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| Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, September 22 2012 @ 11:21 PM EDT |
Burmese pythons. Densest concentration of them in the world is in central
Florida. As a species, they were unknown there fifty years ago.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, September 23 2012 @ 02:35 AM EDT |
Eh. Maybe I'm fatalistic. We live in a ginormous,
extremely dangerous, active chemistry experiment. New flus
come once a year, and occasionally wipe out a large
percentage of the population. (within recorded history...)
Given evolution and cross-breeding, I don't see genetic
engineering as relatively extremely dangerous. And, I don't
see plant modification as even important. They're pretty
much a low-risk way to test harder things. Sure, it'd be
fairly easy to kill some people, but if modifying plants
gives your heartburn, you should really, very seriously,
panic over viruses...*
--Erwin
*Eg., 10 years ago, a 'pawn it off on the intern project' at
the local laboratory involved taking AIDS RNA and
encapsulating it in an Ebola shell. The rationale was that
they wanted to study how the AIDS virus behaved in cells it
wouldn't normally infect - and Ebola even has the additional
advantage of being stable in air. The 'modestly clinically
insane' graduate student who turned down the project wasn't
worried about developing a process to create AIDS dust, that
student just wanted to graduate faster and didn't expect
that it'd be worth the effort.
Of course, that was 10 years ago, in a lab that takes very
modest safety precautions. But, the takeaway is that:
(1) your slightly below-average graduate student could
probably develop a new plague without much trouble.
(2) is typically poorly enough supervised that no one would
notice until they finished.
(3) and many graduate students are insane.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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| Authored by: Wol on Sunday, September 23 2012 @ 05:52 PM EDT |
The humble grey squirrel...
Which has pretty much wiped out our native red.
Which is going to wipe out the hazelnut spread industry in Italy if the Italians
don't stop thinking "awww cute".
Etc etc.
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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