Black Death genetic code 'built'

[Atheist-Lite]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-15278366

Black Death genetic code 'built'

The genetic code of the germ that caused the Black Death has been reconstructed by scientists for the first time.

The researchers extracted DNA fragments of the ancient bacterium from the teeth of medieval corpses found in London.

They say the pathogen is the ancestor of all modern plagues.

The research, published in the journal Nature, suggests the 14th Century outbreak was also the first plague pandemic in history.

Humans have rarely encountered an enemy as devastating as the bacterium, Yersinia pestis. Between 1347 and 1351 it sparked the Black Death, an infection carried by fleas that spread rapidly across Europe killing around 50 million people.

Now scientists have uncovered some of the genetic secrets of the plague, thanks to DNA fragments drilled from the teeth of victims buried in a graveyard in London's East Smithfield.

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[Atheist-Lite]

I would have thought this was a popular topic around here?

[Clinton Huxley]

I would have thought this was a popular topic around here?

Nah, you can't eat it, drink it, smoke it or shag it. What's the use? You can't even shoot it, so Seth won't be interested...

[Azathoth]

You could weaponise it and infect joos so gawd might be

[Atheist-Lite]

You could weaponise it and infect joos so gawd might be

I'm more a universalist so I'm interested in the potential to weaponise it for everybody. Could it be done or was it something else, like ebola, that really caused the Black Death? This plague doesn't seem to have anywhere near the contagious lethality required for the task today?

[Feck]

You could weaponise it and infect joos so gawd might be

I'm more a universalist so I'm interested in the potential to weaponise it for everybody. Could it be done or was it something else, like ebola, that really caused the Black Death? This plague doesn't seem to have anywhere near the contagious lethality required for the task today?

give it some anti biotic resistance and it could still do some damage .

[Tensor]

You could weaponise it and infect joos so gawd might be

I'm more a universalist so I'm interested in the potential to weaponise it for everybody. Could it be done or was it something else, like ebola, that really caused the Black Death? This plague doesn't seem to have anywhere near the contagious lethality required for the task today?

The plague is far more devastating than Ebola could ever be, or at least it was before vaccination.

Ok well clearly this forum is in need of some education on biological warfare. Ideally you want a disease that has high mortality, that is renders the victim sick but not necessarily immobile, and that takes quite a while to kill them, about a week is good. Why because diseases like Ebola don't spread because they are so lethal and so debilitating that anyone with the disease quickly dies before they have a chance to spread it further than their very local environment (for the most part). Hence the black death has spread from Asia to Europe several times, and upon arrival infected an entire indigenous population pretty much across the board, ebola is a localised disease that is fairly easy to contain and has never really left Africa. The ideal disease would not be 100% fatal or at least would not cause death quickly (the sick utilise resources), it would also be most easily passed when the disease was in a symptomless phase, so that the vector carrier wasn't itself sick and could pass easily amongst populations. An added bonus would be that it somehow debilitated it's victims, making them require resources for the rest of their life and making them unable to participate in combat. But meh first things first. Of course contaminants where you want quick deaths such as battlefield diseases would require something like botulinus, however the indiscriminate nature of the toxin makes it hard to use strategically. Trust me I know!

I am working on the genetics of this disease alright, be patient.

[Atheist-Lite]

This is what you want?

http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001755.html

[Feck]

You only need a 60%-70% kill rate, as long as the symptomless (but contagious) phase one is long enough ,if in a matter of weeks 70% of the population died the survivors would be plunged into chaos to quickly to do much .
A battle field weapon doesn't even have to kill it just has to debilitate and do it quickly .

[Gawdzilla Sama]

How Black Death Kept Its Genes but Lost Its Killing Power [Video]

The newly sequenced genome of the plague-causing bacterium Yersinia pestis suggests human adaptations are what have kept this disease in check

From SciAm.

[GenesForLife]

:facepalm:

They haven't reconstructed the genetic code, they've reconstructed the genome. The genetic code is just the correspondence of triplet codons on mRNA to the amino acids that are incorporated into proteins during translation.