Genetic modification could protect soldiers from chemical weapons
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
It's not that chemical weapons have no military use at all, but if you make soldiers immune then the only people killed in gas attacks will be civilians, and that's not so far off from the world as it is.
It honestly amazes me that the “people” in charge of some of those countries had such restraint
The situation was a bit different in WWI when only Germany really had the capability to make extensive use of them.
Germans had already had that experience https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_of_the_Dead_Men
"The gas, "caused the grass to turn black and leaves to turn yellow, and the dead birds, frogs and other animals and insects were lying everywhere. Terrain looked like Hell."[1] The Russians either had no gas masks, or had poorly made ones, and most soldiers used their undershirts as masks, with many soaking them in water or urine.[2] Sub-Lieutenant Vladimir Kotlinsky, the highest ranking Russian soldier to survive the initial attack, rallied the other surviving soldiers, and they elected to charge the advancing German lines.[2]
Over twelve battalions of the 11th Landwehr Division, making up more than 7000 men, advanced after the bombardment expecting little resistance. They were met at the first defense line by a counter-charge made up of the surviving soldiers of the 13th Company of the 226th Infantry Regiment. The Germans became panicked by the appearance of the Russians, who were coughing up blood and bits of their own lungs, as the hydrochloric acid formed by the mix of the chlorine gas and the moisture in their lungs had begun to dissolve their flesh. The Germans retreated, running so fast they ran into their own traps.[2]"
>had such restraint
it isn't restraint. On a real battlefield, especially a modern one with all the tanks, APCs, etc. having NBC protection, chemical weapons have very low resulting efficiency coming at very high price. It is a very unreliable opportunity weapon with a complex logistics. It is much more useful as a threat than as an actual weapon.
Instead of soldiers, i think the work in the original article will in the coming future be used to "fortify" people working in harsh/toxic/dangerous conditions.
With a serious immediate threat, you can force the enemy to wear the full NBC gear. That impedes everything. They can't effectively eat or wash, their vision is restricted, and they might get heatstroke.
Frankly, I'm surprised they're not used more often. I think we'll see a massive scale chemical attack this century. There's a lot of political instability fomenting across the planet.
At the same time all these mods are likely going to be commercialized but out of reach for most classes, so the whole thing will become similar to the pitch that "money for college" was back in the day. I suppose the government would also restrict the sale of certain classes of mods making it potentially more lucrative to enlist.
But enough about the military :)
If the upper classes want to risk their health by doing genetic experiments on themselves, I’m fine with that. It is a “privilege” I will happily forego.
Essentially all wars in recent history have led to widespread devastation, no benefit to any people, insane numbers of deaths, and a LOT of profit for corporations for whom war is a business.
See: War is a Racket (1933): https://www.wanttoknow.info/warisaracket HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22012255
This is one major reason for the wars - they aren't pointless to certain highly influential wealthy people.
Well, there haven't been any significant chemical weapons usage since at least WW1 and occasionally in WW2, but to much lesser extent.
All recent supposed usage of chemical weapons appeared to exist just as an excuse for the USA government propaganda to make an attack and destruction of the country they don't like more acceptable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraqi_chemical_attacks_against...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halabja_chemical_attack
No reputable source denies that this happened.
We get to go home, but all that crap is going to linger in the air waters and soils of iraq and afghanistan for a long time.
Good luck with that!
Violence and aggression are glorified in the media, but when people get into a fight in a public place? Does it make them more attractive to bystanders or raise their prestige? Clearly not.
Use of psychedelics can result in a profound increase in empathy, division of boundaries between oneself and the world and between oneself and others, an increase in care about others, a healing of traumas within oneself that might have hitherto caused one to lash out against others who you projected your own demons on to, and an increase in a sense of the sacredness of all things.
In conjunction with this, widespread psychedelic use might result in another great religious awakening, with the resulting religions reflecting in their values the peaceful and unifying effects described above.
This won't happen overnight. It'll probably take one or two hundred years for psychedelic use to become really widespread, and it can be aborted once more if there's another major backlash against them from the powers that be who are wedded to the status quo.
>Mice injected with the DNA-ferrying virus soon had high blood levels of the synthetic PON1 enzyme, which remained stable for the 5-month study. The rodents survived nine normally lethal injections of nerve agents over 6 weeks
now imagine that that virus and/or enzyme finds its way into cockroaches and the likes - the acquired resistance against the organophosphates (the nerve gases were a result of research into insecticides) would make them into super-cockroaches able to resist the humans' weapons of mass cockroach destruction, ie. insecticides.
Of course the implications of the gene mods go far beyond that niche military application. Being able to reliably mod organs is obviously therapeutically helpful - say being able to reverse sickle cell anemia. Being able to "vaccinate" against toxins is likewise obviously helpful. Drugs that technically work on the pathogen but would be lethal to the patient could be used harmlessly if the patient was made resistant first.
"The use and misuse of Brave New World in the CRISPR debate" https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/crispr.2019.0046
"One of the strangest aspects of Brave New World's use in bioethics is that many authors use the novel as shorthand for ethical issues that never appear in the novel at all, and even some issues that contradict those portrayed in the novel."
"... In contrast, some of the most prominent ethical issues with GGE are rarely discussed. For instance, it is hard to draw a connection between Huxley's scenario and the idea of therapeutic genome editing. The use of “biologically superior” gametes for Alphas is mentioned in Huxley's later essays rather than in the novel itself, and even then, it is left unclear what that entails. Nor does the novel address the possibility of these processes causing unanticipated side effects."
"... thus, there does not seem to be any genetic testing in Brave New World, and most of the methods described involve hormones and chemicals rather than heritable interventions. Although Huxley wrote that “eugenics and dysgenics were practiced systematically,”67 this seems to refer only to selective breeding and not to any kind of direct manipulation on the genetic level. (The Bokanovsky process does represent a form of cloning, but this is not ethically equivalent to GGE, and references to Brave New World may lead some readers to confuse the two technologies.)"
"Second, many authors assume that Brave New World is a parable about genetic enhancement.35,43,47 In their report Beyond Therapy, the President's Council on Bioethics suggested that the novel was about “producing improved … perfect or post-human” people.41 While it's true that the upper castes in Brave New World are smarter than the others, this is more because of the deliberate impairment of the lower castes than because the upper castes are “perfect.” Rather than reducing the number of individuals born with genetic disorders or handicaps, Huxley's dystopia involves dramatically increasing their number. Concerns about large-scale disenhancement appear only occasionally in the gene-editing literature,7,13,28,40 making Brave New World a poor match for these concerns. Furthermore, unfair competition for education or career opportunities is not an issue in Huxley's world because there is no real competition: everyone is created to fill a particular niche in society."
"In some of these cases, it is possible that authors are misremembering the society described in Brave New World, or that they have not read the book in the first place. Others may be using the phrase “brave new world” less in reference to Huxley's novel and more to evoke the general idea of a futuristic dystopia. In many cases, this seems to involve reading contemporary bioethical concerns into Brave New World even when they are not supported by the text itself."
"Huxley was particularly enthusiastic about Nobel laureate H.J. Muller's well-known plan to improve the human gene pool by banking high-quality sperm.75 He envisioned a society organized along those lines in his 1962 utopian novel Island, in which the sperm of men with high IQs are provided from a central bank to grateful married couples, and children play board games such as “Evolutionary Snakes and Ladders” or “Mendelian Happy Families.” In many ways, Island serves as an inverted version of Brave New World, demonstrating how a non-totalitarian society might use eugenics to great benefit. Island even suggests that people who were overly susceptible to persuasion could be trained to avoid hypnotism by would-be dictators.76"
"Huxley's lifelong interest in modifying humans at a biological level makes him a poor (and inaccurate) icon for common-sense controls on GGE. Although many ethicists may be unfamiliar with his other writings, these strongly suggest that Brave New World was never meant to be a warning about technologies such as CRISPR. Authors looking to use science fiction in their work might want to cite authors who provide a better foundation for their ethical arguments."
Brave New World is about tyranny and totalitarianism, not a warning against genetic enhancement technologies. The misuse of this book has set us back by decades.
I actually didnt know the book was being used like that, interesting!