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Build Your Own Virus
Wire Tap writes "Scientists have assembled the first synthetic virus. The US researchers built the infectious agent from scratch using the genome sequence for polio. The most amusing part is this snippit: 'To construct the virus, the researchers say they followed a recipe they downloaded from the internet and used gene sequences from a mail-order supplier.' Heck, don't we all have our own mail-order suppliers for gene sequences?"
I've posted an aerosol AIDS virus recipe to my website. Go there and check it out.
Sure it's a joke now, but just wait a few years...
I remember my BioChem classes (10+ years ago), and it seemed even back then that to some degree the technology was already there. It does make you wonder if this is truly the first one, or just the first one to be formally announced.
Ok, I give up, why you?
With all the terrorist paranoia going on in the U.S., you might just get arrested for a stunt like this.
Al-Quda set to infect US via the Internet with a virus downloaded from mail order sources. CNN on Monday?
What if, say, a virus could be designed to destroy cancer cells? What if a virus could be designed to infect parasites? If the drug companies start doing this, it's only a matter of time before they can make viruses that can target disease cells extraordinarily effectively.
From the article: injected it into mice to demonstrate that it was active. The animals were paralysed and then died.
After decades of research, advances in biotechnology finally creates the long fabled "better mousetrap".
Everything will be taken away from you.
Ok, wtf, from the article we have these snippets:
Responding to criticisms that such research could lead to bioterrorists engineering new lethal viruses, the scientists behind the experiment said that only a few people had the knowledge to make it happen.
and then the rest of the article is filled with stuff like this?!
To construct the virus, the researchers say they followed a recipe they downloaded from the internet and used gene sequences from a mail-order supplier.
According to researcher Jeronimo Cello, the polio virus assembled in the laboratory is one of the simplest known viruses. "It was very easy to do," he said.
"We've known this could be done. We've known it was just a matter of time before it was done," he said.
Why shouldn't we be worried?
Have you hugged your Karma Whore today?
Great, another computer-engineered virus.
No wonder my roomate has been screaming "I send you this file in order to have your advice. See you later. Thanks. " while throwing porn at me and defacing my website. Fortunately, I was able to powercycle him with a car-battery.
What's it called?
9o7i0
kewl! I just made 5m4L7p0x
Release it dude!
called The White Plague, if you haven't read it, the story goes a bit like this :
A biochemist witnesses his wife and children getting killed in a car bomb explosion in Dublin, Ireland. After suffering a deep depression, he goes into hiding in the US and after a couple of years he develops a new contagious virus which infects and kills women only. He releases it in Ireland and, IIRC, Algeria and some other terrorist states by posting infected dollar bills to people in those countries. Of course, the virus sooon spreads to other countries and Frank Herbert doesn't hold back in graphically describing the pain, suffering, and insanity.
It makes a very powerful story in light of recent events, and is well worth reading of you can find a copy.
If Anthrax-in-the-post worried you, this story would scare the shit out of you.
How hard would it be to reduce this to a stepwise procedure that any reasonably intelligent, resourceful, dedicated person could carry out?
Making LSD from scratch required a lot of skill. But with detailed how-tos now widely available, practically anyone can make acid.
--
Socrates was asked where he was from. He replied not "Athens," but "The world."
Now we'll get hassled by spit kiddies - anyone that can follow a sequencing recepie will be generating these things.
Isn't anyone else out there disturbed by this? We just might end up whipping out man kind!
'To construct the virus, the researchers say they followed a recipe they downloaded from the internet and used gene sequences from a mail-order supplier.' This sounds like its nothing revolutionary...first, the recipe apparently was already on the internet in public access...and they used parts from a mail order catalog! How come whenever I read those science magazines, it never has advertisements for the "Make your own Virus...In Your Home!" kit? Seems to me that if its so impressive and potentually harmful, it wouldn't have already been posted on the internet!
The White Plague by Frank Herbert. Woopie!
*Cough, Cough*
Don't worry, I just caught a synthetic virus. I'll be well in a few days...
I'd better go and backup my genome to CD-ROM, so I can be restored later, in case of an accident...
This is the most disturbing thing I've read in a long time. Scientists could not keep the nuclear genie in the bottle, and they won't be able to keep the biological genie in the bottle, either. And it will be worse if it becomes easy to design biological viruses. Next thing you know and we'll be needing vaccines more frequently than Microsoft security updates. I'm afraid that ultimately, the knowledge which we use to destroy disease will be the the knowledge that we use to destroy ourselves.
Just like Slashdot to take a deadly serious issue and turn it into light-hearted fun!
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
Wow, I pretty pissed when McAfee started publishing fake virii like the JPEG thing, but this time they've clearly gone too far....
Of course, if you aren't using MS DNA, you should be fine. Just another example of the benefits of Homo *NIX.
Mod me down, and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
http://www.apfn.org/apfn/aids.htm
"The transcript that follows is taken from the June 9, 1969 Senate
testimony of Dr. Donald MacArthur, a high-level Defense Department
biological research administrator. For those who hold the theory that
AIDS is the result of a U.S. biological weapons program--discussed in
chapter 40 of 60 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time--this testimony is a
smoking gun, or smoking petri dish as the case may be. We present it
without further comment. Judge for yourself."
Funding was approved in 1970 - $10 million to the DOD.
This frightens me badly. Judging from the success that the FBI have had at tracing certain people involved in last year's Anthrax spree (at least one of the suspects was involved in biowarfare trials against blacks in South Africa in the '80s), I shudder to think what one pissed off reseacher could do and how the inept security agencies would not be able to do anything about it.
i would like to think anyone who has read The Hot Zone by crighton is being plagued by the same tingles of fear running up and down their spines. all it takes is one of the few... the hot zone is about an ebola outbreak, and the descriptions of liquidized organs seeping out every opening is enough to give ghengis kahn nightmares.
-- Give us your technology and we'll give you all the cow lips you want.
I don't care about either. I have yet to solve the mystery of why deer are immune to lime disease from deer ticks and other animals aren't.
The definition of stupidity is doing something just because you can, and for no other reason.
Evidently these people don't understand the difference between 'could' and 'should'.
Since these ethical idiots have now demonstrated that building an artificial virus is possible it is only a matter of time before someone (since the gnome is available) rebuilds a small pox virus and lets that loose on the world.
As i clean out my grain silo, I crush the heads of every mouse I see and mail them to PETA's PO Box in San Francisco, California.
This is nothing new. I graduated from college 3 years ago. While obtaining a BS in Chemistry, I took a DNA sequencing class where we learned EXACTLY how to construct DNA chains with proper shielding of the substituatnts (anything other than the N-C-CO chain). This was an undergrad course, people.
Of COURSE there are going to be mail order catalogues to get these bases. Why go to the extra effort to create your own when you can get pure ones? And this isn't some stupid "science magazine" as has been suggested. These are catalogues that biologists and others can order from to create their own strands from isolated ones(like DNA duplication anyone?) and see the effects of certain genes rather than taking a large sample of blood and sorting out the specific gene they want for instance.
This would be a major, major, major pain in the ass to reproduce.
Doing this kind of work takes a lot of time and skill and equipment. It's not particularly hard to get the stuff, but you do need stuff, and the knowledge to go about doing it, and you're not just going to get that knowledge from nowhere.
This team worked for 2 years on this, and they are dedicated scientists with plenty of experience in this sort of work. How long would it take one person working in a home lab to start from scratch? Well over two years. If they don't know anything about Molecular Biology besides what they got out of high school (like your LSD-making example) probably at least triple that.
Everyone is very paranoid about the synthetic virus thing. This is hard work. No, what's more scary is the technology that's been around for three decades or so now, which is the ability to modify existing viruses. Why would someone really go to the trouble to make a new superbug from scratch when they can just use what nature's already done?
Or do you think that you can do a much better job than evolution has over millions of years?
Not that there aren't problems with creating superbugs (even Ebola and HIV have major weaknesses) and it wouldn't be easy, but it'd be far easier to modify something that already exists than it would to build something from scratch.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
To make an application that constructs actual living virii to be injected into a Microsoft Windows system using an infected floppy disc, CDROM, or internet connection. Uhm, doesn't such a tool already exist? It's called MS Macro Assembler...Ahh, now i remember...
"Responding to criticisms that such research could lead to bioterrorists engineering new lethal viruses, the scientists behind the experiment said that only a few people had the knowledge to make it happen."
Well this makes me feel safer because we all know so well how security through obscurity works. Just as well only a few chemists know how to make ecstasy too, otherwise all sorts of undesirables would be making illegal drugs, and we know that doesn't happen either. It's not as if anyone can get the recipe for that of the internet either. And of course, middle class people fighting for a cause would never bother getting degrees in biochemistry. (or learn to fly jets) Is there any sort of weird maths that allows for individuals to have really high IQ, and all IQ's to be positive, and yet overall the mean appears to be negative??
Has the smallpox virus been sequenced? If so,
eradicating it in the wild doesn't really elimanate
the threat, since someone could simply download
the code and fire up the old dna sequencer. Yikes.
Be very afraid...
For those who believed that AIDS was engineered in a lab, now have prove that this can be done. And who knows, maybe they were right!!
Now I'm really scare; I'm putting a condom to my monitor right now!
This sig can be distributed under the LGPL license
Well folks we are pretty much screwed if this becomes possible for the average person to do. The fact of the matter is that no matter what, this information will get out and eventually somebody will use it.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
That these scientists downloaded their instructions off the net and used ordered the sequence mail order is not at all the shock that this story portrays it as. Virtually every common technique in molecular biology can be accomplished with a pre-made "kit" from one of several major vendors (e.g. Sigma, BioRad, Qiagen). These kits contain all the necessary reagents and instructions for completing the procedure. Most of the companies that produce these kits also post the instructions on their websites in case you loose the printed copy. Any trained molecular biologist would have a pretty easy time recreating the "kit" from the directions and the ingredient list.
As for getting DNA by mail, that's standard practice at most research labs I've been involved with. It's more expensive than producing it yourself, but a hell of a lot more convenient. Many universities even have their own, "in house", sequence generation facilities that labs interact with by, you guessed it, inter-departmental mail.
I'd say the poster of this story was taken by the shock value of these statements (and perhaps they are more shocking in our terrorist-paranoid times), but in reality, there's nothing to be suprised by.
I'm guessing that the text is meant to read
"...used gene sequencers from a mail-order supplier..."
-----
PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
Cello, J., Paul, A.V. & Wimmer, E. Chemical synthesis of poliovirus cDNA: Generation of infectious virus in the absence of natural template. Science published online, doi:10.1126/science.1072266 (2002).
I can understand that the virus was created from scratch in the sense they it didn't come from mammalian cell infected by another polio virus, but my guess is that it is not from scratch in the sense of making a biological thing out of stuff from a chemistry set, because the "reagents" used in the process almost certainly had biological origin in their manufacturing.
Can someone familiar with the process comment on the source of the reagents?
and i say you should prepare to eat crow because nobody with a BS could construct a dna chain without the use of tinker toys.
biologists have been able to insert additional genes and knock out genes in organisms for quite a while. while this is the first time they've completely synthesized a virus, as real geeks of course you know that reinventing the wheel might be a good exercise but is hardly ever the most efficient way of reaching a goal - a bioterrorist / military would therefore never build a virus from scratch to use it as a biological weapon but use a perfectly working virus from the wild that already has the ability to infect human cells and maybe alter it to reach the "desired" effect. the techniques needed for that have been the microbiologists' bread and butter for years.
Do it yerself gene sequencing...ooops
Somebody should engineer him some eyebrows so that the journalists don't have to paint them onto his head after the fact.
What's the biggest killer of labratory mice?
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spoilers below
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answer: scientists!
Karma: "Excellent"?
ROFL. So much for gaming the Kap.
Gawd, I hate talking about suicide.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
What Pharmaceutical company is going to develop a self replicating cure for something? These people don't want to develop cures, they want to develop treatments. Expensive, patent protected treatments that you have to pay for over and over again...
in my AP Biology class we made a strain of e.coli that was resistant to the antibiotic ampicilin. That was pretty fun. We also got them to turn green when they broke down lactose (or glactose...which ever is bigger...i forget).
I guess this is more impressive though. I want to be a bio major in college, so i hopefully will get to do some neat stuff like this.
Viruses are going to be extremely useful as vectors for genetic and cellular therapies in the future, to deliver therapeutic genetic material directly to the cells that need it.
While it is certainly possible that a designer virus might escape the laboratory, unless the virus was designed specifically as a deadly agent and endowed with the kind of viability inherent in naturally-evolved viruses there is no reason to believe that such viruses can or will be worse than those already existing "in the wild" which have had complete freedom to evolve for millennia.
In the future this technology can and likely will become a weapon in the hands of power-hungry individuals. Whether that future is near or far seems to me rather irrelevant. Humanity's lessons come in their due time, no sooner and no later. There might be some comfort in the fact that these technologies are being pursued, at least initially, in consideration of their benefits, by individuals in relatively free and rational non-hostile nations.
The cliche holds true: With great power (and knowledge) comes great responsibility! Those of use who do not control these technologies must learn to exercise faith. Not faith in mankind to act infallibly (or even responsibly) but faith that whatever comes is ultimately for our benefit in this continuum.
-- thinkyhead software and media
Sounds like the script kiddies of the microbiology world.
They just took ready-made, off the shelf parts & put them together
"A terrorist is someone who has a bomb but doesn't have an air force." -William Blum
I have a depressing feeling that my body is less secure than old Outlook Express, yet I cannot upgrade it. Until we have a patch, the vulnerability should not be disclosed :-)
Homo *NIX.
hahahahahahah!
You said it, not me...
There is an ongoing question of whether or not viruses are "alive". Clearly the fragments of DNA used to reconstruct the polio virus aren't, right?
If the "frankensteined" (a good word here) polio virus replicates and acts in other ways like a regular virus...
Did these guys create life from lifelessness?
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This + This = Immortality. All you'd have to worry about from there would be disease/walking in front of a MAC truck.
1) "While rare, sporadic case reports of AIDS and sero-archaeological studies have documented human infections with HIV prior to 1970"
http://www.avert.org/his81_86.htm
Why wasn't it identified earlier? It's extremely easy to imagine a situation where hundreds or thousands of Africans were dying of AIDS for decades, though no one knew what they were dying from. It wouldn't have caused a great deal of alarm because deaths would be sporatic (occuring years apart) and deep inside the least medically advanced continent on the planet.
There is even some speculation about deaths as early as 1955 from AIDS, though no one is entirely sure if the "mystery disease" that killed back in 1955 was actually AIDS.
2) AIDS exists in chimpanzee populations, too. It is a different from the strain found in humans.
They should be very, very careful. You never know what might happen with mail-order gene sequences, or genetic material from eBay or such places.
And the brethren went away edified.
He once said something similar to "The more details you get to know about the HIV virus, such as its defensive mechanisms and "polymorphic" behavior, etc, the more it seems like it was created by humans. In a sense, it looks like it's too complex to have been made by nature's randomness."
I can do nothing else than agree with him, but who knows...
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
So what? Name one other country besides the US that has used a nuclear weapon on its enemy.
Bzzt, time's up.
The science to design a biological virus from scratch has been out there for over two years. Of course, nobody's gone about doing it other than these guys. There are enough loose ends in your typical high-level biohazard lab to give any wacko with a postage stamp the ability to mail you hepatitis, anthrax, or influenza. They don't need to mail order the parts and put it together at home.
Mordor...a magical, mythical land where women are more rare than dragons--but where every man would rather find a dragon
What this means is that new viruses which
A.) There is no natural human immunity
B.) No research base
C.) Rapidly mutate and infect easily
can be synthesized. Viruses like ebola and HIV could be made more contagious, virulent and prone to mutation. I think what's worse is that new virii can be synthesized (worse than anything we have now). It's only a matter of time before such a virus takes out a huge chunk of the world's population. I wonder what Charles Darwin would think of this news.
BANJOOOOOOOO!!!!!!
AIDS was the first synthesized virus :
::
Yes, the Wu-Tang's RZA broke this news some years ago
Wu-Tang Clan
America Is Dying Slowly
...
[RZA]
My nigga Chuck, he loved to fuck
Everything, exotic bitches down to ugly ducks
Like Nancy, who liked the fancy tickles
So he put popsicles on her nipples
To make her sex passion triple quadriple, until she bust
Overcome with passion, big ass want lust upon him
But nigga he forsake to grab the condom
Fuck it, he said AIDS was government made to keep niggaz afraid
So they won't get laid no babies be made
And the black population will decrease within a decade
German warfare product against the dark shade
[Raekwon]
AIDS kills, word up respect this, yo
Comin from my crew, it's real
AIDS kills, word up respect this, yo
Comin from the Wu, it's real, yeah
I'm in the biotech field, and I must say, this is an amazing feat. It's not just some run of the mill thing. From scratch is the real hard part - designing a virus from the ground up. In theory it's easy - in practice hard.
Unfortunately, because of the current way things are going in the US, this is really the only direction people can go I guess. Stem cell research has been all but eliminated in the US, while countries like Saudi Arabia and China push on (surpasing us as we speak)...kind of sad.
As scary as this is, and for all the negative implications it has, I have to say that the research must continue, the reason being that it may lead to something positive in the future, such as a universal cure for virii. Remember what happened to Britain before WWII? They banned civilian explosives research and so when the time came Germany was massively far ahead. In the same way, the civilized world must continue their research so that hopefully the good guys have the answer before the bad guys have the problem.
I just hope I have the good guys and the bad guys straight. Deus Ex was a great game, but I sure don't want it to be real.
~Ben
Corewars
:-)
/op
and
More Core Wars
and
Even More Core Wars
Okay, not virii - but still programs that kill each other are kinda cool
Whats more is people are evolving these little programs to be better.
Oh they have a newsgroup too.( google alt.rec.corewar )
And you know what? This has already happened. That's how viruses can replicate inside us now. They have some of the same genes, stolen from host cells long long ago.
So, you have to ask yourself this: How is what I'm doing any different than what nature itself is doing? It's not really, and in fact, it's far more controllable and less likely to happen than in nature itself. In nature, the virus has less hurdles to go through to create this sort of doomsday scenario you're thinking of. With us, it's got to go through a lot more trouble. It's not impossible, but it's really really unlikely.
You also have to realize what I mean by "suicide gene". It's not something that will randomly kill whatever cell it's expressed in. We, and many many others, are using a standard gene taken from herpes called Thymidine Kinase (Tk). Humans have a version of this gene too, but it's far more picky than the herpes one. Basically, if you use the herpes gene, you can treat with a prodrug like gancyclovir, which normal human Tk will ignore, but herpes Tk will incorporate in to DNA. This will cause the DNA to be unable to replicate, and the cell will die. Note that this can't happen without administering the drug. The provides yet another major hurdle for the virus to overcome in order to attain its "deadly capability".
Stop being so scared of what humans are creating. Nature is doing a far better job of finding ways to kill you and the rest of humanity than I or any other molecular biologist could ever hope to devise.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Resident Evil
Why do you say that?
My understanding of the poliovirus is that it's protein capsule is very highly conserved. The gene for its pieces is actually one polyprotein which is cleaved after the pieces interact. The pieces of the each subunit have to fit together perfectly, and altering the genetic structure of the gene can destroy those interactions, making it impossible for the virus to assemble correctly.
So the antibodies will probably be just fine. Besides, the Salk vaccine is heat-killed virus anyways, so you could probably apply the same treatment to your mutated virus, and have an effective vaccine. Or, since you know the makeup of your synthesized original, you could mess around with its genetic structure and create a live attenuated vaccine (another type which exists for polio, and can be more effective).
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
What happens if you cross a chicken virus with a human virus?
You get the next plague.
Those that understand my comments will remember the China scare from 2 years ago. Those that don't will think this is offtopic.
Just because the virus doesn't reproduce doesn't mean it can't transfer it's genetic payload to something that does.
Fortune 1,000 companies don't hire "Prophesors". They sometimes hire scientists, but that's an entirely different thing.
What you are is an idiotic troll. And it's past your bedtime.
Expression of Mouse Interleukin-4 by a Recombinant Ectromelia Virus Suppresses Cytolytic Lymphocyte Responses and Overcomes Genetic Resistance to Mousepox
Oh shit.
I'm no virologist (or biologist for that matter), but it seems to me that there is nothing to fear here. Why would a bioterrorist "do it the hard way" when there are plenty of naturally ocurring and lethal pathogens out there? In fact, this kind of biotechnology is our best hope of a real defense against such weapons.
Biological warefare was practiced in ancient times. Even though they had no real disease theory, they know that hurling diseased corpses into walled fortifications would spread disease. They new that fouling water upstream of a city would spread disease. They did all this with no scientific knowledge of biology or pathology whatever.
Bombs are easier than bugs. Planes are easier than missiles. Radiation and disease are only probable attacks because of the primal fear they create. Biotechnology offers the best hope of defense against the latter (and maybe even a cure for the effects of the former). We need to know much more, sooner, not later.
How do they know they didn't just create some sort of neuro-toxin? All they did was assemble the same basic "components" which made up the original virus. You could do the same thing with human body (admittdly with much more effort), and all you're essentially getting is a stack of carbon-based junk.
The distinguishing factors between a stack of carbon-based junk and a human being still elude me.
Love and Peace,
Valen
"The best compliment a girl ever gave me was 'Your hair smells nice.' I hate being the platonic friend." -Valen
The funny thing, the sequence for smallpox has been available for quite some time at NCBI (National Center for Biotechnology Information, as are the sequences for at least 2000 viruses and phages (per my last count).
I'm all for public knowledge of such sequences if they lead to productive research in the areas of disease control. However, with the current technology of being able to construct viruses from sequence data, it might be prudent to restrict such data to only respectable research centers.
I see it happening every weekend in NYC, but I'm sure it happens elsewhere. Let me explain my findings.
I've found that people between the ages of 19 to 30 are most likely to be infected by this virus. It usually always happens after drinking at bars or clubs. I even have been infected by this dastardly virus. After having quite a few beers and vodka cranberries, I've been know to get infected by virus that I've been calling the ILOVEYOU virus...It's usually only communicable to people of the opposite sex, unless you travel to the village. The more you drink, the more apparent this virus becomes. Good thing is that it usually lasts only about eight hours before it's effects wear off.
I'll get to the bottom of this. Will report back with more information on Sunday.
- grunby
How do they know they didn't just create some sort of neuro-toxin?
Because they're trained scientists and you're not.
IWAMB (I was a molecular biologist, until I discovered programming paid better, at least before the last round of layoffs...)
This news should not be surprising. The technology to synthesize multiple large genes has been around for years; and it has been known that the pieces could be combined in a host cell to yield whole, infectious virions. The novel thing here is that somebody has combined the two technologies, creating the polio genes synthetically before putting them into a host.
Two older articles describing the combination of cloned viral genes in vivo to make infectious virus are:
This article showed that the bovine herpesvirus genome could be cloned into a bacterial vector, maintained indefinitely, then reintroduced into cow cells to produce active virions.
This article showed that infectious rabies virus could be produced by putting cloned rabies genes into a suitable host.
Nowdays, if you have a gene sequence, you can synthesize it in pieces and assemble it (with modifications, if you choose) with PCR quite easily. You don't need any source material from the original organism. I synthesized a small gene from scratch myself, once, back when I was an underpaid M.S. in a biotech company.
Of course, I never tried this with a whole FREAKIN' POLIO VIRUS!!!!! WTF!!!! Didn't these guys ever read "The Stand"?!
-dexter ("Don't Fear the Reaper", my ass) riley
Now it all looks like low level "programming". How long until there's enough research so that scientists can start using high level languages for this?
It may sound stupid, but that's also what some hackers though about C or anything 20 years ago. Or even now (compiled vs. interpreted).
unfinished: (adj.)
The way these scientists did this was actually fairly "high level". They ordered premade genes (read: libraries or objects) from the mail and pieced them together correctly. Obviously there's a lot more to it than that, but that's the gist of it. The problem is that it still takes a lot of skill and knowhow, as well as time and energy to do this.
No matter what, you're still going to be cutting up DNA and splicing it together using enzymes.
No matter what, you've got to make sure you have enough DNA, which means either amplification by PCR or growing it up in cells and isolating it.
No matter what, you need to confirm what you've got, which takes more enzymes, gel equipment, and a good working knowledge of the sequence.
No matter what, you'd have to package it in to a virus, something that's not easy even with today's kits.
All of this can be done using "high level" stuff, kits for PCR, cloning, amplification, and isolation exist. You still need to understand what's happening, unless someone sends you a ready-to-make polio kit, you still have to know how to use the stuff. Having all of these tools lying around won't make the virus the same way having a copy of the gcc won't make you a programmer. You have to know how to use the tools.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
Biotech... virus... Eckard... do these guys work for the GSA?!
It's MAIL ORDER MONSTERS!
(do a google search)
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
(* Stop being so scared of what humans are creating. Nature is doing a far better job of finding ways to kill you and the rest of humanity than I or any other molecular biologist could ever hope to devise. *)
My understanding is that most viruses have evolved not to kill their host, otherwise they would shorten the time they can spread themselves around.
HIV is one of the rarer viruses that *does kill* its host fairly easily.
If the killer side is mixed in with the easy-to-spread features of say the common cold, then a killer cold could be put on the loose by some Osama-like madman (or madwomen. EOI=Equal Opportunity Insanity).
Table-ized A.I.
I find it really hypocrital that the US is against all the bioterror and whatnot, and now some US researchers have developed a synthetic virus without anyone batting an eye.
Does no one else see how big this is ? Life from nothing, without the chain of other life back to the primordial soup. This is a monumental achievement.
It'd really suck if the /. crowd worked out how to make their own Virus...
(http://www.access-music.de/)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
... medical companies create and release viruses which they just happen to have a treatment for?
.. make me want to paint monkeys on the walls, pluck out my teeth and travel to and from the past?
- Synthetic virus
...- Profit!
You Know What You Doing ??I don't need a complex definition for what life is, in order to call this *thing* alive.
The difference between this creation and earth, for example, seems to be that the earth does not really have a strategy for survival, no conscious effort for its own good aside from some complex mechanisms that seek balance through adjustments. Really, the people who believe in the Gaia theory would probably believe that the stock markets, even the economy as a whole, is also "a living organism".
so how long before we create Super-AIDS to wipe out Regular-AIDS and replace our immune systems with unstoppable terrors which fight off any disease with 100% effeciency?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
First? Nonsense.
AIDS is a biological weapon gone astray, and so is Ebola. I just can't prove it, but I can't prove that God exists (or not) either.
gene sequences from a mail-order supplier. I wonder if I can find one on Ebay
NO MORE MONKEY BUSINESS
Why didn't they just write one in VBScript like all the other newbies?
© 2004 The SCO Group, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
I mean... If this guy's trying to impress the world with his ability's, why not work towards a cure for cancer, or aids? Whatever...
Anything is better than this guy building the polio virus "as proof that we can do it".
Give me a break... When scientists are getting grants to create potential deadly diseases, and existing deadly threats are going unchecked, something's definately wrong!
Perhaps this mysterious rash of scientist death's really isn't such a bad thing afterall?
I could possibly get behind such an effort if it meant that these morons weren't here to breed death for future generations just to prove that they can.
Idiots... F*cking idiots!
[2 scientists smoking crack]
Scientist 0: What should we make?
Scientist 1: How about Ebola?
Scientist 0: Too 'Tom Clancy.'
Scientist 1: Hmm. Smallpox?
Scientist 0: Nah. E-Coli?
Scientist 1: Not cool enough. Anthrax?
Scientist 0: Been there, done that.
Scientist 1 & 0: [at once] Polio!
You have to wonder what the crap goes through these guys minds. I mean, how is this a good idea? I'm all for scientific research and stuff, and yeah I know some of it is dangerous. But this seems to be tempting fate to me. What's the matter with making something *benign*?
Thanks, gold old US of A! The first fully artificial virus comes from your labs, too!
I'm sure you'll only use this for humanitarian reasons, and your very safe bioweapon labs will make sure that none of its ilk will ever escape.
Right? Right.
Man, every day I'm glad that I don't live there anymore...
Ciao,
Klaus
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Been there, done that, at least USA army can said that...
Fear the Bio-Hackers! Call me a paranoid-glass-half-empty kind of a guy, but Id have to drop this into the old "always wondering if they can, never if they should" department ;P.
It doesn't sound stupid. I watched the local University channel one day out of boredom and they were discussion how gene's are processed. I understood the PROCESS immediatly, the terminallogy, etc was new to me, and I must admit quickly forgotten. But the process itself made perfect sense. Meanwhile, the professor asks the class a question and they stared back blankly like the whole thing was beyond them. It probably was. They can memorize all the molecules, etc they want. But I doubt most of them can understand a process in the same manner as most programmers do. I think a mix of molecular biologist & computer programmer will be the scariest thing in the next 20 years...
Heck, don't we all have our own mail-order suppliers for gene sequences?
If you've got a credit card and a mailing address, you certainly do have your own mail order supplier for DNA sequences. In fact, you've got quite a few to choose from.
There's one thing computing teaches you, and that's that there's no point to remembering everything.
--Doug Copland
A few years from now, the same scientists have advanced to creating higher life forms. One of them gets carried away and claims he can perform the Genesis process - creating a human from dust.
"Poof" God appears in the lab.
"No so fast, sonny - that's my dust. You make your own dust first."
--
Henry Troup, htroup@bigfoot.com
This disease ( a virus I think but it doesn't matter ) was very deadly when it first came out but quickly evolved to kill much more slowly. What happened to the old killer version? That is, why did the less lethal mutant cause the lethal version to become extinct?
I bet it's probably because enough of the population was infected with the less lethal version that the number of suceptible ( to the killer version ) people decreased. The people infected with the mild version were in effect vaccinated against the more virulent form.
I wonder if you could create a version of a dangerous disease that did nothing ( or not much, maybe just the sniffles ) but would spread quickly, vaccinating the public against the virulent form.
Syphilus hasn't mutated back to it's virulent form, wouldn't a less virulent form always have the evolutionary advantage over a nasty one? ( i am not sure.. )
On the other hand syphilus still kills unless treated, and diseases like leporcy and smallpox ( which would still be around if we hadn't killed it off completely ) have always been around.
If we could be *sure* that a less nasty version would outcompete a nasty one, then releasing an artificial mild form might make sense, but then humans have never been able to predict how an introduced species would affect an ecosystem, so I doubt we could do this.
Eat at Joe's.
Director of MIT AI lab Rodney Brooks gave a nice interview in which he mentions using a compiler to produce DNA that is then inserted in E. coli. Check this quote and read the article:
"At the wackier, far-out end, Tom Knight now has a compiler in which you give a simple program to the system, and it compiles the program into a DNA strip. He then inserts that DNA string into the genome of E. coli, and it grows into a whole bunch of E. coli. When the RNA transcription mechanism encounters that piece of DNA it does a digital computation inside the living cell, connecting them to sensors and actuators. The sensors that he's used so far are sensing various lactone molecules."
Article
I hate the fact that you people don't salute me
How ironic for this to come out just days after I finished reading Frank Herbert's The White Plague. The novel deals primarily with engineering of viruses, how accesible some of the tech may be, and of course, outcomes. Fiction or not, it does leave me quite disturbed by this news, especially the whole mail-order part, was that a joke?
Regardless though, I agree that this was inevitable. Also, a virus is the simplest most primitive form of life (I take the stance that viruses are alive) thus it was the logical first choice for this attempt. What really bugs me though, is these scientists claiming that lack of knowlege is some sort of defense. They repeatedly state that only a few people in the world could do this. But all that means to me is that there are only a few people in the world that could untangle any screwup these goofs come up with...
The abstract, and some comments.
I do have my own gene sequencing mail order company. I work for Northwestern University in the Chicago campus in a molecular bio lab and let me tell ya, I still remember the first time I designed 20 sequences, sent off a long list of a's c's t's and g's online and got tubes of them back in five days. I felt like a god.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
The only problem I have with this whole desusion is the fact that I had heard that it was linked to Terrorism. Ummmmmmmm everything has been linked to Terrorism............my Grandma yelling out the door screeming in a psycotic manner about how her garden died was b/c of terrorism, "Those damn terrorist used chemicals to kill my garden!!" Get over it!
Is it possible that it might allow for some kind of a vaccine to be made against Ebola/Marburg? Or does the high mutation level counteract any vaccine?
~ Leilah
I think this is crazy...
Something like this is going to be the end of us all!
Flashbacks from "Last Stand"
Those evil biological stuff can be created so easily and so... Saddam moron even created it without a doubt...
So he should be attacked,etc etc...
"Ooooooh" and "aaaaaah", that's how it always starts. But then later comes the running and screaming. I mean, life will find a way.
-- Ian Malcolm
Maybe this is the beginning to nanomachines.
Just a thought.
This people didn't build a 7500 piece virus one piece at a time; they ordered premade sequences and then tried to get them to bind together (sounds pretty random to me.) Anyway, don't you think if you tried to order, say, all the subsequences of a smallpox virus, that would raise a few red flags somewhere? Wanna try it and see how long before the FBI comes knocking at you door? Thats why the the experiment was a good thing -- if the feds weren't monitoring the gene splicing marketplace before, they sure as hell are going to be keeping an eye on it now!!!
Then again, I don't live in or near the States. Local terrorist still prefer bombs and AK47s.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
Everyone seens to be missing the big picture here. This is the first artifically created life form. A bunch of chemicals were ordered, put into a container. The result being something that replicates itself.
They didn't suck the nucleus from an already viable life and transfer it to another container like cloning.
BTW: It doesn't take $300K of DARPA grants and 2 yrs to make DNA. I do it all the time.
That's a cop-out.
Thats like answering "Uh, the Force" to that whole lightsaber termination point issue.
"The best compliment a girl ever gave me was 'Your hair smells nice.' I hate being the platonic friend." -Valen