Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by Fnord666 on Sunday July 09 2017, @11:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the there-goes-the-B&M-virus-stores dept.

Here's an achievement that will have bioethicists reaching for their banhammers: the recreation of the horsepox virus using DNA ordered in the mail (from a German company):

Eradicating smallpox, one of the deadliest diseases in history, took humanity decades and cost billions of dollars. Bringing the scourge back would probably take a small scientific team with little specialized knowledge half a year and cost about $100,000.

That's one conclusion from an unusual and as-yet unpublished experiment performed last year by Canadian researchers. A group led by virologist David Evans of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, says it has synthesized the horsepox virus, a relative of smallpox, from genetic pieces ordered in the mail. Horsepox is not known to harm humans—and like smallpox, researchers believe it no longer exists in nature; nor is it seen as a major agricultural threat. But the technique Evans used could be used to recreate smallpox, a horrific disease that was declared eradicated in 1980. "No question. If it's possible with horsepox, it's possible with smallpox," says virologist Gerd Sutter of Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany.

Evans hopes the research—most of which was done by research associate Ryan Noyce—will help unravel the origins of a centuries-old smallpox vaccine and lead to new, better vaccines or even cancer therapeutics. Scientifically, the achievement isn't a big surprise. Researchers had assumed it would one day be possible to synthesize poxviruses since virologists assembled the much smaller poliovirus from scratch in 2002. But the new work—like the poliovirus reconstitutions before it—is raising troubling questions about how terrorists or rogue states could use modern biotechnology. Given that backdrop, the study marks "an important milestone, a proof of concept of what can be done with viral synthesis," says bioethicist Nicholas Evans—who's not related to David Evans—of the University of Massachusetts in Lowell.


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Monday July 10 2017, @12:15AM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Monday July 10 2017, @12:15AM (#536978) Homepage

    This is no joke. I know a guy who claims to be Bulgarian, but who is more than likely Ukranian, who drank at bars with people developing bioweapons in that part of the world. He remarked that some of the stuff they were working on was so destructive that they would break down in tears just talking about it. Eastern Europeans are generally tough sons of bitches, so that is a big deal.

    Mutually assured destruction is not only about nuclear weapons.