Scary Science Stories #1

While we’re listening to Michael Crichton talk about bad science, let’s add a couple of practical examples.

The story you are about to read is true.

Consider the following sequence of events:

1. Rhesus monkeys are out running around in the wild doing rhesus monkey things.
2. Somehow these monkeys develop a virus that we will refer to as Virus W.
3. Virus W doesn’t usually kill the monkeys, so it spreads widely in their population.
4. Humans come and capture some of these rhesus monkeys.
5. They are then turned over to scientists.
6. The scientists vivisect the monkeys to obtain their kidneys.
7. The kidneys are used to culture a vaccine to cure a disease that harms humans: polio.
8. Unbeknownst to the scientists who cultured the vaccine in rhesus monkey kidneys, the process they are using does not kill Virus W, which has not yet been identified by human science.
9. Virus W piggybacks on the polio vaccine.
10. The infected vaccine is given to tens or hundreds of millions of human beings, stretching over decades.
11. Virus W comes to exist in 23% of the human population (whether globally or in America isn’t clear).
12. Virus W is passable from one generation to the next and thus will persist in the human race for generations.
13. Fortunately, Virus W is not normally harmful to humans, though a slight correlation with a certain kind of cancer may exist.

It is not clear if Virus W was present in the human population prior to the polio vaccine distributions, but there is some evidence it was, though to a lesser extent than afterwards.

The real name of Virus W is Simian vacuolating virus 40, or just Simian virus 40, or just SV40.

This story is true, or strongly thought to be true and not very controversial  so far as I have been able to determine.

This is probably because SV40 does not normally kill humans.

If it did kill humans, then the polio vaccine makers would likely be circling the wagons and impeding investigations of the matter–and possibly lying about their vaccine cultivation methods in order to cover themselves. All those would be very human reactions.

And they would serve to make the matter controversial.

Like Scary Science Story #2.

I’ll tell it that one to you tomorrow.

(N.B. People who can guess what Scary Science Story #2 is likely to be about, do not spoil it for others in the comments box below!)