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Re: Fear of Flying -- from HotWired
On Thu, 12 Sep 1996 12:03:18 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote:
>>... former CIA director James Woolsey: responded with some seemingly
>> gratuitous anti-Net
>> rhetoric. Terrorists may use biological weapons like anthrax, he said.
>> "Anthrax is colorless, odorless, and has a 90 percent lethality. One
>> gram has 100 million lethal doses." Then Woolsey delivered the zinger:
>> "The knowledge of how to make anthrax is widely available, including
>> on the Internet."
>Gee, biotech has come a long way. Now I can download the Anthrax DNA
>sequence from the net and insert it in some carrier bacteria and start
>making Anthrax bacteria. Neat!
Now the bad news: the DNA replicator only works under Windows 95 and comes
with buggy drivers!
>Or did he mean I can chemically synthesize Anthrax toxin? Or did he mean I
>can get information on culturing bacteria on the net, but must obtain a
>sample of the bacteria from other sources?
<sarcasm>
I guess we need to ban all those "science" pages; after all, why would any
non-terrorist want to learn about bacteria?
</sarcasm>
>BTW - My dictionary says that Anthrax is primarily an animal disease which
>only occasionally infects humans. It sounds like a poor choice for bio-war
>terror.
Unfortunately, it can be very deadly. The idea here is that it rarely infects
humans - in the normal course of events. If a determined biowarrior is trying
to infect people, all bets are off.
# Chris Adams <[email protected]> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp
# [email protected] | V.M. (619)515-4894
"I have never been able to figure out why anyone would want to play games on
a computer in any case when the whole system is a game. Word processing,
spreadsheets, telecoms -- it's all a game. And they pay you to play it."
-- Duncan Frissell