Is making any species extinct a good idea? If so, why?
I mean, if it had been destroyed in '86, we'd never have sequenced it. What more info can we get from it 10 or 20 years from now?
Also, this whole "debacle" is massively overblown. Note that a) the amules were all still securely sealed, and in appropriate storage... it's just that they should have been known, and put in recorded storage.
For that matter, where's whatever you were looking for at home? Or when was the last time your boss asked you to find something that you spend hours, or weeks, on and off, looking for? Now let's talk about the NIH campus in Bethesda, with (depending on your sources) somewhere betwwn 18,000 and 35,000 people who work there every day, and sixty or eighty buildings, including a large hospital. That is *not* a small place to misplace something.
Oh, and I've yet to see or hear *anything* as to *why* it was left there. Was the team that was working on it laid off, or reorganized somewhere else?
No, destroying it all's a bad idea.
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