Smallpox has killed a billion humans. That's more deaths than in all modern wars combined. Yet despite its virulence, smallpox typically kills only 30 percent of the population it infects. Naturally evolving pathogens keep enough victims around to kill again. Engineered pathogens can be different - as recent work in Australia has terrifyingly demonstrated. By inserting a mailorder gene into mousepox, scientists increased the death rate in mice to 100 percent. Even after vaccination, the rate was 60 percent. We don't know whether the mail-order gene would have the same effect with smallpox. But the very idea is an example of the fear that led Bill Joy to write his frightening piece "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us," published four years ago this month in Wired.
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