What a great accident.
It is however amazing that nobody (me included) never thought that this could be a solution to our plastic issues. "It's common knowledge, why waste time thinking about it?"
Digesting the polymer OTOH - that's a bit of a paradigm shift.
EDIT: It just occurred to me that both wax and plastic bag polymers are large chains of carbon with some hydrogen hanging off the edges. Perhaps it should not be so surprising that wax worms can digest that polymer.
EDIT2: Nevermind, that was in the article, I didn't read the whole thing.
https://m.phys.org/news/2014-12-gut-bacteria-worm-degrade-pl...
> Scientists say that the degradation rate is extremely fast compared to other recent discoveries, such as bacteria reported last year to biodegrade some plastics at a rate of just 0.13mg a day.
.13mg of plastic per day per bacterium would be incredible; per kg of bacteria would be not so amazing.
http://www.kidsdiscover.com/quick-reads/penicillin-found-fun...
Isaac Asimov
I think that one might stand out somewhat since I'd expect most accidental advances to be helpful to humanity. Or maybe I'm just an optimist. :)
So some of these scientists may not have known what their creations were going to be used for.
It's pretty clear that even if insecticide was the beginning there was a pretty clear point in time where it was obvious that this had nothing to do with insects any longer.
Okay, then they'll get someone else to take your work and weaponize it. The bulk of the work would have already been done by then, which is synthesizing the chemical and showing its effects on people.
By your reasoning you can excuse away any behavior. Which of course plenty of scientists and other horrible people tried to do. And then there was the collective amnesia epidemic of 1945.
Shockingly, it's not a black and white world with many layers of gray in between, which is what I was trying to show. That a lot of research can get twisted for evil.
In your earlier post, you claimed there was "no upside". That's patently false, since these started with the ideal of getting rid of pests more efficiently. Yes, there's a point where it turns from this generic research to weaponizing, but that might not be immediately obvious at the time, nor what the repercussions might be 50 years later.
No, the second people start weaponizing your research you have the option to stop participating.
> Shockingly, it's not a black and white world with many layers of gray in between, which is what I was trying to show. That a lot of research can get twisted for evil.
Chemical weapons research is pure evil, I don't doubt that at all.
> In your earlier post, you claimed there was "no upside".
Yep.
> That's patently false, since these started with the ideal of getting rid of pests more efficiently. Yes, there's a point where it turns from this generic research to weaponizing, but that might not be immediately obvious at the time, nor what the repercussions might be 50 years later.
It was obvious within the lifetime of the scientists involved because they were the ones to help weaponize it. And for that there are no excuses.
I really don't understand why you're twisting so much to come up with excuses for these people here, their role and position in all this is pretty well documented. If not for the Germans fear that allies would be able to retaliate in kind that stuff would have been used.
This is one of the best documented era in the history of mankind, there are people who deserve the benefit of the doubt but this particular group isn't one of those.
I want to agree with this, but I'm not certain how I would act if I knew my options where a) continue weaponisation research or b) get shot in the face.
Making a principled stand is only useful when it stands a non-zero chance of accomplishing something.
Basically any powerful/impressive weapon can be justified to have upside as it might reduce further casualties by ending conflict sooner.
And looking at trench warfare, if there had been a way to make it completely unfeasible by being able to "permanently" poison an entire field at a time, perhaps that would have turned out better.
One could extend this argument to engineers who work for nefarious, privacy-violating ad companies, invasive surveillance...
Imagine yourself coming home with your bicycle and having a massive (250 ug) LSD trip only having experienced it once, pretty scary and interesting at the same time [1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Hofmann#Discovery_of_LS...
[1]: http://www.thegooddrugsguide.com/articles/lsd_accident.htm
https://books.google.com/books?id=mykDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA80&lpg=P...
How many random chemicals did scientists accidentally ingest for every artificial sweetener discovered? It must be quite a lot, and many of those must have been quite dangerous.
Would we have artificial sweeteners at all if people practiced decent lab safety?
Could we massively speed up the discovery of future sweeteners and similar things, by intentionally exposing people to as may random chemicals as possible? Ideally after verifying they are at least probably safe in a very small quantity for tasting. I'm guessing that wouldn't be legal.
The caterpillars in the linked article are biodegrading the plastics into non-plastic (fairly quickly). That's the key thing.