It was announced last week that U.S. scientists have just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 "Spanish" flu.
This is big. Very big.
When I first read this story my reaction was, "holy crap, what on Earth do they think they're doing? These scientists are playing with fire! Will they bring about what they think they are working to stop? A worldwide pandemic?"
But that first article raised no worries. All is under control. This is wonderful progress.
But Krauthammer notes that beyond the sheer amazing science quality of this development:
Which brings us to the second element of this story: Beyond the brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have brought back to life an agent of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes New Scientist magazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more quickly than any other flu virus ever tested .
Now that I have your attention, consider, with appropriate trepidation, the third element of this story: What to do with this knowledge? Not only has the virus been physically re-created, but its entire genome has also now been published for the whole world, good people and very bad, to see.
Now I'm back to thinking holy crap. This decade may suck more than I've possibly feared. It may suck really big. Very big, in fact.
