Antrax?

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I'm just stating what I read, they did try and get a loan and didinquire about cropdusters and probably did meet with an Iraqi militairy guy and have sent anthrax in the mail.

Hell they didn't even need a plane, they could have just used something like small pox and hoped it didn't spread to the middle east, no need for planes then, just spread some in thenew york subway. But it is still reasonable to say that anthrax was a real threat. U say urself it's probably easy to get hold of a cropduster and they already had the anthrax.

Maybe they just weren't any good at taking off and landing or maybe the anthrax wasn't of good enough quality. But taking off is easy and they weren't concerned with landing with plan b.
Many questions, but can u say 100% that Anthrax wasn't and won't be as big a threat as cancer ?
I mean they had the anthrax, they asked about hiring and buying a crop duster, what did stop them from doing it ?


And can you say 100% that the method used where they cut up the human dna is definatly 100% accurate ?
There have alrady been some major mistakes using genetic manipulation where trace amounts of very toxic poisen in medicins etc have killed ppl.

It's tough making these decisions when you can't be sure about anything and u shouldn't go shouting they made the wrong decisions when you don't have all the information.
 
Ok Ace erm wtf its comments like you made about the Human Genome project that are the reason there is so much confusion around current affairs in Science !

Ok a very quick genetics lesson :

were made up of about 30,000 genes - ie a stretch of DNA that codes for a single product ie. a simple stomach enzyme

each gene is made up of a stretch of DNA sequence made up of the Four bases represented by the letters A, T, C, & G
for example A T A T G G C G C T A C T A G G T

these are usually a few thousand in length.

Now as were are talking about a massive amount of sequence it cannot be just read in a line like a book ! at best only a few 100 bases can be sequenced at one time !

So as you described the sequence is replicated then broken up into manageable sizes. Its broken up at random creating lengths starting and ending in different places ie :

A T A T G G C G C T A C T A G G T

A T A T G G---G C T A C T
-------T G G C G C-----C T A G G T

This is done totally at random and in a large enough amount so that a computer can be used to find corresponding overlapping sequences from each fragment !

Now as for the Human genome it was first concieved in 1984
mapping began in 1990, and sequancing only began in 1998, 2 years later the first draft was completed, containg many gaps and likely errors... The above process is going to be repeated 10x (Known as 10x coverage) to get as much of the sequence as possible. and this is intended to be finished in 2002

This is the way it is currently being processed in many seperate labs throughout the world... All working together to compile the entier sequence ! IT IS STILL NOT COMPLETE DESPITE WHAT THE PRESS WILL HAVE US BELIEVE

Tim
 
What did I say that was wrong ?
This is done totally at random and in a large enough amount so that a computer can be used to find corresponding overlapping sequences from each fragment !
U say it urself with that copy paste from a website, isn't it possible that some of it will be the same and hence stuck together in wrong order ?
I don't know, can u be sure ?


All I said was
And if I remember correctly the privately funded one was cutting cornors by chopping the genome into pieces then reading each piece and "hopefully" everything would fit back together alright without any duplicates. Now consider the human genome is only made up of 4 letters and seems to be filled up with a lot of junk, it doesn't seem unlikely to me that there could be a few bits that look exactly the same, meaning it could be stuck together in wrong order.
 
The numbers are rather in your favour.

One in three people who live to adulthood die of Cancer. Of the 56 Million people in the UK, 18 Million of us can look forward to suffering cancer in our lifetime which may or may not kill us.

Anthrax can be treated. there are vaccines which reduce the severity of the spore infection, and drugs which can cure the symtoms.

The effectiveness of Anthrax as a munition is not in it's mortality, but in the illness it causes. if you kill a combatant, you remove him from the field. if you injure him, you te up four people to look after him, and place a logistical and financial burden on your enemy.

Cancer can also be treated, but with a much lower success rate.

As to the HGM Project, that's how the *PUBLIC* project is doing it as well.

Both camps are using enzymes to chop the DNA into chunks, and
then sequencing the chunks, and identifying the overlapping sequences to determine the order.

What Celera did was stop looking at the *function* of the sections they were examining to get nice "gene for X, Y, Z discovered" stories to keep the funding coming, and simply used massive pattern matching engines (one of the largest supercomputer farms in the world) to brute force the solution.

It is no more, and no less, accurate either way.

As to your "no-one knows" comment.. yeah, no-one knew what would happen when we landed a man on the moon either.

End result: our understanding of our universe expanded. and yee-fucking hah says I.
 
Ace you flatter me but that is no copy and paste !
I wrote that myself as I am studing Medical Biochemistry and Genetics atm at university... And currently a module on Genome sequencing quite coincidently !

Yes your point is warrented but this is where it becomes difficult to explain. Mapping and sequencing are two enirely different things and the mapping was first done to identify repeated regions and to try and prevent what you said. The second precautionary method is to repeat the process 10 seperate times !! and currently they have done it 1-3 times and not got all the sequence !

What I was explaining is that your rediculous notion that this is cutting corners ?? Its the most accurate and only method that could possibly be used to obtain such a huge sequence in a operational timescale. The Private company and the Public sequencing were both doing the same thing... just the Public was using multiple labs from over 30 countries worldwide ! The private company did not stand a chance ! Also there cutting corners was to only do 3-5 repeats instead of the 10 which is considered to be the optimum number to produce high quality sequence !

The process has its flaws but there is a hell of alot of money being speant to try and prevent them being a problem.

Tim
 
As an extra note the main goal of the Private company was to patent genes that were of significance in certain aspect of humans that could lead to making pharmacutical companies lots of money !

Yes believe it or not folks you can actually patent a gene !!!!!

And they sucessfully managed to sequence and patent some... but they fell behind and the "Good Guys" won!


And lastly on the note of the HGP actually changing the world ? Hmmm well admitedly nobody can say for sure, but knowing a long list of bases that basically mean nothing until they are Transcribed, Transcripted and modified is not much use at all. As of yet we cannot put a gene sequence into a comuter and get it to identify its structure and function ! we can try but it doesn't tell us much at all. The HGP will have its uses but at the moment its not going to make any large significant impact on our lives.

Tim