Mad Scientists Threaten Humanity
Attempts to rein in scientists’
ambitions are too little, too late
This headline is no idle threat. They already gave us nuclear weapons. And they killed seven million people with Covid-19. Don’t think for a moment that their potential to invent a global catastrophe is now under control, especially when dangerous capabilities are promoted by rogue regimes or enabled by feckless government watchdogs.
We’re not saying that every scientist working on “dual use” technologies is like a cartoon mad scientist snickering with dastardly plans to destroy the world; certainly the vast majority go to work each day with good intentions and perhaps noble motives to cure diseases and help their fellow man. Thank God for scientists who work tirelessly to understand diseases, save lives, and alleviate suffering. But it only takes a few to go rogue. Traditions in Big Government and Big Science create perverse incentives that, left unchecked, could make Covid-19 look like a spring sneeze. Big Science (consisting of journal editors, academic deans and lobbyists who presume to “speak for science”) has an insatiable appetite for government funding and an unfettered desire to push limits. And when most scientists are atheists and evolutionists, who can tell them “Thou shalt not” or “Love your neighbor as yourself” when a Nobel Prize or a government grant dangles in front of their wistful eyes? There is also pressure to keep ahead of other countries.
History Lesson
Even a free nation can be pushed to develop deadly weapons for self defense. This is how World War II ended. America was racing Germany to get nuclear weapons. In hindsight, most historians count it fortunate that the USA won that arms race because it saved a million American soldiers who would have died invading Japan, and hastened Japan’s surrender, launching the post-war Baby Boom (see Prager U video describing the bomb as the “least awful” solution to the crisis). But the Soviets soon had nuclear weapons and the technology became increasingly deadly. A nuclear war today could threaten almost all life on the planet save cockroaches. Just wait till Iran gets nuclear weapons, chanting “Death to Israel” and “Death to America” and sells their products to other rogue nations determined to exterminate their enemies. What a dangerous world “science” has bequeathed to us.
It’s always been this way to some extent; the Romans and Greeks developed weapons (long bows, Greek fire, catapults) to gain advantages in war. European nations in the Scientific Revolution often steered their research institutions toward military needs, usually for defensive but sometimes offensive purposes. Never before, though, has the whole world been threatened with extinction due to scientific research. Bioweapons, more insidious than nuclear weapons, leave no mushroom cloud. Invisible, silent and deadly, designed viruses could be unleashed on the world that, like the broomsticks in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, multiply in human bodies and spread through the air. It would be difficult to tell where they came from or whether they are natural or artificial. The scientists who created them might be unable to stop them or develop countermeasures in time. The unseen, indiscriminate killing machines could run their course for years, leaving tens or hundreds of millions in their wake.
The Covid-19 Scandal as a Case Study
It took a long time for Big Science to admit complicity in the development of the Covid-19 virus. Leading institutions scoffed at or even censored claims that the USA had funded the research in the Wuhan lab (see Evolution News article). More recently, these institutions have softened their denials, admitting that the lab leak theory was a possibility while rationalizing the dangerous research. Senator Rand Paul has been in the forefront of proving from documents and emails that Anthony Fauci steered government funds from NIAID that he controlled under NIH to Wuhan specifically for the development of coronaviruses with increased virulence and transmissibility (see Rand Paul in this interview that is very pertinent to today’s topic, and new report from the House Oversight Committee, 17 May 2024).
Fauci, the highest-paid government bureaucrat in the country, repeatedly denied all charges angrily before Congress. Now, despite lying to Congress and to the world, Fauci is retired in comfort with no accountability for the millions of deaths that came from his “science” projects. No one else involved in this massive fraud and cover-up of an engineered pandemic virus that killed millions, including NIH Director at the time Francis Collins and Eco Health Alliance leader Peter Daczak who deployed the funds, and Big Science journal editors who censored the evidence, has suffered any consequences.
New Regulations: Too Little, Too Late
The two leading mouthpieces of Big Science, the journals Nature and Science, wrote about new U.S. government rules to monitor research on “gain of function” microbes or viruses dubbed “potential pandemic pathogens” (PPP). These two institutions, like Tweedledeedum and Tweetledeedee in terms of their political biases, both welcome the new clarity in the regulations. Any improvement in oversight, though, won’t take effect till May 2025, and a lot can happen in a year.
Big Science has mixed motives. They don’t want to be blamed for a mistake, but they hate being told “no, you cannot research that.” Remember how they fought the 14-day rule for research on human embryos and pushed for extending the deadline? Remember their desire for unlimited freedom to create human brain organoids that worried bioethicists? Remember the damning testimony that they were buying human embryos from abortion mills for research? Oh, they just want to “help” people, while visions of Nobel Prizes dance like sugarplums in their heads. American scientists watch with envy their colleagues from totalitarian nations like China, torn between ethics and FOMO (fear of missing out).
New Rules: Too Little, Too Late?
US funders to tighten oversight of controversial ‘gain-of-function’ research (Nature, 7 May 2024). Notice the tension in the editors’ minds between what is dangerous for the world and what scientists want to do.
Manipulating pathogens such as viruses inside an enclosed laboratory facility, sometimes by making them more transmissible or harmful (called gain-of-function research), can help scientists to assess their risk to society and develop countermeasures such as vaccines or antivirals. But the worry is that such pathogens could accidentally escape the laboratory or even become weaponized by bad actors.
Who, you might ask, do they recognize as “bad actors”? Certainly not the free world’s scientists in white lab coats, right? What counts as “bad” to scientists bereft of any standard of morality other than evolutionary self-interest?
Policymakers have had a difficult time developing a clearly-articulated review system that evaluates the risks and benefits of this research, while ensuring that fundamental science needed to prepare for the next pandemic and to advance medicine isn’t paralyzed. The latest policy, released on 6 May by the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), is the next chapter in a long-running balancing act in the United States between totally banning high-risk pathogen research and assessing it with standards that some say are too ambiguous.
As stated, deciding on a balance between legitimate research and dangerous research is an ongoing concern. Some “bad actors” however, whether in Iran, North Korea, China, Russia or Washington, will have no such compunctions. Standards, furthermore, are worthless without enforcement and accountability. The watchdogs must be diligent to do their jobs with integrity, and must be free of collusion, political bias, conflict of interest, or corruption. Given recent political scandals, how confident can citizens be of that?
White House overhauls rules for risky pathogen studies (Science, 7 May 2024). This journal is relieved that the new rules are less restrictive than earlier proposals. Notice the subtext, ‘Don’t tell scientists what they cannot do.’ Notice also how they still cast doubt on US involvement in Wuhan.
The White House is tightening federal oversight of so-called gain-of-function (GOF) studies that could enhance risky viruses in ways that increase their ability to cause a pandemic. It is also overhauling rules for a broader category of federally funded research on dangerous pathogens that is considered “dual use,” because the results could be used as bioweapons.
The new rules, spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic and concerns about U.S.-funded studies in Wuhan, China, that manipulated bat viruses distantly related to SARS-CoV-2, will expand the number of studies that must undergo special reviews. But the rules, released yesterday by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), are narrower than a proposal floated last year that many scientists feared would complicate studies on low-risk pathogens such as cold viruses and herpesviruses.
“Scientists feared.” Yes, the argument can be made that researchers on cold and flu viruses need flexibility and freedom. Never before, however, have labs needed to genetically modify pathogens to study them. Vaccine research has a long history from Jenner through Pasteur and beyond. The editors beg the question that the only way to do “studies” on pathogens is to genetically manipulate them to be more dangerous—more transmissible, more deadly. Why is that assumed?
Is the following scenario unbelievable? The US creates a deadly version of herpesvirus to beat the Chinese who are working on one, but it escapes a lab accidentally through carelessness and kills millions of Americans instead. Is this not part of what the Chinese suffered when the Covid-19 virus escaped? The communist government locked down its citizens for weeks and months, increasing the suffering.
The report in Science ends on a less-than-reassuring note that regulations cannot forestall a disastrous error.
Some critics of GOF research still have concerns. For example, Harvard University epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch and others say NIH should regularly release details on the risky studies it reviewed but deemed not GOF. The policy instead requires only annual public reporting on funded Category 2 projects. Rutgers University molecular biologist Richard Ebright is also troubled that under the new rules Ebola virus, SARS-CoV-2, and monkeypox are apparently not considered PPPs. The policy is “complex and convoluted, essentially guaranteeing failure” because it is open to interpretation, he wrote on X (formerly Twitter).
Even supporters of the new policy agree that it is complicated and might not work exactly as planned. Time will tell, Gronvall says. “We’ll have to see real case examples of how well this works.”
What “real case examples” does he have in mind? Is this a credible future headline? ‘GM herpesvirus escapes; ten million die.’ Better tighten those regulations again. But keep the funding flowing, please.
Here’s a scary story from July 2023: secret Chinese biolab found operating in California, with vials of HIV and ebola viruses handled carelessly (New York Post, also reported on many mainstream media outlets like the AP and NBC and USA Today). Fairly ‘shocking’ last year, but largely forgotten now.
Perverse Ideologies
Another nightmare scenario should be considered. There are leftist scientists with misanthropic worldviews who believe the deaths of millions of people would be a good thing! (source). A guest artist for CEH, J. Beverly Greene, quotes one of them, Eric Pianka, in this drawing:

Dr Eric Pianka, ardent evolutionist and genocide advocate, by J B Greene. Used by permission.
He’s not alone within academia. Evolution News reported in 2006 that the Texas Academy of Sciences gave Pianka a standing ovation for his speech about how to kill off 90% of humanity with an airborne virus.
Another quote illustrated by Greene came from your friendly TV liberal, Bill Maher.
‘Just start with everyone else,’ Pianka and Maher must be thinking. They don’t want to set an example and commit harakiri first. Evolution is, of course, a selfish worldview built on Malthusian notions (see “Darwin and Malthus were wrong,” 13 May 2016).
People like this justify their misanthropic views from the myth of overpopulation (see Jerry Bergman’s articles from 26 April 2019 and 10 April 2024, and my article from 16 Nov 2022) or from worries about anthropomorphic climate change. One of our contributors, Dr J.Y. Jones, wrote a dystopian novel about a world given over to radicals in the Animal Rights movement (14 Nov 2023). Bioethicist Wesley Smith outlined other cases of “frightening science” going on today in “reckless biotech” (Evolution News).
It’s worth noting that all these voices calling for mass death of humans come from the political left. They all get their morals from evolutionary scientism and from Deep Time, seeing human beings as sort of an afterthought in the grand Darwinian scheme of nature. Human beings went off the rails and threaten the planet, they think, so killing off 90% of the population would be no worse than other mass extinctions that evolutionists believe have happened from time to time. “Humans are no better than bacteria,” Pianka said. But how does an amoral worldview like evolution call any behavior bad? In the evolutionary worldview, Stuff Happens, and whatever happens is neither good nor bad.
WHO Is Trustworthy with the Fate of Mankind?
Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is calling all conservatives and Christians to oppose a new initiative by the World Health Organization to assert global control of pandemic responses (hear Senator Ron Johnson with Perkins). Senator Johnson called WHO’s performance during the Covid-19 pandemic “dismal” so why trust the corrupt organization now? If adopted as a foreign treaty by the Biden administration without Congressional approval, this United Nations entity would gain power over lockdowns and vaccination requirements, diminishing personal health autonomy, and would mandate redistribution of health resources. Footnote: the head of WHO, Tedros Ghebreyesus, is a Marxist.
Sweet dreams.
I lost three friends in the pandemic, and tragically, their family members in some cases were prevented from going to the hospital to visit them in their hour of need. All of us have stories like this. The mistakes made by “experts” in science and health care over Covid-19 are numerous, heartless and unforgivable. Big Science has shown its ability to run roughshod over the rights of millions of people.
The dystopia of Big Science that worried C.S. Lewis (watch this video) is with us, and without a revival of Christian principles, can only get worse. Fallen man without God has no restraints. Christians have faith that God sustains the world and will never allow an extinction of all humanity outside his permissive will and plan for the End Times. The book of Revelation ends in a literal bloodbath under the Antichrist, showing for all eternity where rebellion leads. Lewis believed that hell was necessary as a backstop, restraining evil from its potential bottomless pit. In that sense, hell is merciful for beings given the choice to love their Creator or to reject him. It’s like telling rebels, ‘You can go this far in your rebellion, but no further.’
We end with a quote from Proverbs 8, where Solomon personifies Wisdom at the creation of the world. Notice the benevolence of Wisdom, interpreted by Paul as embodied in Christ (I Corinthians 1:22-25). Notice the reference to intelligent design in verse 30. Contrast this benevolent passage to the quotes by Pianka and Maher above.
30 Then I was beside Him, as a master workman;
And I was His delight daily,
Rejoicing always before Him,
31 Rejoicing in the world, His earth,
And having my delight in the sons of mankind.
32 “Now then, sons, listen to me,
For blessed are those who keep my ways.
33 Listen to instruction and be wise,
And do not neglect it.
34 Blessed is the person who listens to me,
Watching daily at my gates,
Waiting at my doorposts.
35 For one who finds me finds life,
And obtains favor from the Lord.
36 But one who sins against me injures himself;
All those who hate me love death.”
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