TST 1/17/23 - Bees are a Zero Sum Game

The year 2022 began with a story from National Geographic about the quest to create contagious vaccines, research that began in 1999 with rabbits. Soon after the FDA announced gene-edited beef cattle may be able to “better withstand hot weather.” Genetically altered mosquitoes have also been experimented with for nearly 15 years, utilized to carry, yet again, vaccines. Now 2023, the year of the rabbit, began with a story about an FDA approved vaccination for bees. Those fans of the X Files certainly may find it interesting that the use of vaccines and genetic engineering, particularly relating to bees and corn, is strikingly familiar. It’s the plot of Fight the Future. Alien colonists have been on earth since before man. An alliance was later created with a small group of humans that would allow them to survive colonization by becoming alien-human hybrids. A group known as Syndicate plans to release the virus on a global scale by using genetically modified corn, which transmits the material to bees that then transport it to humans. The virus-material given by the colonists, however, triggers gestation of an alien creature that kills the human host. We know this virus famously as Purity or Black Oil or Black Cancer. In the later seasons of the X Files we learn that the aliens planned to use the Spartan virus, which was placed in smallpox vaccines, to edit human DNA and destroy what we call the immune system. The use of genetically altered mosquitoes to transmit genetic material to other mosquitoes, causing sterility, has already been achieved and is certainly a danger to animals and humans, especially when the insects can be engineered to carry any genetic material or biological agent. The announcement of a USDA bee-vaccine to be added to a colony’s food, which will then transmit to their queen and offspring, can easily through pollination make it into our food supply - a reversal of the process in the X Files. Creating a panic over a variety of viruses, or an omnivirus, cultivates a willing response from the public to be injected with material intending to alter human DNA - a universal vaccine. In the TV show Utopia it was a sterilizing agent, as is the original justification for genetically modified mosquitoes - to sterilize other insects. The 1999 experiments on rabbits off the coast of Spain used “self-spreading vaccine against two viral diseases” - rabbit hemorrhagic disease and myxomatosis. The National Geographic article reported how “self-spreading vaccine virus could evolve to jump species or cause other unknown consequences in wild and domestic animal populations and, perhaps, even in humans.” Other self-spreading vaccines being worked on included ebola and bovine tuberculosis. The Zero Sum game being played here also involves other technologies such as edible electronics, which include password pills and tiny machines to monitor organs. Then there is smart dust. The Human Genome Project which sequenced every piece of human DNA has now been matched with the first functional map of genes expressed in human cells, tying each gene to its specific job. This allows for far more precise gene editing. But scientists aren’t simply content with altering what already exists; they intend to bring species back from the dead and revive the dead, but at a price. In 1928 Soviet scientists reanimated the five-sense of a severed dog head using a circulatory machine. Successful, they moved on to draining the blood from an incapacitated living dog which died for ten minutes. A dialysis-like machine then pumped blood back into the animal, triggering heart rate and respiration. Now scientists at Yale University have done something similar. In 2019 they reanimated dead pig brains with a machine called BrainEx, though they acknowledged there was no 'life'. On August 4, 2022, Yale scientists then brought pigs dead for an hour back to 'life' using a circulatory...