We all know that human bites can be very nasty after the fact. It's a good reason to think twice about punching someone in the face.
And most of us are familiar with Taz - the Tasmanian Devil from Looney Tunes cartoons.
Well how do you take a marsupial with the attitude of T Rex and wipe it out? Biology.
Such a thing could happen to humans one day - with the right mutation. And such a technique might one day defeat a seemingly undefeatable enemy as in H G Wells' War of the Worlds.
I'm not sure why people are wondering whether there will be tasmanian devils in 20 years or not. You just have to collect some, keep them separate until any possible incubation has passed, let the wild illness burn out, breed them, and release them. For animals such as these, the sooner the better so a more diverse stock can be preserved. They're like cheetahs in their number and species fragility and passing through a genetic bottleneck can cause some problems down the road, and they're obviously already vulnerable if they don't have the immunologic diversity to recognize cancer cells from a different Taz. But it looks like they won't have a choice.
Note: collecting some Tasmanian devils in crates is probably all less interesting, expensive, and scientifically sexy as doing cancer research in a race against the clock. But if you want guarantees...
I'm not convinced that this isn't their intent all along, Ian. They've set themselves up for controlled breeding by coming up with a diagnostic marker for devil facial tumor disease (DFTD).
I think there's more to it than saving Taz. I believe we're witnessing something that could happen again in another species. That species could be critical to human survival, or could be a transmissible human cancer.
My dad is an experimental subject in an immune-base cancer treatment. There's a lot of interesting and cutting edge stuff going on now that could revolutionize the way we treat this illness.
Nothing wrong with that avenue, but you could keep the devils in small groups and merely observe for symptoms. Maybe there's some hidden information about there being an extended incubation period, but given the poor immune surveillance I wouldn't *guess* that would be an issue.
I think our risk for something like this would be low given the greater genetic diversity and numbers. There's 8 billion something of us running around! The closest thing I'm aware of is prion disease, in which a misfolded human protein can induce misfolding in recipients and lead to a rapid generative brain disease (kuru / mad cow / creutzfeld-jakob).
Of course, every once in a while an awful virus comes along and wipes out everyone but a few immunologically distinct individuals, at least in fiction: The Stand, 28 Weeks Later, I Am Legend. Tough to stay ahead of zombie viruses! More often its the other way around, when a bad (super antigen or other toxin producing) strep circulating in the community finds someone like Jim Henson who's terribly susceptible and conditions are right for an immunologic meltdown.
IJ wrote:
Of course, every once in a while an awful virus comes along and wipes out everyone but a few immunologically distinct individuals, at least in fiction
Such killer viruses, bacteria, and other entities happen in real life as well. The Plague wiped out a good deal of Europe. The 1918 H1N1 holds the record for deaths at somewhere around 40 million (plus or minus a few tens of millions). And European diseases (STDs, measles, small pox) decimated the Native American population.
If thread viruses weren't so damned virulent, they could be the next great plague. One can imagine a slight genetic change causing something like that to wipe out most of humanity.
I believe most public health researchers think not "if," but "when." The more we breed, the more we set ourselves up for Mother Nature making the final population correction. She can be a real beach you know...
I guess the worse case scenario is something highly contagious, highly lethal, but with a long incubation. The other stuff tends to burn out. HIV is highly lethal (absent treatment) but not particularly contagious so it only got 2 of 3. I do think we are up for a correction of some kind in the future, but we've got a lot of smarts now and it might not be an epic plague. We may instead just find ourselves falling to regular ole bacteria once all our drugs stop working, and once again victims of predation like most species.
I can't really add much to your discussion, gents, but I do have a question...I hope I'm not out of place here, but I read your posts and thought I saw an opportunity to bring up something that's been on my mind lately...
I took several biogeography courses in university and remember being told back in the eighties that it was probably already too late -- that we were already experiencing mass extinction (estimate: one species per day in the rain forests); that climate change was likely already occurring (I know this is still up for debate among many out there - especially those of us who have invested interest in producing the sorts of gases that might contribute to warming - Canada's tarsands projects simply add to my own confusion over the issue); and that the human population was continueing to grow and would likely exceed the planet's ability to support it sometime in the new millenium (say, about now).
Disease and famine were often touted as being the most effective vectors for re-balancing populations.
Very pessimistic stuff from lectures I attended at The University of Toronto between 1987 and 1990.
Now, given how incredibly complex the immune system is (and, for that matter, how complex ecosystems are), and given how fast our scientific knowledge of such matters is growing-- would either of you say that what I was taught back in the eighties was roughly correct or incorrect?
Another way of addressing what's on my mind: If nature seeks equalibrium, are we managing to maintain our sense of balance?
Bill Glasheen wrote:
I believe most public health researchers think not "if," but "when." The more we breed, the more we set ourselves up for Mother Nature making the final population correction.
Well, the more we compress our population the more lives will be lost to a deadly plague, but I would imagine that our actual chances of survival as a species increase with genetic diversity, and therefore, with breeding. So perhaps we should all take to furiously conceiving children on high altitude flights
Although really, I think that the advantages of proliferation to combat pestilence are easily outweighed by the many problems created by there being just too damned many people.
Catastrophes are difficult to model because they tend to be both figuratively and mathematically chaotic phenomena. More and more, I'm beginning to believe in Stephen Jay Gould's concept of punctuated equilibrium. Genetically this means that there are sudden changes (mutations) that rarely but occasionally are adaptive, and then a species (or new species) settles into a new equilibrium. That happens with no observable (or measurable) predictability because mathematically nonlinear phenomena can only be predicted if you understand the initial conditions to an infinite number of significant figures. In other words, sheet just happens on occasion. You can tell when the conditions are ripe, but you don't necessarily know when and if.
Epidemiologically we can get a similar phenomena. The stage can be set for a catastrophic illness to hit. The biological organisms are plentiful, and they can be vulnerable in myriad known and unknown ways. Genetic material suddenly happens that finds a species as a host and perhaps devastates it. The likelihood that catastrophic sheet will happen is proportional to things like population density, personal/cultural hygienic practices, and (as Justin mentioned) genetic diversity.
The good news is that we're getting smarter (e.g. CDC) and the taboos against breeding across races and cultures are being torn down. The more genetically diverse we are as a population, the more likely that any one pathogen won't be able to wipe a significant portion of the population out. But make no mistake about it; epidemics and pandemics will happen. It's just the if, when, and how bad that is the question.
I wouldn't lie awake at night worrying about it. In the long run, these plagues tend to be a good thing. Of course that matters greatly on whether you are the survivor or a victim.
I'm not as hopeful (right now) about what we're doing with the biodiversity on the planet. I think redistributing CO2 back to its previous equilibrium pales in comparison to what can or might happen if biodiversity reaches a critically lower threshold. Our planet can be very robust, but not under all extreme conditions.
I am a huge proponent of control of baby emissions. Who wants to live in a stinky smoky crowded world bereft of beauty, even if we can? What kind of response is that to the incredible luck we have to exist, and to exist in such a fragile, wonderful ecosystem? Biodiversity and natural wonder are the most precious things that exist.
That said, I read a book called the Population Bomb or something like that years ago, from the 70s. Basically, the world can't sustain a third of the current population and famine and catastrophy will destory us in an epic disaster by, oh the 90s or something. Turns out that we're not good at predicting disasters.
The thing to stress here is that systems aren't static. With 60's technology maybe we can't live in the 90s. I dunno, but it doesn't matter. As the population grows, food supply increases in response. It's supply and demand. When supply is outstretched, then demand will shrink, whether that takes people starving or not. Equilibrium will be reestablished; the question is when and at what cost? I'd do it now, and save what's still beautiful. If we wait, especially if we CHEAT, we could get into real trouble. We are currently cheating with, say, fossil fuels. If we didn't use them, equilibrium would be more stable because growth would be slower and there would be no sudden stop. If we manage to masively over extend our population THEN supplies drop precipitously, that won't be pretty. Economists tell us that as the supply goes down, we'll find less productive sources more profitable and these will come online and enable a controlled withdrawal rather than a crash, but I do believe we're living beyond our means and a lot of that is gas fueled. Just think about our food, which is fertilized, farmed, and transported by gas. We eat a lot more than the sun can produce and that will have to contract or we'll be planting the whole earth--at great losses. I don't know if we can easter-island the earth but I don't want to find out (the inhabitants overgrew the fragile habitat and ended up felling all the trees, ecological disaster ensued).
On the plus side, now and then 99% of species go extinct and the result may be something cool like mammals. We're pretty awesome I think. So crash or no, life will go on for a while, I would just prefer to do it with, oh, snow leopards and such.
