Virulent Bird-Human Flu Hybrid Made in Lab

[Jan Klimkowski]

The PNAS findings suggest this may not be so. The researchers engineered all 254 possible variants of hybridization between a deadly bird flu strain found in Borneo, and a human flu virus from Tokyo. They identified three strains that, at least in mice, were both contagious and deadly.
A flu virus that kills mice won’t necessarily kill humans, but the results are suggestive. All three killer hybrid strains possessed a protein taken from the human strain. Called PB2, the protein appeared to help the virus survive in the mice’s upper respiratory tract. As of now, bird flu stays in the lower respiratory tract, where it’s less likely to be casually transmitted.

The scientific community would defend this as pure scientific research, and probably part of some sort of precautionary principle: better forewarned than caught by surprize.

However, that is because the scientific community operates under the fundamental principle that scientific research is ethically neutral or, if at all biased, then biased towards the good and life-saving.

In my judgement, that principle is a fiction.

Further, it is a convenient fiction, because it has enabled scientists to produce incredibly potent creations and yet escape any moral blame if their creations are used to harm humanity or the wider world.

The potential for the malign use of the 254 bird-human hybrid flu types created by the CDC far outweighs any potential benefit.

There's also this:

In May 1994 the CDC admitted to have sent several biological warfare agents to Iraq from 1984 through 1989, including Botulinum toxin, West Nile virus, Yersinia pestis and Dengue fever virus.[9]

9 "The eleventh plague: the politics of biological and chemical warfare" (p. 84-86) by Leonard A. Cole (1993)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centers_for...Prevention