Warwick Kerr, poster child for hubris

Apis mellifera scutellata

In 1956, geneticist Warwick Kerr began breeding experiments in Piracicaba, Brazil with African honeybee queens and European honeybee drones, creating the Africanized honeybee. The new bees however produced less honey and due to their highly defensive nature they were kept in a box with queen excluders (slats that allow only the smaller workers to fly out), to stop them ever reproducing in the wild. However in 1957, an uninformed beekeeper noticed the excluders and removed them, as it wasn't the season for their typical use. 26 queens escaped and rapidly reproduced in the wild, dominating the indigenous honeybee. At first, it was assumed that the Africanized bees would mate with other European bees and lose their African temperament. Unfortunately, this did not happen and very soon reports of violent bee attacks began to occur. In 1963 the first death occurred, when Lino Lopez was attacked while attempting to destroy a hive hanging from a building.
Arizona university paper on Africanized bees

Think this is all much about nothing? From the same site:
"Africanized honeybees have accounted for 7 human fatalities in the US and 175 fatalities in Mexico alone since 1985."

Hubris was not only in doing the experiment in the first place, but assuming that all their 'safeguards' (and one can only assume that they did not even have a "Mantenha as barras sobre, stupid" sign in place or, if they did, that the poor 'uninformed beekeeper' could read it) would protect us.
Think of that, the next time someone at a press conference assures us, with a straight face, that "everything has been done to prevent anything bad from occurring".
At a place called, say, Chernobyl...

Always remember that Murphy was an optimist.