Everything Is Going to Kill Everybody Read Online Free PDF Page B

delicious. A company in San Diego called Epicyte is responsible for this terrible, terrible idea. They’ve accomplished this extremely unsettling feat by using a recently discovered and exceedingly rare class of human antibodies that attack sperm. When they found these antibodies—which I should remind you are described as “attacking” something inside your balls —Epicyte decided to take the road less traveled and, instead of taking the logical course and killing them with fire, they opted to splice them into corn crops.

Other Epicyte Inventions
Black Death by Chocolate Cake
Coke Ebola
AIDS burgers
    But I digress. Epicyte isn’t pure evil; they actually want to help. The general idea Epicyte is working on is to create a hormone-free contraceptive that places reproductive responsibility on both men and women equally, rather than sticking with the status quo, which is asking women to take daily insanity pills so sex can be fun again. Epicyte has also isolated an antiherpes antibody and spliced that gene into the corn as well. So their product will not only serve as a sexual lubricant, but also as a contraceptive and an STD inhibitor. Epicyte president Mitch Hein explains how it works in bizarrely dance-centric terms:
Essentially, the antibodies are attracted to surface receptors on the sperm. They latch on and make each sperm so heavy it cannot move forward. It just shakes about as if it was doing the lambada.
    Aside from his strange obsession with the Forbidden Dance, that’s an accurate description. The antibodies don’t kill sperm, they just render it inactive. It’s not like you accidentally eat the wrong corn dog once and so can never have babies again—the antibodies actually have to be continually present to function. If you stop eating the corn, the effect will gradually fade.
    And before you start thinking that’s comforting, let’s revisit what we learned from the genetically modified foods section: Scientists have proven, over and over again, that it is practically impossible to fully contain GM crops. They will escape and, what’s worse, could actually become the dominant strain of a crop through purely natural reproduction, not to mention the possibility of crosspollinating into other related plants. When you consider that corn is the single largest crop on the planet—sustaining not only our own food, but that of our livestock and, thanks to ethanol, even our vehicles—that’s a pretty big field to contaminate. Since it’s not an “if” but a “when” the contraceptive corn escapes, that means there is a distinct possibility that the largest crop on the planet will eventually render you infertile if you eat it, forcing you to choose between food or babies.
    Food is delicious and babies are loud. And if the question is “Would you rather have a Coke or a kid? A sandwich or a lifelong commitment?” we all know the answer most men would choose. (Hint: It’s the dooming-humanity one.)
    Not enough examples to worry you yet? OK, one more: There’s a popular theory right now that obesity, conventionally blamed on too much pie and couches, could actually be caused by a virus. A fat virus.
    It started twenty years ago, when an Indian scientist named Nikhil Dhurandhar found something odd: An epidemic had struck the local chicken population, killing thousands of birds and leaving behind giant, fatty corpses. Eventually a bizarre type of adenovirus was found to be causing the deaths and now, twenty years after the chickenpocalypse, it’s happening again.
    In humans.
    Another strain of the same disease, called AD-36, is being found in increasing numbers in human fat tissue. And, as Professor Richard Atkinson of the University of Wisconsin found in a related study, it does have the same obesity effect in humans as it did in chickens. He tested five hundred people for the AD-36 strain and found that those infected by the virus weighed noticeably more than the uninfected. Even after isolating and