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Asked by FUTURE GAMER to Ellen, Elliot, Hazel, Rupesh, Thomas on 21 Jun 2016.
Question: Do you believe someone is making a biological chemical that might go wrong and might cause an apocalypse?
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Elliot Jokl answered on 21 Jun 2016:
I think that if someone really wanted to, the technology exists to develop a really nasty disease that could harm a lot of people if it were used as a weapon. I hope nobody is, and it would take some rather specialist skills and equipment to do, so I doubt that there is any intentional effort to make something like that.
For example, there is increasing concern about bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics – if you get infected with those there is no way to treat you and so you would get very sick. If someone wanted to, they could take a nasty bacteria and give it the gene or genes to make it resistant to antibiotics and try and spread it around to make lots of people very sick.
The even scarier thing is that bacteria can naturally develop ways to become resistant to antibiotics, without the help of our hypothetical supervillain. This is why you might have seen in the news that many scientists want governments to fund research into new antibiotics to keep us safe.
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Thomas Biggans answered on 22 Jun 2016:
As Elliot has said, it is certainly possible that someone somewhere is deliberately making something that could cause an apocalypse.
It is also theoretically possible that it might happen accidentally when a scientist is working with dangerous chemicals. However we are very aware when we’re working with something that is dangerous, they’re alot of rules and quite a bit of training a scientist has to go through to make sure that if anything goes wrong it won’t mean the end of the world. I trust that we’re taking enough precautions to avoid creating anything that destructive but if we did I also think we take enough care to make sure it is contained so we can destroy it before it gets out.
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