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?"

Comments

Re:Huge medicine possibility

[krmt]

What if, say, a virus could be designed to destroy cancer cells?

Heh. This is exactly what my lab is doing, as are many others. We're using a modified adenovirus to deliver a suicide gene to cancer cells, thereby killing them. Not a new idea anymore at all (people have been working on gene therapy for over a decade) but it's one that takes a lot of time to put in motion. Just do a search on "gene therapy" and "viral vector" at PubMed and you'll get more info than you ever wanted to know about what's going on.

It's Hard

[krmt]

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.