Russell McMahon wrote:
> My point was - in such a highly regulated, your-mission critical,
> hopefully-careful and worldwide life and death affecting industry a
> new virus 'just happened', totally took over from what it was thought
> to be, and went unnoticed for a decade or two.

Nature reshuffles the cards a little every time a chromosone is replicated.
These little reshufflings are individually miniscule, but over time and
great numbers and tossing out the broken results is what made us distinct
from orangutangs, mosquitos, and potatoes.  It should be no surprise at all
that a mutation occurred in a virus just because we were helping it
reproduce.  Far greater mutations happen more often in the wild.

> In that time it *could*
> have been wreaking havoc somewhat akin to HIV worldwide unnoticed and
> with a carefully organised international delivery system to many
> people worldwide.

No, it couldn't.  Large effects would have been noticed, and of course much
much less likely to have occurred in the first place.  It is also much much
less likely that a mutation causing a major change would have allowed the
virus to survive and continue to reproduce.

> As it happened, while not without it's faults,  it
> works about as expected.

Precisely because the mutation was minor.

> BUT it flew through the N 9's of safety that
> such an industry is assumed to have, completely unnoticed.

Minor mutations occur all the time and are nothing new in laboratory bread
organisms either.  That is one reason there are so many "strains" of various
organisms, including human pathogens.

> By comparison we are scatter-gunning GM products across the fields of
> earth which is *certain* to ultimately produce utter catastrophe.

This kind of emotional and unfounded assertion only serves to undermine the
credibility of real science.

You have no way of knowing the risk of an "utter catastrophe", however that
is defined.  Certainly there is a risk in humans deliberately altering the
genetics of certain organisms.  There are also benfits.  The benefits are
real and much easier to measure.  I think the risks are largely overstated.
Nature already performs random genetic alterations on all organisms all the
time.  While these are random, their sheer numbers guarantees that many many
genetic experiments we haven't even dreamed of are being tried all the time.
The vast vast majority are either too minor to care about or to major to
survive and we therefore never hear about them.  Every once in a few zillion
rolls of the dice we get a new flu virus, AIDS, SARS, Brazillian Buporic
Fever, or whatever.  There are checks and ballances in nature that pretty
much guarantee a pathogen can't be both highly virulent and easily spread at
the same time.  Every once in a while one gets its genes reshuffled and is a
little better tradeoff than before.  A few million people die, but some
always survive too.  Think of the nasty diseases of the past before there
were antibiotics and vaccines.  We took a beating but are still here, all of
us descendents of the survivors.  It's hard to imagine anything we create
accidentally in the lab having anywhere near as big an impact as the things
nature is cooking up all the time and has and will again throw at us.

In the mean time we do know and can measure how many people die of
starvation every year.  It's a cost/benefit tradeoff, and you can't ignore
the benefit side to get a good picture.  In the end human overpopulation of
the planet seems like a bigger threat to me, and is partly to blame for the
starvation toll.  If you really want your kids to inherit a better world,
have fewer of them.


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