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No burn out
Guterl 12 – Fred Guterl, Executive Editor of Scientific American, Former Senior Editor at Newsweek, Professor at Princeton University, The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, p. 1-2
Over the next few years, the bigger story turned out not to be SARS, which trailed off quickly, bur avian influenza, or bird flu. It had been making the rounds among birds in Southeast Asia for years. An outbreak in 1997 Hong Kong and another in 2003 each called for the culling of thousands of birds and put virologists and health workers into a tizzy. Although the virus wasn't much of a threat to humans, scientists fretted over the possibility of a horrifying pandemic. Relatively few people caught the virus, but more than half of them died. What would happen if this bird flu virus made the jump to humans? What if it mutated in a way that allowed it to spread from one person to another, through tiny droplets of saliva in the air? One bad spin of the genetic roulette wheel and a deadly new human pathogen would spread across the globe in a matter of days. With a kill rate of 60 percent, such a pandemic would be devastating, to say the least.
Scientists were worried, all right, but the object of their worry was somewhat theoretical. Nobody knew for certain if such a supervirus was even possible. To cause that kind of damage to the human population, a flu virus has to combine two traits: lethality and transmissibility. The more optimistically minded scientists argued that one trait precluded the other, that if the bird flu acquired the ability to spread like wildfire, it would lose its ability to kill with terrifying efficiency. The virus would spread, cause some fever and sniffles, and take its place among the pantheon of ordinary flu viruses that come and go each season.
The optimists, we found out last fall, were wrong. Two groups of scientists working independently managed to create bird flu viruses in the lab that had that killer combination of lethality and transmissibility among humans. They did it for the best reasons, of course—to find vaccines and medicines to treat a pandemic should one occur, and more generally to understand how influenza viruses work. If we're lucky, the scientists will get there before nature manages to come up with the virus herself, or before someone steals the genetic blueprints and turns this knowledge against us.
Influenza is a natural killer, but we have made it our own. We have created the conditions for new viruses to flourish—among pigs in factory farms and live animal markets and a connected world of international trade and travel—and we've gone so far as to fabricate the virus ourselves. Flu is an excellent example of how we have, through our technologies and our dominant presence on the planet, begun to multiply the risks to our own survival.
2nc at: can’t get deference Deference applies to patents
Liu 16 [Cory Liu, Law Clerk, Hon. Danny J. Boggs, United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit; J.D., Harvard Law “Chevron's Domain And The Rule Of Law,” Texas Review of Law & Politics20.2 (Spring 2016): 391-420]
Another example of a skirmish over Chevron's domain deals with patent law. Courts do not currently give Chevron deference to the United States Patent and Trademark Office when it examines patents, but a number of scholars have begun to challenge this thinking. In a 2007 law review article, Professors Stuart Benjamin and Arti Rai argued that “the analysis in Mead suggests that Chevron may be the appropriate standard for patent denials.”121 More recently, Professor Melissa Wasserman set forth a highly detailed argument for why the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act, passed in 2011, evinces a congressional intent for courts to follow Chevron when reviewing the Patent and Trademark Office's decisions.122 On the other hand, Professor Orin Kerr has argued strongly against the application of Chevron because patent law predates the modern administrative state and operates using different mechanisms.123 The Federal Circuit--which has near-exclusive jurisdiction over patent appeals124--has yet to apply Chevron in the context of patent law. Nevertheless, the vigorous debate between these professors provides another example of how the malleable, case-by-case inquiry set forth in Mead, Barnhart, and King can result in increased litigation and uncertainty over the scope of Chevron's domain
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