Buckle up buttercups... - ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

vectorgen.bsky.social • 13 days ago

Buckle up buttercups...

Reposted from Dr Steven White

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

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kapitaali.bsky.social•13 days ago

a lab leak?

https://www.livescience.com/63765-darpa-insect-allies-or-biological-weapon.html

vectorgen.bsky.social•13 days ago

Of course not. Mosquitoes move & WNV has been in Europe for a very long time. I'm frankly surprised it hasn't shown up in the UK before now

As an aside, that Insect Allies DARPA article is from 7 years ago. I was involved in one of the projects. It was a stupid idea then and it's a stupid idea now

drstevenmwhite.bsky.social•13 days ago

Most probably introduced by infected migratory birds, then fed on by native mosquitoes.

vectorgen.bsky.social•13 days ago

Maybe. I'm always biased toward direct mosquito movement because I hate birds :)

drstevenmwhite.bsky.social•13 days ago

Excellent science right there...!

vectorgen.bsky.social•13 days ago

I went to school for many years to do science this well

kapitaali.bsky.social•13 days ago

interesting

was it WNV or some other viral thing you were working on?

vectorgen.bsky.social•13 days ago

Insect Allies? It was viruses of plants, not animals. I worked on transgenesis for the whitefly vectors as my part.

I was co_PI but quit because other PI was a sociopath & I didn't need the aggravation. Finished my bit with other funding, published here:

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7194319/

vectorgen.bsky.social•13 days ago

Insect Allies had nothing to do with human or animal pathogens. It was to develop methods to reverse crop biological warfare-like if some evil person released a pathogen to kill all the corn in the USA-could we release a modified "good" virus, spread by insects, to stop the pathogen & save the corn?

vectorgen.bsky.social•13 days ago

Unlike most DARPA projects, nothing was classified, it was considered to have no military application, & nothing we did was restricted

It was just a dumb idea. I got roped into it, realized it was dumb, and consoled myself with the knowledge that no one would fund this shit. Then it got funded...

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