May 14, 2000 UK:
US Planned One Big Nuclear Blast For Mankind
By Antony Barnett
The US Air Force developed a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the Moon as a display of military might at the height of the Cold War.
In an exclusive interview with The Observer, Dr Leonard Reiffel, 73, the physicist who fronted the project in the late Fifties at the US military-backed Armour Research Foundation, revealed America's extraordinary lunar plan.
'It was clear the main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on Earth,' he said yesterday. 'The US was lagging behind in the space race.'
'The explosion would obviously be best on the dark side of the Moon and the theory was that if the bomb exploded on the edge of the Moon, the mushroom cloud would be illuminated by the sun.' The bomb would have been at least as large as the one used on Hiroshima at the end of World War II.
'I made it clear at the time there would be a huge cost to science of destroying a pristine lunar environment, but the US Air Force were mainly concerned about how the nuclear explosion would play on earth,' said Reiffel.
Although he believes the blast would have had little environmental impact on Earth, its crater may have ruined the face of the 'man in the Moon'.
Reiffel would not reveal how the explosion would have taken place. But he confirmed it was 'certainly technically feasible' and that at the time an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile would have been capable of hitting a target on the Moon with an accuracy of within two miles.
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Synthetic Biology: Creating New Life Forms by Rearranging DNA
by Bill Sardi
In the Brave New World of uncharted biology, does everything go? Where will biologists stop in their directionless frenzy to acquire basic scientific knowledge?
The latest fad among biologists is called synthetic biology. The small group that calls themselves synthetic biologists are already squirming at the thought of regulation, fearing limits will hinder their efforts to reach as yet undefined goals. The whole idea of synthetic biology is to improve upon nature, but there is a lot of gibberish coming from the mouths of these biologists that makes the most avid science buff begin to question what is going on.
Synthetic biologists claim they intend to create bioengineered organisms that can "produce pharmaceuticals, detect toxic chemicals, break down pollutants, repair defective genes, destroy cancer cells." [The New Atlantis, Spring, 2006] These are laudable objectives. But there is a dark side to the direction they are taking.
It’s not that humans don’t already modify nature and transform biological systems. The cross-breeding of watermelons to produce seedless varieties, or grafting varieties of flowers to create, for example, new colors of roses, has already been accomplished without hesitance or harm. Gregor Mendel’s work (1823–84 AD), which began by crossing varieties of pea sprouts, continues today. But it has gone beyond that.
Beyond GMO
Synthetic biologists extend their work even beyond the concerns of genetically modified (GMO) foods. They want to design new strands of DNA into sequences that result in totally man-made viruses, no part being derived from DNA sequences found in nature.
Keep in mind, even with regulations in place, GMO "Franken" foods have crept into the food chain.
continued at link above
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Defense Tech: Chem-Bio Archives
BIOLABS METASTASIZE
BIOLABS METASTASIZE
Been sleeping well lately? This Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists article by Defense Tech pal Nick Schwellenbach should take care of that.
It's on a subject we worry about a whole lot here at Defense Tech HQ -- the ginormous growth in biodefense research, and how the hell to maintain safety amidst that growth. For example, 97 percent of the folks receivng National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) grants for biodefense research hadn't touched the bugs before 9/11, Nick notes.
No wonder three Boston University lab workers were infected with tularemia, or rabbit fever, back in January. "Things like that happen when people are not trained well," explained NIAID Director Anthony Fauci.
And those infections went down at a relatively low-risk, "BSL-2" lab. What happens when the school's BSL-4 facility -- designed to handle killers like Ebola -- gets up and running?
Take an ambien, for starters.
SPRAY ME, PAY ME
Most of us laughed pretty damn hard when we learned that the Air Force was thinking about spritzing enemies of freedom with aphrodisiacs, to temporarily turn them gay. But, apparently, some researchers at the University of Zurich found the idea downright inspirational.
The brains haven't found the so-called "gay sex bomb," yet. But they have come up with a hormone spray that makes folks almost comically naive, according to the Washington Post.
Researchers had some volunteers inhale oxytocin [also known as the "hormone of love" or "cuddle chemical" -- ed.] and then examined how they and those who inhaled a placebo invested money in a mock transaction.
The transaction involved taking a risk: handing over money to a "banker" who had the option of returning the investment with a profit or withholding principal and profit, leaving the investor with nothing. The experiment was a measure of the trust that the investors had in the bankers.
Volunteers who inhaled oxytocin were more likely to trust the banker with money and risk larger sums, the researchers said in an article published yesterday in the journal Nature.
The scientists said they made sure the chemical was not merely enhancing risk-taking behavior by substituting bankers with computers. Without the interaction with a human, the hormone had no effect.
Antonio Damasio, a University of Iowa neurologist, tells Nature that the spray might be a bit superfluous. "Modern advertising already uses tricks to get us to trust a brand that probably make us boost our own oxytocin levels. 'It lures you in with images of wonderful landscapes or sex, and it probably works in exactly the same way,'" he says. (big ups: Ed)
DEADLY FLU SHIPS; BIOSAFETY M.I.A.
This is a nightmare. But it's not a surprise.
A dangerous strain of the flu virus that caused a worldwide pandemic in 1957 was sent to thousands of laboratories in the United States and around the world, triggering a frantic effort to destroy the samples to prevent an outbreak, health officials revealed yesterday.
With the government tossing out biodefense research grants like Louisville Sluggers on Bat Day, universities and private companies by the dozen have been building labs to handle the nastiest bacteria and viruses around. As a result, "hundreds of inexperienced researchers [are being drawn] into work with hazardous organisms," the Times observed a few months back.
But the federal government is largely leaving oversight of these labs up to the colleges and companies themselves, the bio-watchers at the Sunshine Project note. Each institution is supposed to be policed by a home-grown "biosafety committee." But, as of last summer, at least, "some three dozen laboratories" receiving federal biodefense dollars hadn't even set their committees up.
When these committees are active, they often work in secret. So no one from the outside the lab has a good idea what's going on inside. There's little, if any, independent safety advice. And that makes it easier for potentially-deadly mistakes -- like distributing an ultra-dangerous flu strain to thousands of sites scattered around the globe.
"As if recent tularemia incidents, SARS escapes, and the myriad of other accidents in recent years were not enough," writes the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond. "When will researchers and regulators come to grips with the inevitability of human error and equipment failures and restrict research and require transparency (as a restraining measure) - by law - as is so obviously required?"
THERE'S MORE: POGO has put together a creepy timeline of biosafety mishaps over the last three years.
SCIENTISTS BLAST BIOTERROR BOONDOGGLE
Researchers have been quietly complaining for years about the gigantic piles of cash being burned on bioterror defense -- while threats like tuberculosis, which kill millions every year, are given short shrift.
Finally, these microbiologists are starting to get organized, and speak out in public. From the Times:
More than 700 scientists sent a petition on Monday to the director of the National Institutes of Health protesting what they said was the shift of tens of millions of dollars in federal research money since 2001 away from pathogens that cause major public health problems to obscure germs the government fears might be used in a bioterrorist attack.
The scientists, including two Nobel Prize winners and a biologist who is to receive the National Medal of Science from President Bush in March, say grants for research on the bacteria that cause anthrax and five other diseases that are rare or nonexistent in the United States have increased fifteenfold since 2001. Over the same period, grants to study bacteria not associated with bioterrorism, including those causing diseases like tuberculosis and syphilis, have decreased 27 percent, the petition said...
signers of the petition insisted that the government was making poor trade-offs. "These projects obviously take money away from basic research in the United States," said Sidney Altman, a molecular biologist at Yale who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1989. He said that while a risk of bioterrorist attack existed, he considered it "a very minor factor" among all the threats faced by the nation. "There's no question that microbiology has suffered" by the focus on obscure organisms, Dr. Altman said.
THERE'S MORE: Nick directs our attention to this handy (and depressing) chart, showing just how out-of-whack the biodefense spending numbers are.
AND MORE: "The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has repeatedly claimed that the biodefense boom has not adversely impacted funding for public health research," the Sunshine Project's Edward Hammond notes in a release. "But NIH data does not support [that] position. In fact, analysis of competitive grant data shows double digit declines in funding for high priority public health diseases since the end of 2001."
