–Ayooshi Mitra, Amity University Kolkata
With the horror with which Covid-19 is spreading presently, the story of U.S President Donald Trump’s suggestion that the Coronavirus was either engineered intentionally or was the result of a laboratory accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China, has brought forward terror in the minds of people. According to a Nature Medicine research report, the release of this virus may have been an accident, but the pathogen is not a jumble of known viruses that can be expected to be designed in a lab. With COVID-19 bringing the economies of the countries to their knees, all leaders worldwide are now aware that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles. But what’s even more concerning, is that engineering a virus no longer requires an extensive government lab. Thanks to technological advancement in genetic engineering, all the instruments needed to create a virus have become so inexpensive, simple, and readily available, that they can be used by any rogue scientist or college students, creating an even greater threat. Experiments that once could only have been conducted behind the secured walls of government and corporate laboratories, can now be effectively done at home with equipment found on Amazon. Genetic engineering has become standardized– with all its potential for good and bad.
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TARGETED THERAPY TO THE RESCUE?
-Biswadeep Sen, Amity University Kolkata Lung cancer has troubled scientists for decades now. But with the passing of each decade, a newer method of its detection and treatment has emerged. Now as we set foot onto the second decade of the 21st century, we are successful in treating selective targets of the NSCLC. Mutant EGFR […]