Sometimes I wonder about how smart these people are. Why on earth would you replicate a virus from 1918??? Yeah, it kills. I don't need to know why, just keep it away from me!!!
 

You *can* but none of the rest of us will be around to read it.

Idiots.
 

Oh yeah, Lori. Why didn't I think of that?
 

The Stand was one of the best yet creepiest books I ever read. I'd never thought about how fast a virus could spread before I read that book! Get me my face masks!
 

I'm starting to think maybe we ought to move underground as well. Have you read/seen Outbreak? Similar idea, although not scientist initiated. It just floors me that "man" thinks "they" can control everything.
 

Are these the same monkeys with vasectomies that somehow managed to get another monkey pregnant?

God help us all. No really, I mean it. I want the hand of God to come down & help us just like in The Stand. The biggest case of Deus Ex Machina I ever saw.
 

There is a critical question as to what they mean by "reconstruction" in the article. My understanding is that there is no actual virus sample left from the "1918" pandemic. If that is true, then the reconstruction is really just a designer flu that tells us more about the designers than the flu.
It always fascinates me that they note the flue occurred at the end of WWI without make the connection that flu strikes harder on people with bad health, weakened immune systems and greater stress on them, etc, etc. And then never notice that in 1918 a lot of the world was undergoing its fourth year of poor diet, stress, and all the other accompanying factors of world war. I wonder what the 1918 flu would have been like had it struck in say, 1928.
All that aside, I wonder how it is that scientists can play these games without some sort of control or oversight.