I got this from a thread on the diybio board a few days ago. It's a recent article from an online magazine called “Homeland Security Today” and it warns against zombies.


link

It reminds me of the saying “To a man with a hammer everything looks like a nail”. Could it be that a “Homeland Security Today” reader with an AR in his closet keeps an extra eye out for zombies?

Maybe somebody should tell the “Intelligence Community” they need not worry too much about this.

Zombies aren't real.

-dR

Well, theoretically, if one could engineer a virus that attacked certain parts of the brain, one could enbgineer a "zombie outbreak"...

The thing would die out almost immediately, though. A host with no higher thought functions and high risk of coma doesn't make a very good infector. Also it would be complicated as all hell.

If you read the original history of where the concept of zombies came from (the paper 'The Ethnobiology of Haitian Zombie' covers this, see below) the idea of biologically engineered zombies is kinda ridiculous. The idea of zombies being dead, came from toxins that slowed the heart rate down dramatically, and then the person was supposed to be dead. They then buried them as part of a ritual process. The idea of a 'mung' braindead zombie then came about because the person that was buried was starved of oxygen, and this screws with the brain. So you have two concepts: the idea of the dead returning to life, and braindead zombies. Both of which arised from a combination of neurotoxin, oxygen starvation, ritual, and folklore.

From here the concept (think of it as a meme) has mutated into zombie viral vectors, when it never was the case that the conceptual idea and myth of zombies were ever from viruses. It's a chain of piss-poor analogical reasoning and folklore perpetuated by our terrible science-lite media.

Link to paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6668953

As I recall part of the zombie experience also had to do with that a person who was declared a zombie became a non person to his/her community.

This meant that they could walk around freely in the community but everyone treated them as if they didn't exist. So after a while they adopted the role.

-dR

If the zombies do happen, it’s going to take biohackers to solve the problem.

That or shotguns. Hundreds of first-person shooters can't be wrong.

Soviet zombies from the 1940s



The "head without a body" part I'm not so sure about. Seems to me it's more likely to be propaganda for the achievements of the glorious state/ideology. Dunno.

-dR