Courting ELE: Or why Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka should be locked in a padded cell.

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THERE IS MUCH DEBATE about which Extinction Level Event (ELE) is most likely to carry off the human species. The most nominated ELE candidate is an asteroid strike. This is hardly surprising, since it was an asteroid the size of Mt Everest slamming into our planet approximately 65 million years ago that put an end to the reign of the dinosaurs. You might say that, as an ELE, the asteroid strike has “form”.

Another reason for the popularity of an Asteroid Apocalypse is that it wouldn’t be our fault. The fact that a large chunk of rock somehow ended up on a collision course with Planet Earth is simply not attributable to any human agency. The End of Human History (assuming there’s time to record it) will be put down to plain, old-fashioned bad luck.

That comforting (sort of) thought is definitely not available when it comes to the rest of the most likely ELEs because all of them would be the result of human activity. Computer technology, for example, throws up at least two apocalyptic possibilities.

The first of these is familiar to every fan of The Terminator movies. A defence-related cyber-network becomes sentient and (probably quite wisely) determines that the human species, constituting the greatest threat to its survival, must be eliminated immediately. “Judgement Day” duly arrives in the form of a nuclear apocalypse.

The second computer-generated ELE arises out of what might be called a nanotechnological “glitch”. Having created a “species” of self-replicating micro-bots, humanity watches in horror as the power of exponential growth transforms (in a terrifyingly short space of time) the entire universe into “grey goo”.

The “grey goo” way of going at least possess the virtue of being quick – which is a great deal more than can be said for the slow-motion apocalypse of Anthropogenic Global Warming. This promises to be a centuries-long ELE, comprised of a bewildering succession of subsidiary apocalypses involving unceasing droughts, colossal forest-fires, super-storms, Biblically-proportioned floods and relentlessly rising seas which slowly-but-surely snuff out all vestiges of the impossibly sophisticated but morally inert Carbon-based civilisation that once bestrode the world.

But all that, thankfully, lies in the future. If you’re looking for an ELE right here, right now, allow me to introduce you to Professor Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the good ‘ole USA.

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According to the UK Independent, Professor Kawaoka “has genetically manipulated the 2009 strain of pandemic flu in order for it to ‘escape’ the control of the immune system’s neutralising antibodies, effectively making the human population defenceless against its re-emergence.”

Yes, that’s right, Professor Kawaoka has worked out a way of preventing the human body from fighting the 2009 H1N1 flu virus which, according to The Independent, “killed as many as 500,000 people in the first year of its emergence.”

Learning how to switch-off the only biological defence humanity has against this deadly virus is a pretty neat trick (if you’re willing to put aside for just a moment its batshit insanity). The result, no doubt, of the considerable practice Professor Kawaoka has already put into creating and re-creating end-of-the-world diseases.

Oh yes:

“Prior to his statement to The Independent, Professor Kawaoka’s only known public mention of [this latest] study was at a closed scientific meeting earlier this year. He declined to release any printed details of his talk or his lecture slides.

“Some members of the audience, however, were shocked and astonished at his latest and most audacious work on flu viruses, which follow on from his attempts to re-create the 1918 flu virus and an earlier project to increase the transmissibility of a highly lethal strain of bird flu.”

Come again? Oh yes, you read that correctly, Professor Kawaoka (like the asteroid strike) has “form”.

The 1918 flu pandemic, by the way, killed more people than World War I. Roughly half-a-billion human-beings, from the Arctic Circle to New Zealand, were infected, and somewhere between 50-100 million people died.

Why would anybody try to re-create such a deadly virus? An even better question: what sort of benighted fools gave this “Mad Scientist” the resources to pursue such an extraordinarily dangerous research programme?

Well, that would be the Institute for Influenza Virus Research based in Madison, Wisconsin. According to The Independent, this was “built specifically to house Professor Kawaoka’s laboratory, which has a level-3-agriculture category of biosafety: one below the top safety level for the most dangerous pathogens, such as Ebola virus.”

Whew! What a relief – “a level-3-agriculture category of biosafety” – and here was I, in this age of terrorist atrocities, worrying about masked men breaking into Professor Kawaoka’s lab, stealing his unstoppable virus and holding the entire world to ransom. Silly me! I was forgetting that Professor Rebecca Moritz, the Head of Wisconsin’s Institutional Biosafety Committee, has assessed Professor Kawaoka’s work and found “the biosafety containment procedures to be appropriate for conducting this research.” She has “no concerns about the biosafety of these experiments”.

Worryingly, these are not unanimous views. Professor Tom Jeffries also sits on the 17 member Biosafety Committee and he told The Independent: “I have met Professor Kawaoka in committee and have heard his research presentations and honestly it was not re-assuring […] I’m very uneasy when the work involves increasing transmissibility of what we know already to be very virulent strains”.

If this sounds to you like the script for a very scary movie, then you’re not alone. Of all the ELEs to which humanity could fall victim, the accidental or deliberate release of a deadly, air-borne, highly contagious virus, against which the human immune system is powerless, and for which there is no available vaccine, is by far the most likely.

Paradoxically, what’s driving Professor Kawaoka’s research are the huge profits that will accrue to whichever scientist, university and/or pharmaceutical company first discovers the way in which the human body generates the genetic resistance necessary to withstand potentially species-destroying viruses. Crack that code, and the manufacture of the vaccines necessary to ward off global pandemics becomes a relatively straightforward process – worth billions.

It was always thus. Science, if left to itself, will find a way to take us beyond the stars. But when bound to the will of a rapacious and dangerously under-regulated Capitalism, Science becomes ELE’s most assiduous suitor: the human agency most likely to send us the way of the dinosaurs.

31 COMMENTS

  1. ELEs have rarely if ever occured on earth. Most extinctions result from slow and inevitable changes in the environment forcing a species to evolve to cope, with its former form dying out. Even if the some ‘dinosaurs’ – the largest and most specialised – were wiped out by an asteroid strike 65 million years ago (and this is still disputed) many dinosaurs survived and still live amongst us, as the birds and other reptiles.

    The Black Death in Europe in the 14th Century is believed to have killed up to 60% of the population, but even that left a perfectly viable population to start over – with the added benefit of shaking belief in the church as the ultimate authority and rendering the previously ‘locked-in’ system of feudalism no longer sustainable giving far greater power and oppportunity to those previously at the bottom of the food chain, leading to the growth of mercantilism, the Reformation etc. and the modern world.

    Even if 99.9% of the earth’s present population were wiped out by an escaped pathogen there would still be more of left than the total world population of a mere 7,000 years ago, perhaps split into isolated and remote populations. It has even been suggested that the Mt. Toba eruption some 75,000 years ago reduced the then human population down to some 10,000 individuals, but we got over it.

    In fact the most likely threat we face is the eruption of the Yellowstone Supervolcano, which is some 40,000 years overdue and would be another Mt. Toba event. Yet even this would be likely not be an ELE for the human race. Global warming, unless it becomes completely run-away and turns the Earth into another Venus, is a long way short of becoming an ELE, however unpleasant it does become.

    Professor Kawaoka’s pathogen likewise not likely to become an ELE, and if it leads to a greater understanding of the mechanisms of disasters like the Black Death, Plague, Ebola, H1N1 flue etc. – and more particularly ways to fight them – I’d say he’s doing us a favour.

      • Sorry Frank. I didn’t realise you were a Black Death denialist.

        Seems to me, though, you’ve just swallowed hook, line and sinker, a piece of one-sided MSM-screeching sensationalism. Labs around the world have samples of Bubonic Plague, Ebola, H1N1 and worse in order to try to find out how they work and how to stop them. We don’t know to this day why, although one in two of the populatiion caught the Black Death and died of itwhy the other one either caught it and recovered – and some did – and why some didn’t catch it at all. Knowing that would be damn useful.

        Reading your piece it appears to me that what you find most offensive is that this guy was driven to try to find an answer to a threat to humanity because of the profit motive rather than holy beneficience. Unfortunately the latter doesn’t pay for many labs.

        • Endymion, when someone makes an unbelievably gormless comment like this;

          “Even if 99.9% of the earth’s present population were wiped out by an escaped pathogen there would still be more of left than the total world population of a mere 7,000 years ago, perhaps split into isolated and remote populations. “

          – it’s not my grasp on reality that should be questioned.

    • Phew. We’ve got nothing to worry about because Keats’ acolyte says so. We can just carry on cooking the planet and leave the doors to the good professor’s lab wide open for ISIS and other deranged fanatics to help themselves, because “we” will get over it. OTOH, purging the human species of the 99 percent of us who are defective because we are not pathologically avaricious would free up a lot of room for the one percent who are (and who can afford to buy the good professor’s vaccine).

  2. If he can figure out the mechanism by which the virus can make this change (in a lab) then this means that he may be able to create a vaccine for this changed virus, in case this change occurs in the natural world.

    I’m not sure I understand what the problem is.

    • I’m not sure I understand what the problem is.

      Really? The issue is risk management and oversight. How much security is required when the risk involves a totally catastrophic event.

      I might remind readers of the tragic death of an exchange(?) post grad researcher from the UK who contracted a deadly disease when working with the organism within an extreme bio-hazard lab here in New Zealand recently. Systems are never 100% secure.

    • Simon – if that virus escaped into the outside world, that might help you understand. For a few days orf weeks, at least. Then you’d be one corpse out of seven billion in a cemetary called Earth.

      • Frank- I don’t think it’s logical to build an argument upon an ‘if’ when we don’t actually have an understanding of the containment measures of the lab and so on.

        In fact, logically speaking this kind of argument is the exact same argument that Kawaoka’s uses to justify his research. i.e an appeal to a doomsday scenario. .

        • Simon, I think you should read the article to it’s end conclusion and note the number of escaped organisms that have infected and killed people.

          Plus, the potential for terrorist/criminal/demented groups and individuals such as the one who released anthrax in the US in 2001… well, need I draw you a pretty picture?

          Based on historical f**k-ups, this is not some sort of pointless fear-mongering. The human race is renowned for almighty screw-ups and the release of a Kawaoka organism (whether by accident; natural disaster; or crazy human intent) might be the one that tops the whole damned lot.

          I’m not some kind of anti-science, anti-medicines, anti-vaccination fanatic. Hell, I whooped loudly when ‘Curiosity’ made that incredible parachute/rocket touch-down on Mars.

          I love the thought that Voyagers One and Two are carrying the images of a man and woman, plus the sounds of Earth, into inter-stellar space.

          I still remember those grainy images of Neil Armstrong climbing down that ladder from the lunar lander.

          Unfortunately, I was too young to appreciate the courageous Yuri Gagarin going where no man or woman had gone before.

          But I’m also not so foolish as to understand that sometimes, just because we can do a thing, doesn’t mean that we should do that thing.

          This project by Kawaoka is sheer insanity. And it troubles me deeply that some human beings still don’t have the wisdom to understand this.

    • The thing is Simon, I once remember a time when I thought some atrocity ‘conspiracies’ could never be done by mankind. Then I remembered the massacres we justify when invading other countries, the massacres that occur over resources ( eg Timor Leste and West Papua) the killings done by drone strikes, the 5 eyes and mass surveillance for power and control ( to name a few human directed activities)… And quietly came to the conclusion in contemplation – yep mankind is capable of doing anything. Anything at all deliberately and intentionally. Enjoy the day lol

    • Because the vaccine will be sold to the highest bidder. It’s called maximising shareholder returns, in case you didn’t know.

  3. With global warming you omitted the possibility that we warm the oceans to such an extent that they again produce sulphur dioxide instead of oxygen, and poison the atmosphere to the extent that only a few microbial forms of life survive. It has happened once already long before we were anywhere near evolving.

    I just thought that a little more gloom might add emphasis to your warning about the socially irresponsible element of the short-term profit motive of Capitalism. Sadly, most humans are unwilling to even think about the banana, let alone see its skin upon which we could slide into extinction.

    Now this Professor Kawaoka is apparently offering us the risk of a short cut. That ’12 Monkeys’ film comes to mind.

  4. I think there would always be some survivors, if only through non exposure. Patagonia, here we come,

  5. One of the reasons the ‘Spanish flu’ has been such a quiet killer is because people were so traumatised and governments wanted to deny the existence of this horrible pathogen which killed more people than world war 1. Very few photographs exist of the bodies piled in the streets or the queues of people wearing masks as they tried to leave the cities.
    Contrast this with the ‘jolly ho’ reporting of all things military during the war and suddenly we have a lethal picture of what was really going on.
    For anyone to suggest the release of this vile pathogen as a means to solving overpopulation or climate crisis is most vile and reprehensible.
    Humanity can do better.

    • I’m not sure anyone outside of Hollywood scriptwriting circles is suggesting actually deliberately releasing a pathogen to cull the population. Although of course in Noah’s Flood we have a Biblical precedent for it, from a vile and reprehensible deity.

      Nevertheless it is a fact that population bottlenecks such as Mt. Toba and the Black Death perhaps the last glaciation event profoundly effected human evolution, so perhaps if it did occur now can you be so sure than in a thousand years time someone amongst the successors of the survivors living a New Age utopia might not look back and regard it much as you regard the Black Death – nasty but not all bad?

  6. Even with a marginal loss of human population–say the benigh scentists, medically trained technicians, and nuclear plant control staff (without which all the nuclear plants would procede to some invidious end)–the rest of us are all compost on a poisoned planet.

    I believe the universal alien robot observers has seen this all before.

  7. I also don’t agree with the computer based doomsday scenarios.

    The thing to remember is that evolutionary forces made the human brain what it is today. That is, by process of natural selection, certain traits, phenotypes etc. were ‘recognized’ by evolution and retained in the organism, because they bestowed an adaptive value upon that organism at that time.

    I don’t think that a computer could grow in power as a result of self-agency for a series of fundamental but related reasons.

    1) There are no evolutionary pressures that would naturally force a computer to improve, because it is not an organism, therefore…

    2) It would have to have some form of consciousness so that it can ‘want’ to improve for the sake of improvement, in the absence of evolutionary pressures, therefore…

    3) It would have to have consciousness and free will programed by humans, which is impossible.

    4) Alternatively, the computer would have to have knowledge of what improvement is, without consciousness, in addition to knowing how to gain that improvement, in the absence of evolutionary pressures, therefore…

    4) Because a computer doesn’t know what improvement is, and can’t evolve the capacity to know what improvement is without evolutionary pressures, humans would have to give the computer knowledge of a)what improvement is b)why improvement is beneficial c) what improvement is beneficial (for an environment that potentially wouldn’t exist at time of programming) and d) how to achieve this improvement e) and how to improve the improvement and so on…

    5) Therefore, not only would the computer have to have a capacity for improvement programed, it would have to have a capacity for predictive evolution to ‘evolve’ without evolutionary pressures, therefore

    6) The human mind would have to develop something that has never occurred in nature (a self-replicating, improvement knowing,future seeing, predictive machine), therefore…

    This would require the human mind to create something more complex than the human mind, which is a logical impossibility.

    Just my thoughts…..

    • Interesting thoughts, Simon, but I have heard Richard Dawkins talk and write about evolving computer graphics and watched a TV show that demonstrated avatars learning by evolving.
      It seems to me that bacteria, for example, are quite capable of complex biological actions and can evolve without being burdened by free will or consciousness, maybe they have another form of intelligence that we can’t recognise. There’s now a lot of research showing that plants can “think”, something we use to think impossible (see doco pasted below).
      Perhaps Alan Turing’s test needs to be applied to forms of intelligence that differ to our own.

      http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwF-ZENphHw

  8. Thank God for Yoshihiro Kawaoka san . Here’s me , terrified I was going to die of TV induced boredom . I was worried I was going to be burried under gated communities , drowned in half spanish white . The Warehouse’d to an early grave .
    I’m heading out tonight to take every good drug I can find then fuck myself to death . As some already wish I would .
    I can see the future of humanity . Ten people cringing in a damp cave in south westland . We humans , we’re funny little things are we not ? We must have seemed like a good idea at the time .

  9. Chis’s initial comment that this man should be locked in a padded cell stands firm. This is absolute insanity, I would personally refer to it as a form of latent blackmail, treason against the people, subversion of the state or just plain insanity. That governments don’t shut this down with such things as anti -terrorist legislation displays a reprehensible lack of vigilance.

    On the matter of “collapse” and “near term extinctions”: the mad scientist scenarios and Chris’s contention that this is linked to unregulated capitalism is redolent with parallels to lots of other similar issues. For example, the money spent by energy corporations denying or obfuscating “global warming”, “peak oil” etc. It would appear that the personal greed factor remains our greatest danger to communal interests.

    • The good professor should be given a dose of his own medicine – the pathogen, not the, as yet uninvented, cure.

  10. “Yes, that’s right, Professor Kawaoka has worked out a way of preventing the human body from fighting the 2009 H1N1 flu virus which, according to The Independent, “killed as many as 500,000 people in the first year of its emergence.”

    This is nothing unusual at all, this kind of stuff happens at a range of research institutes in a number of countries worldwide.

    Indeed, scientists are developing diseases, viruses and so, to use them for testing potential new medicines and other substances, and simply also to study the consequences of what the diseases and so can do.

    Human beings are their WORST own enemies, and we have been this for ages. The human being and mind is the most destructive one on this planet, that is, when it is not kept in check, and when it is not actually channeling energy into a positive, constructive way.

    But look at our “development”, in many ways, at the way we do “business”, the way we do and run things, we pollute, manipulate, fight, annihilate, destroy and kill, and that has never changed.

    I see humans as the ultimate risk takers, and the very simple splitting of the atom, initially a great scientific achievement, led to not just use of highly dangerous new energy sources, but also the development of mass destructive weapons. Why do humans develop chemical and other weapons?

    So all this is not at all far fetched and out of the ordinary, it is quite “normal”, although of course highly disturbing to those of us, with good intentions, and a “healthy” mindset.

    I think it is highly likely that humans will self destroy in the coming centuries.

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