Demon in the Freezer

There is another fantastic book called "Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World--Told from the Inside by the Man Who Ran It " By Ken Alibek.

For example, the USSR supposedly had an annual production of weaponized Smallpox measured in tons, which is a ridiculous amount of virus.

> these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox

We know for sure there's such supervillain. We call it Nature.

Smallpox is a thing. Yes it is deadly and a bad thing, like nukes or taco-bell being open at 3am. But it is still a thing. It's evilness derives from the people who can use it as a thing, not itself. For instance, rabies is a very bad virus too, but is used all the time in research (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabies_virus#Application). There, rabies is used as a thing in the vein of a tool for research, not as a tool to hurt others. Having some back-ups somewhere like in an internationally governed vault in Greenland would be most prudent. We all have access, in theory, then to it and it is less likely to be used as a bad thing in the future that way.

Does anybody else get goosebumps when reading about how smallpox has been eradicated? A disease that for thousands of years killed and maimed billions of humans -- gone for good[1]. It's a great testament to human ingenuity and perseverance.

[1] Well, except for those samples mentioned in the article

As an animator and researcher on the piece, I'd want to clear up some details in the comments below:

We synthesized viruses as early as 2002,[0] and you can get the sequence for Variola right now.[1]

Ken Abilek is regarded as largely discredited.[2] Sergei Popov, seen here, made a great variety of claims, but the ones in the documentary seem to be the most consistent with other sources.

In particular, a great extra source is Jeanne Guillemin, a medical anthropologist who wrote a variety of books about the Vector institute, its accidental release of anthrax into the city of Sverdlovsk,[3] Ken Abilek and Sergei Popov's claims about what went on in Vector, and the Amerithrax case. Her analysis is largely consistent with experimentation with Variola at the Vector facility in Sverdlovsk, less so the chimeric agent making that allegedly occurred there according to Ken Abilek.

Richard Preston argued that man is the demon in the freezer. There is no compelling scientific use for variola today, and if it can be synthesized artificially anyway, there's no compelling use for it sitting around in preposterously expensive high security.

Mutually assured destruction by variola was the only reason it was kept around. The Soviet Union was alleged to have filled a handful of missile warheads with variola, along with anthrax and ricin. The Soviet Union was alleged to believe that the United States was developing anti-nuclear weapon technology (it was). But to be clear, the United States for a period of time violated the biological weapons development ban too. Weapon development is crazy business and it's the only legitimate use of variola today.

[0] http://www.nature.com/news/2003/031110/full/news031110-17.ht... [1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1 [2] http://articles.latimes.com/2007/jul/01/nation/na-alibek1 [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sverdlovsk_anthrax_leak

Should the blueprints to variola, (a single linear double stranded DNA genome 186 kilobase genome sequence), be destroyed too? It wouldn't take too much effort to generate 186 kilobase DNA sequence ("longest gene made by us >230kb"[1])

[1] https://www.dna20.com/services/gene-synthesis

There's no way to eliminate smallpox completely now that it has been sequenced, unless you can also get rid of the digital copies as well. It's getting easier and easier to print DNA and RNA. We might not be able to print a full virus yet but it's only a matter of time.

There's a very good book by the same name about Smallpox eradication and the debate over destroying remaining stocks of the virus. I highly recommend it.

Pretty sure that David Baltimore had access to the virus at Rockefeller University. That would be one place it would be kept in the United States. That is their thing, the rarest of diseases. Perhaps, he was worried about himself. I mean that in a abstract sense. Imagine if you had that destructive power available to you.

I've never understood why these samples were maintained. I don't find "some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox" compelling - if some rogue government develops a new smallpox and releases it, we'll have plenty of samples to work with.

Eliminating the remaining samples is an irreversible decision. It's impossible to predict what value those samples might have if kept, because we don't yet know what use they would be put to.

There's not too much danger in it getting loose again, after all we eliminated it once already.

Url changed from http://kottke.org/16/05/the-demon-in-the-freezer, which points to this.

I can't help but agree with this article's argument which seems to be 'there are some smallpox samples'.