Pacific Spirit Marine Institute
Microbiologists Develop Super Salmonella; the regular kind wasn’t Virulent enough?
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Microbiologists at Arizona State University launched salmonella into space. Salmonella! Yes, they loaded test tubes with Salmonella bacteria and then sent those tubes to space aboard the September 06 shuttle flight.
I’m not suprised that the microbes came back from their journey even more virulent and dangerous than when they left. I wonder if the biologists, were suprised though.
The outcome of this experiment was published in the National Academy of Sciences.
Apparently spaceflight has an affect on the ‘master genetic regulator’. Seeing how an organizm turns ’super’ may give some insight into how to turn it weaker than normal? Maybe.
Has common sense taken leave of the planet? Maybe.
I can’t help wondering with all the ’super-strains’ of bacteria already mutating here on earth, super-strains becoming more and more ’super’ on their own, why we need to create even more powerful ones intentionally.
Maybe the Salmonella wasn’t supposed to come back to earth 3 times more deadly than when it left but, was that not one of the possibilites in researchers had in mind?
We have to be glad that bottles of ‘SARS’ or ‘EBOLA’ or ‘AIDS’ weren’t sent to space. Then again, maybe they have been. Maybe. I’m not excited over the prospect of microbes, or anything else sent to space returning to earth in a ’super-fied’ state and I think a huge amount of caution should be used, and I pray there are ‘regulations and sane oversights’ regarding what is allowed to be shot into space over our heads and our planet.
In my mind there are only 4 ways anything can come back from Space, or War, or for that matter a trip to the Market or a day at the Office:
Changed for the better
Changed for the worse
Unchanged
Dead
Lisa Nowak and Salmonella seem to have come back from space in the same category.
On the topic of War: the first death by ‘Cholera’ has been reported today by the W.H.O., world health organization, in Baghdad. The outbreak of cholera has spread to 25 districts of Northern Iraq and 4 districts in Southern Iraq and across the center of the country. it is extimated that more than 30,000 people there have fallen ill with Cholera symptoms, but only 2,116 have been identified as positive cholera, this since late August.
Labels: Cholera, Salmonella, Space, WHO
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Microbiologists Develop Super Salmonella; the regular kind wasn’t Virulent enough?
