can talk to each other as well as with Autodesk applications like Maya, an animation tool used in Hollywood blockbusters.

Various research labs have attacked parts of this problem. The Baker Laboratory at the University of Washington created Rosetta, widely used software for designing proteins, as Re/code wrote about last month.

Shawn Douglas, an assistant professor at UC San Francisco, developed Cadnano for DNA design and collaborated with Project Cyborg to improve the 3-D functionality of the open source tool.

Meanwhile, private DNA synthesis shop Gen9 is working on its own software specifically to support “visualization and design for manufacturability,” Chief Executive Kevin Munnelly said.

At this stage, it’s unclear which parties will end up as partners, rivals or something else in the emerging space, he added.

“It’s still a very early industry, so [it could be] cooperation or cooper-etition, data sharing or API linking, all of those things can happen,” he said.

Of course, putting these tools into more people’s hands carries risks as well. While scientists see great potential to create novel medicines, vaccines and nanomaterials, bad actors could attempt to use them to create bio-weapons.

Hessel himself has pointed this out, notably by co-writing a memorable piece for the Atlantic titled “Hacking the President’s DNA.”

DNA synthesis companies like Gen9 have already put some safeguards in place, including automatic pre-screening of DNA orders for whole or partial sequences that carry telltale signs of pathogens.

Autodesk didn’t have any explicit commercial purpose in creating the viruses, which the company has already destroyed. It mainly wanted to walk through the process, including ordering precisely specified DNA strands from synthesis shops, to gain a better sense of where the market stands.

“I thought opening up this channel and understanding it was very important,” Hessel said. “The take-home message for me is that genome synthesis today has significantly improved over the years and now is capable of routinely producing about 5,000 base pairs without much trouble.”

The Phi-X174 virus genome consists of 5,386 base pairs of nucleotides, the basic structural unit of DNA. By way of comparison, the human genome stretches out to 3 billion.

Commercializing anything out of Project Cyborg could still be years away. So it remains to be seen whether Autodesk is timing the market right — or will ultimately emerge as a leader in the space.

But it’s increasingly clear there’s a giant opportunity in the nano world.

“They see synthetic biology and bionanotechnology as a future industry,” Douglas said. “The way you get a foothold and become relevant is by experimenting; try out different things and that knowledge accumulates over time.”

To learn more about synthetic biology, check out the primer in the video below — or the many additional resources on Andrew Hessel’s site.

[Iamwhomiam]

This a very long article filled with embedded links and a fairly accurate history.

Over and over again, the military has conducted dangerous biowarfare experiments on Americans
Kevin Loria

Sep 25, 2016, 4:00 PM

https://www.businessinsider.com/military-government-secret-experiments-biological-chemical-weapons-2016-9

[Wombaticus Rex]

Just got hipped to this one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corrupted_Blood_incident

The Corrupted Blood incident was a virtual pandemic in the MMORPG World of Warcraft, which began on September 13, 2005, and lasted for one week.

The conditions and reactions of the event attracted the attention of epidemiologists for its implications of how human populations could react to a real-world epidemic.

In March 2007, Ran D. Balicer, an epidemiologist physician at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Beersheba, Israel, published an article in the journal Epidemiology that described the similarities between this outbreak and the recent SARS and avian influenza outbreaks. Dr. Balicer suggested that role-playing games could serve as an advanced platform for modeling the dissemination of infectious diseases. In a follow-up article in the journal Science, the game Second Life was suggested as another possible platform for these studies. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention contacted Blizzard Entertainment and requested statistics on this event for research on epidemics, but was told that it was a glitch.

The Corrupted Blood incident was described as a fascinating yet accidental case study of modeling disease origins and control at the Games for Health conference in Baltimore, Maryland by Gamasutra. They compared it to a real-life epidemic, in that it originated in a remote, uninhabited region and was carried by travelers to larger regions; hosts were both human and animal, comparing it to the avian flu; was passed through close contact; and there were people, in this case non-playable characters, who could contract it but were asymptomatic. However, there were elements that differed from a real-world epidemic, including an indicator for carriers that they have the disease and how much risk they are at, which cannot be done in the real world. One aspect of the epidemic that was not considered by epidemiologists in their models was curiosity, describing how players would rush into infected areas to witness the infection and then rush out. This was paralleled to real-world behavior, specifically with how journalists would cover an incident, and then leave the area.

In August 2007, Nina Fefferman—a Tufts University assistant research professor of public health and family medicine—called for research on this incident, citing the resemblances with biological plagues. Some scientists want to study how people would react to environmental pathogens, by using the virtual counterpart as a point of reference. Subsequently, she co-authored a paper in Lancet Infectious Disease discussing the epidemiological and disease modeling implications of the outbreak, along with Eric Lofgren, a University of North Carolina graduate student. She spoke at the 2008 Games for Health conference in Baltimore, Maryland and the 2011 Game Developers Conference about the incident and how massively multiplayer online populations could solve the problems inherent with more traditional models of epidemics.

Fefferman added that the three base models have their strengths and weaknesses, but make significant behavioral assumptions. She also compared Corrupted Blood to a drug trial with mice—"a real good first step." She stated, "These are my mice [and] I want this to be my new experiment setup." She expressed an interest in designing new diseases, perhaps non-fatal ones, to be introduced to the game so she could study how risk is viewed, how rumors would spread, and how public health notices are handled. She added that Blizzard made such notices in the original outbreak, but kept changing its position as it could not effectively deal with the problem. She commented that she did not believe it would ruin gameplay, as World of Warcraft dealt with health challenges in combat, and that games set in medieval times had such health risk. She argued that if researchers and developers worked together, it could be fun. While Blizzard was initially excited about the proposition, it became less outwardly excited over time, though never rejected it. She has been in contact with other developers, hoping to conduct the simulation in games similar to World of Warcraft.

Dr. Gary Smith, professor of Population Biology and Epidemiology at the University of Pennsylvania, commented that very few mathematical models of disease transmission take host behavior into account, but also questioned how representative of real life a virtual model could be. He stated that while the characteristics of the disease could be defined beforehand, the study is just as observational as one conducted on a real-life disease outbreak. However, he added that one could argue that the proposal could give an opportunity for a study that epidemiologists may never have. Neil Ferguson, director of the MRC Centre for Outbreak Analysis and Modelling at Imperial College, London, felt skeptical of the idea, commenting that such a study could not properly mimic genuine behavior. Using the zombie plague used to promote World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King before its release as an example, players would intentionally become infected to gain zombie powers. He added that characters could also regenerate, meaning there was low risk in becoming infected. He felt that while online games such as World of Warcraft could be set up to help scientists study epidemics, it will always be limited as their primary use is for entertainment.

Model for terrorism research

In an analysis of the Corrupted Blood incident, Charles Blair, deputy director of the Center of Terrorism and Intelligence Studies, said that World of Warcraft could provide a powerful new way to study how terrorist cells form and operate. While his organization already uses computer models to study terrorists' tactics, Blair explained that because World of Warcraft involves real people making real decisions in a world with controllable bounds, it could provide a more realistic models for military intelligence analysts.

Yale University terrorism expert Stuart Gottlieb admitted that while the outbreak was interesting and relevant to the times, he would not base a counter-terrorism strategy on a video game. Gottlieb expressed skepticism that analyzing the incident could shed light on the complex underlying causes of terrorism in the real world, as the stakes for both terrorists and civilians are lowered in a virtual setting. However, as commented by the editor of the article, "the biggest weakness for using a game as an analytical tool is that death in World of Warcraft is a nuisance at most".

Blizzard has maintained a position that World of Warcraft is first and foremost a game, and that it was never designed to mirror reality or anything in the real world.

[Grizzly]

^^^ Reminds me of Steve Jackson Games (SJGames) Inc. v. United States Secret Service for some reason. Anyone hip to that?

816 F. Supp. 432 (W.D.Tex. 1993), was a lawsuit arising from a 1990 raid by the United States Secret Service on the headquarters of Steve Jackson Games (SJG) in Austin, Texas. The raid, along with the Secret Service's unrelated Operation Sundevil, was influential in the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.[1]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jac ... et_Service

The Secret Service executed the warrant on SJG on 1 March 1990.[4] Three SJG computers were seized, along with over 300 floppy disks.[4] Among these was the master copy of GURPS Cyberpunk, a role-playing game written by Blankenship which SJG was about to release.[5] The "Illuminati" server included private personal emails to and from SJG employees.

[Iamwhomiam]

Interesting, Rex. A novel aspect of Game theory when combined with Sun Tsu's art. Thanks Grizzly. I hadn't remembered the raid prompting the formation of the EFF.