I sure hope people are sharing this research with Zimbabwe. They’ve got endemic marburg virus to deal with. The frank truth is, for something like Ebola, sequencing it isn’t going to change how you weaponize it. You weaponize it by breeding it and then blowing it up at low heat so it spreads over a large area. Any contact with it leads to infection, it’s a nasty bug.
This is different, than say, anthrax weaponization. You can go to cattle farms, dig in the dirt, and culture it, and you will eventually isolate anthrax. That strain, however, won’t really go into spore form well and won’t be super pathogenic. You’ll need to infect a bunch of sheep with it and try to get a better strain, like they did in my hometown at Ft. Detrick. Then you use specific drying methods to make it turn into weapons grade spores. That’s why specific strains are important with anthrax and you could theoretically use something like CRISPR to make your own that’s better than what you can find digging in the dirt.
I sure hope people are sharing this research with Zimbabwe. They’ve got endemic marburg virus to deal with. The frank truth is, for something like Ebola, sequencing it isn’t going to change how you weaponize it. You weaponize it by breeding it and then blowing it up at low heat so it spreads over a large area. Any contact with it leads to infection, it’s a nasty bug.
This is different, than say, anthrax weaponization. You can go to cattle farms, dig in the dirt, and culture it, and you will eventually isolate anthrax. That strain, however, won’t really go into spore form well and won’t be super pathogenic. You’ll need to infect a bunch of sheep with it and try to get a better strain, like they did in my hometown at Ft. Detrick. Then you use specific drying methods to make it turn into weapons grade spores. That’s why specific strains are important with anthrax and you could theoretically use something like CRISPR to make your own that’s better than what you can find digging in the dirt.