Word: toxins
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Human Factor, Greene's 22nd novel, combines the shadow world of spies and the games they play with a pervasive spiritual malaise. Secret codes and assassination by peanut-mold toxin entice the reader into the author's gloomy inner sanctum. As usual, the workmanship is superb-almost too good. At times the novel reads as if Greene had entered a Graham Greene write-alike contest. The principal character is British Intelligence Agent Maurice Castle-a surname that pointedly suggests the guarded and lonely aspects of both the man's profession and character. The settings include the nondescript...
...awesome properties. On the plus side, fast-breeder nuclear reactors, which are generally fueled with plutonium and U-238, can not only generate electricity but also produce more plutonium fuel than they consume. On the other hand, plutonium, even in tiny quantities, is searingly radioactive and ranks with botulin toxin as one of the world's most poisonous substances. Moreover, with as little as 12 Ibs. of plutonium, the right equipment and expertise in handling the stuff, almost any government-or terrorist outfit-could make a nuclear bomb...
...consider the probability that an inadvertently produced harmful organism might cause a laboratory infection, and let us assume the worst case: an E.coli strain producing a potent toxin absorbable from the gut, such a botulinus toxin. Such a strain would indeed present a real danger of laboratory infection. But there are a number of reasons to expect this danger to be less than that with the pathogens that are handled every day by medical bacteriologists...
...thus see that with a strain known to have added the gene for a potent toxin a serious laboratory infection requires the compounding of four low probabilities. With strains from shotgun experiments we have a fifth, very low probability, already mentioned: that an apparently harmless mammalian tissue will yield a dangerous product...
...risks thus seem very much smaller than the public has been led to believe. Nevertheless, it is important to keep all the probabilities low. For example, even if a toxin-producing strain could survive only very briefly in the gut, a large enough dose might meanwhile cause disease. Hence a major benefit from the current discussion could be the requirement that those working in this area learn and use the standard techniques of medical microbiology, at least until we have acquired much more experience...