Word: viruses
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It’s 8:47 and a set of cells is ready to be transfected. April is in the process of creating mutants of the rabies-like virus she’s studying. She pipettes in snippets of mutant DNA, which will enter the cells, altering their cellular genome to express viral proteins...
...Along with habitat loss, the apes face threats from human population growth and a surge in the bush-meat trade - locals and organized traders killing wildlife to eat and sell - along with the spread of the Ebola virus, estimated to have killed about a third of the world's gorillas in the past 15 years. (Read why Ebola is killing gorillas...
...menacing replicant in the garage. A year later, Jack Finney fleshed out the premise in his novel The Body Snatchers, the source for the 1956 Invasion of... movie version and its three remakes. Alex Garland's script for 28 Days Later..., in 2002, blamed the plague on a virus injected into monkeys. In The Happening, two summers ago, M. Night Shyamalan reprised Romero's Crazies concept, except that the toxin is transmitted through the air, not the water, and turns its victims suicidal, not homicidal...
Romero expanded this premise into parable of a government experiment gone horribly wrong in wartime. He posited that a plane containing a deadly virus crashed in a lake near a small town; the military then takes drastic actions to contain it. Made during the Vietnam war, and just after the revelations of a My Lai massacre, the original Crazies had an unmissable Vietnam analogy: the military must destroy this village to save the country. The local folks could almost be seen as Vietnamese civilians, politicized by attacks on their village and fighting back by any means necessary. There's also...
...PNAS study undermines that hope. The key difference in this study was the presence of a single gene from the H3N2 human virus: the PB2 protein, which gave the hybrid viruses the ability to spread easily among the lab mice. Scientists think the protein may allow hybrid viruses to grow more efficiently in the lower temperatures of the upper respiratory tract, from which the virus can more easily spread to others. (The H5N1 virus tends to infect the lower respiratory tract in humans, where it can't easily get out and spread...