Quote Originally Posted by Presley Cannady View Post
Newsflash. Homo sapiens is a part of nature. So the question is which do you prefer? A world where mankind isn't intelligent enough to contemplate, execute and study--under controlled conditions--evolutionary pathways of pathology or a world where we just stumble across it? 1918 wasn't a fun year.
Research is important. No argument, but 1918 was most likely far smaller than a similar event that is apt to happen in our lifetime. Bringing a super-virus into a world with no immunity to the same is not science, it is opening Pandora's box.

I've seen estimates that as high as 90% of the North American populace were killed in pandemics from the time Columbus landed in the Caribbean and when the first settlers arrived in Virginia. They thought they had found a wilderness, but had in fact arrived in a ghost town.

I am sure the scientists who create the next virus to have such an effect will rationalize how their work was to advance science as you describe, and it was only some accident or intentional abuse of their work that led to the following disaster. Some things are best left uninvented.