Re: Terrorism, about 50% Off-topic

>At 12:09 10/08/98 -0500, you wrote:
Snip a whole bunch about terrorism

>Can you imagine bio weapons in 200 years?  Gene weapons designed to
attack
>over a period of time and perhaps only certain genetic types.	Forget
your
>starships and ground trooops.	Just drop bio-agent into the water
supply of
>a colony and 10 years later they cease to exist.  Or are severely
weakened.

Yeah and just watch as your carefully bio-engineered vectors run amok in
the natural population replicating and mutating as they go.  Sure you
could
design in safeguards like shorter lifespans or 'self-destruct' on
signal,
however, given a population of organisms spontaneous genetic chnge will
occur, and that change will seems to occur faster in micro-organisms
that
go through many short generations.

OK so I guess what I'm saying is Biological weapons, albeit potentially
devastatingly powerful, are a double-edged sword unless VERY carefully
controlled.  IMO I would much rather use chemical agents than biological
ones, that is unless you want to render the place uninhabitable, then
the
killer bug is your best friend.

BTW I once got offered a job working with animal viruses, OK so not as
nasty but the level of containment required definately put me off,
goodness
only knows wht working with potential bio-weapons grade viruses are
like.
That's one installation I'd definately put out in space a loooong way
from
any inhabited planets !

Stuart.

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Stuart Murray

Department Of Molecular Genetics	     Tel: (718) 430 4289
Albert Einstein College Of Medicine	      Fax: (718) 430 8778
1300 Morris Park Avenue 			  email:
smurray@aecom.yu.edu
Bronx
New York 10461

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