{"id":333,"date":"2010-04-09T15:46:05","date_gmt":"2010-04-09T14:46:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/?p=333"},"modified":"2010-04-09T15:46:05","modified_gmt":"2010-04-09T14:46:05","slug":"slightly-gratuitous-abuse-of-the-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/04\/09\/slightly-gratuitous-abuse-of-the-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Slightly Gratuitous Abuse of the Blog&#8230;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Someone&#8217;s just asked me if it&#8217;d be possible to design a virus specifically to kill people with a certain given genetic signature.\u00a0 I have a feeling that the South African security services tried to cook up an ethnically specific biological agent in the &#8217;80s, but am not sure whether this is an urban myth.\u00a0 Any suggestions?<\/p>\n<p>Similarly, would it be possible to engineer a virus to deliver some kind of gene therapy for this or that condition, and then release it into the wild?\u00a0 (I&#8217;ll ignore the moral problems of treatment without consent &#8211; I&#8217;m just interested in the possibility at the moment.)\u00a0 Has there been anything published on this theme?*<\/p>\n<p>*I&#8217;m sure there has.\u00a0 What I actually meant was, &#8220;Could someone give me a reference or two?&#8221;.<!--TrendMD v2.4.8--><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Someone&#8217;s just asked me if it&#8217;d be possible to design a virus specifically to kill people with a certain given genetic signature.\u00a0 I have a feeling that the South African security services tried to cook up an ethnically specific biological agent in the &#8217;80s, but am not sure whether this is an urban myth.\u00a0 Any [&#8230;]<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"btn btn-secondary understrap-read-more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/2010\/04\/09\/slightly-gratuitous-abuse-of-the-blog\/\">Read More&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[472,1241],"tags":[317],"class_list":["post-333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thinking-aloud","category-tinfoil-hat","tag-research"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stg-blogs.bmj.com\/medical-ethics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}