Senior Scientists attack Chinese Researchers for creating new strains of Influenza Virus

Experts warn of danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.

Senior scientists have criticized the “appalling irresponsibility” of researchers in China who have deliberately created new strains of influenza virus in a veterinary laboratory.

They warned there is a danger that the new viral strains created by mixing bird-flu virus with human influenza could escape from the laboratory to cause a global pandemic killing millions of people.

 

Lord May of Oxford, a former government chief scientist and past president of the Royal Society, denounced the study published today in the journal Science as doing nothing to further the understanding and prevention of flu pandemics.

“They claim they are doing this to help develop vaccines and such like. In fact the real reason is that they are driven by blind ambition with no common sense whatsoever,” Lord May told The Independent.

“The record of containment in labs like this is not reassuring. They are taking it upon themselves to create human-to-human transmission of very dangerous viruses. It’s appallingly irresponsible,” he said.

The controversial study into viral mixing was carried out by a team led by Professor Hualan Chen, director of China’s National Avian Influenza Reference Laboratory at Harbin Veterinary Research Institute.

Professor Chen and her colleagues deliberately mixed the H5N1 bird-flu virus, which is highly lethal but not easily transmitted between people, with a 2009 strain of H1N1 flu virus, which is very infectious to humans.

When flu viruses come together by infecting the same cell they can swap genetic material and produce “hybrids” through the re-assortment of genes. The researchers were trying to emulate what happens in nature when animals such as pigs are co-infected with two different strains of virus, Professor Chen said.

“The studies demonstrated that H5N1 viruses have the potential to acquire mammalian transmissibility by re-assortment with the human influenza viruses,” Professor Chen said in an email.

“This tells us that high attention should be paid to monitor the emergence of such mammalian-transmissible virus in nature to prevent a possible pandemic caused by H5N1 virus,” she said.

“It is difficult to say how easy this will happen, but since the H5N1 and 2009/H1N1 viruses are widely existing in nature, they may have a chance to re-assort,” she added.

The study, which was carried out in a laboratory with the second highest security level to prevent accidental escape, resulted in 127 different viral hybrids between H5N1 and H1N1, five of which were able to pass by airborne transmission between laboratory guinea pigs.

Professor Simon Wain-Hobson, an eminent virologist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, said it is very likely that some or all of these hybrids could pass easily between humans and possess some or all of the highly lethal characteristics of H5N1 bird-flu.

“Nobody can extrapolate to humans except to conclude that the five viruses would probably transmit reasonable well between humans,” Professor Wain-Hobson said.

“We don’t know the pathogenicity [lethality] in man and hopefully we will never know. But if the case fatality rate was between 0.1 and 20 per cent, and a pandemic affected 500 million people, you could estimate anything between 500,000 and 100 million deaths,” he said.

“It’s a fabulous piece of virology by the Chinese group and it’s very impressive, but they haven’t been thinking clearly about what they are doing. It’s very worrying,” Professor Wain-Hobson said.

“The virological basis of this work is not strong. It is of no use for vaccine development and the benefit in terms of surveillance for new flu viruses is oversold,” he added.

An increasing number of scientists outside the influenza field have expressed concern over attempts to deliberately increase the human transmissibility of the H5N1 bird-flu virus. This is done by mutating the virus so that it can pass by airborne droplets between laboratory ferrets, the standard “animal model” of human influenza.

Two previous studies, by Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam and Yoshihiro Kawaoka of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, caused uproar in 2011 when it emerged that they had created airborne versions of H5N1 that could be passed between ferrets.

The criticism led to researchers to impose a voluntary moratorium on their H5N1 research, banning transmission studies using ferrets. However they decided to lift the ban earlier this year, arguing that they have now consulted widely with health organisations and the public over safety concerns.

However, other scientists have criticized the decision to lift the moratorium.

Source:

www.independent.co.uk

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DARPA scientists want to Create Database of all Conversations

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The Pentagon’s blue-sky researchers are funding a project that uses crowdsourcing to improve how machines analyze our speech. Even more radical: Darpa wants to make systems so accurate, you’ll be able to easily record, transcribe and recall all the conversations you ever have.

Analyzing speech and improving speech-to-text machines has been a hobby horse for Darpa in recent years. But this takes it a step further, in exploring the ways crowdsourcing can make it possible for our speech to be recorded and stored forever. But it’s not just about better recordings of what you say. It’ll lead to more recorded conversations, quickly transcribed and then stored in perpetuity — like a Twitter feed or e-mail archive for everyday speech. Imagine living in a world where every errant utterance you make is preserved forever.

University of Texas computer scientist Matt Lease has studied crowdsourcing for years, including for an earlier Darpa project called Effective Affordable Reusable Speech-to-text, or EARS, which sought to boost the accuracy of automated transcription machines. His work has also attracted enough attention for Darpa to award him a $300,000 award over two years to study the new project, called “Blending Crowdsourcing with Automation for Fast, Cheap, and Accurate Analysis of Spontaneous Speech.” The project envisions a world that is both radically transparent and a little freaky.

The idea is that business meetings or even conversations with your friends and family could be stored in archives and easily searched. The stored recordings could be held in servers, owned either by individuals or their employers. Lease is still playing with the idea — one with huge implications for how we interact.

“In their call, what [Darpa] really talked about were different areas of science where they would like to see advancements in certain problems that they see,” Lease told Danger Room at his Austin office. “So I responded talking about what I saw as this very big both need and opportunity to really make conversational speech more accessible, more part of our permanent record instead of being so ephemeral, and really trying to imagine what this world would look like if we really could capture all these conversations and make use of them effectively going forward.”

How? The answer, Lease says, is in widespread use of recording technologies like smartphones, cameras and audio recorders — a kind of “democratizing force of everyday people recording and sharing their daily lives and experiences through their conversations.” But the trick to making the concept functional and searchable, says Lease, is blending automated voice analysis machines with large numbers of human analysts through crowdsourcing. That could be through involving people “strategically,” to clean up transcripts where machines made a mistake. Darpa’s older EARS project relied entirely on automation, which has its drawbacks.

“Like other AI, it can only go so far, which is based on what the state-of-the-art methodology can do,” Lease says. “So what was exciting to me is thinking about going back to some of that work and now taking advantage of crowdsourcing and applying that into the mix.”

Crowdsourcing is all about harnessing distributed networks of people — crowds — to do tasks better and more efficiently than individuals or machines. Recently, that’s meant harnessing large numbers of people to build digital maps, raising funds for a film project at Kickstarter, or doing odd-jobs at Amazon Mechanical Turk — one system being studied as part of the project. Darpa has also taken an interest in crowdsourcing as a way to analyze vast volumes of intelligence data, and Darpa’s sibling in the intelligence community, Iarpa, has researched crowdsourcing as a way to find the best intelligence predictions.

But a few problems have to be overcome before crowdsourcing can be used to analyze speech. According to Lease, both crowdsourcing and automated systems for analyzing and transcribing speech are — by themselves — pretty weak. Audio transcripts written by humans are very accurate, but they take time to produce, and the labor is too expensive when applied on a large enough scale.

Meanwhile, automated systems are not very accurate, and require humans to copy-edit the result: adding missing punctuation marks, capitalization, and correcting for verbal disfluencies — those little noises we make when filling gaps in our speech, like “um” or “ah.” We don’t always finish our words when we talk. (But our brains are really good at not noticing it.) We change phrases mid-thought, or mistakenly begin a sentence by saying one word, only to quickly correct ourselves by switching to another word. Background noise — which has plagued voice recognition machines — can also interfere with the quality. All in all, this kind of conversational, casual speech plays havoc with our automated machines, the result being a sort of unintelligible word salad.

“There’s a linguistic sense in that conversational speech is quite different than text,” Lease says. “So we really need to think about how we make this form of our language, which is so natural to us in speech, something that is accessible to us when it’s written down, in a way that it may not naturally be.”

It also raises some thorny legal and social questions about privacy. For one, there is an issue with “respecting the privacy rights of multiple people involved,” Lease says. One solution, for a business conference that’s storing and transcribing everything said by the participants, could be a mutual agreement between all parties. He adds that technical issues when it comes to archiving recorded speech are still open questions, but people could potentially hold their cell phone conversations on remote servers; or on individual, privately-held servers.

The other problem is figuring how out how to search massive amounts of transcribed speech, like how search engines such as Google use complex algorithms to match and optimize search queries with results that are likely to be relevant. Fast and cheap web analytics — judging what people type and matching it up to what they click — is one way to do it. Studying focus groups are more precise, but expensive. A third way, Lease suggests, is using more crowdsourcing as a sort of a “middle-ground” between the two methods.

But it’s unknown how the research will be applied to the military. Lease wouldn’t speculate, and it’s still very much a basic research project. Though if it’s similar to EARS at all, then it may not be too difficult to figure out. A 2003 memorandum from the Congressional Research Service described EARS as focusing on speech picked up from broadcasts and telephone conversations, “as well as extract clues about the identity of speakers” for “the military, intelligence and law enforcement communities.” Though Lease didn’t mention automatically recognizing voices. But the research may not have to go that far — if we’re going to be recording ourselves.

Source:

www.wired.com

http://worldtruth.tv

SCIENTISTS FINALLY PRESENT EVIDENCE ON EXPANDING DNA STRANDS

The human genome is packed with millions of gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but it turns out that so-called junk DNA plays critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. Cambridge researchers have published a paper proving that four-stranded ‘quadruple helix’ DNA structures — known as G-quadruplexes — also exist within the human genome. The question is, how many DNA strands are human beings capable of possessing? Some geneticists are claiming humans will one day have 12 strands.

Just a few years ago, modern medicine officially acknowledged the first case of a child with 3 DNA strands. A two-year-old boy, Alfie Clamp became the only person in the world to be diagnosed with an extra strand in his DNA. He was born blind and with severe disabilities, which led doctors to carry out various tests. They revealed his seventh chromosome had an extra strand of material which had never been documented anywhere in the world before. Doctors were baffled at his condition, which is so rare it does not have a name.

Dr. Berrenda Fox said “we are finding that there are other helixes that are being formed. In the double helix there are two strands of DNA coiled into a spiral.” Dr. Fox says there are major changes and mutations occuring in our DNA. We are evolving. “We will be developing twelve helixes. During this time, which seems to have started maybe 5 to 20 years ago, we have been mutating. This is the scientific explanation. It is a mutation of our species into something for which the end result is not yet known,” she stated.

The findings of the G-quadruplexes mark the culmination of over 10 years investigation by scientists to show these complex structures in vivo — in living human cells — working from the hypothetical, through computational modelling to synthetic lab experiments and finally the identification in human cancer cells using fluorescent biomarkers.

The research, published in Nature Chemistry and funded by Cancer Research UK, goes on to show clear links between concentrations of four-stranded quadruplexes and the process of DNA replication, which is pivotal to cell division and production.

Physical studies over the last couple of decades had shown that quadruplex DNA can form in vitro — in the ‘test tube’, but the structure was considered to be a curiosity rather than a feature found in nature. The researchers now know for the first time that they actually form in the DNA of human cells. Quadruplex DNA is actually found fairly consistently throughout the genome of human cells and their division cycles

The study showed that if an inhibitor is used to block DNA replication, quadruplex levels go down — proving the idea that DNA is dynamic, with structures constantly being formed and unformed.

The researchers also previously found that an overactive gene with higher levels of Quadruplex DNA is more vulnerable to external interference.

Scientific research has now proven our DNA holds the genetic codes for our physical and emotional evolution through frequency held in the languages we speak.

There is evidence for a whole new type of medicine in which DNA can be influenced and reprogrammed by words and frequencies WITHOUT cutting out and replacing single genes.

Russian researchers’ findings and conclusions are simply revolutionary! According to them, our DNA is not only responsible for the construction of our body but also serves as data storage and in communication. The Russian linguists found that the genetic code, especially in the apparently useless junk DNA follows the same rules as all our human languages. To this end they compared the rules of syntax (the way in which words are put together to form phrases and sentences), semantics (the study of meaning in language forms) and the basic rules of grammar. They found that the alkalines of our DNA follow a regular grammar and do have set rules just like our languages. So human languages did not appear coincidentally but are a reflection of our inherent DNA.

The Russian biophysicist and molecular biologist Pjotr Garjajev and his colleagues also explored the vibrational behavior of the DNA. The bottom line was: “Living chromosomes function just like solitonic/holographic computers using the endogenous DNA laser radiation.” This means that they managed for example to modulate certain frequency patterns onto a laser ray and with it influenced the DNA frequency and thus the genetic information itself. Since the basic structure of DNA-alkaline pairs and of language (as explained earlier) are of the same structure, no DNA decoding is necessary.

This finally and scientifically explains why affirmations, autogenous training, hypnosis and the like can have such strong effects on humans and their bodies. It is entirely normal and natural for our DNA to react to language. While western researchers cut single genes from the DNA strands and insert them elsewhere, the Russians enthusiastically worked on devices that can influence the cellular metabolism through suitable modulated radio and light frequencies and thus repair genetic defects.

Through scientific inquiry, research has exposed that only 3% of our DNA is wrapped up in the spiraling double helix strand. During the time of the 75,000 year cycle when we are exposed to the most torsion energy waves and it affects our DNA by reorganizing the 97% “junk” DNA from a 2-strand double helix to a 12-strand helix advancing man in a leap of evolution.

Source:

Prevent Disease 

http://worldtruth.tv