ON SNAKES & POLITICS

It is very sad... Instituto Butantan, the grand Brazilian biomedical research center is destroyed by Fire last Saturday.



Along with it is the world's largest scientific collection of dead snakes, spiders and scorpions that served as the main source for research on many species. It is also a state-supported producer of vaccines against many infectious diseases, such as rabies, hepatitis, botulism, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis and tuberculosis, as well as polyvalent and monovalent antivenoms against the bites of snakes, lizards, bees, scorpions and spiders.

It's a day of mourning for most scientists and researchers. The nearly 100-year-old collection lost in Saturday's fire included almost 80,000 snakes and several thousand specimens of spiders and scorpions. The specimens were used to study evolution and provided information on how to avert extinctions.

This lead me to think... why did the fire choose to burn the large collection of dead snakes especially? Why not the live snakes in politics that suck each and everyone's blood like there is no tomorrow?

I am in mourning together with all the good productive humans in the world. I share their sentiments for the loss of the great collection. The dead snakes and other dead species provided humanity with life-saving information. The politicians I grew up seeing did nothing but make themselves rich. These human snakes deserved to be burned more than the dead snakes.

For more news, http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100516/ap_on_sc/lt_brazil_research_fire