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 <adamsc@io-online.com> | http://www.io-online.com/adamsc/adamsc.htp # cadams@acucobol.com | 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