Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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!
What if, say, a virus could be designed to destroy cancer cells?
Until they mutate and we have that same viruses destroying healthy tissue. Besides, what would the immune response be? Would that make you sick?
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
*THUDDUD*
Oooh, verdamnt, not once more! Back to ze dravink board es ist. Igor, clear out ze body and vasche ze beakerz! Schnell! Ich must vork on the formula some more! Hunh...
"I have opinions of my own, strong opinions, but I don't always agree with them." -- George H. W. Bush
Viruses have already been employed in gene therapy, and actually this technique was involved in the first gene-therapy death. So, already been done and already wreaked unforseen havoc on at least one occasion, but the idea is that the virus alters the genes in a person's cells in a beneficial manner rather than in a way that causes the cells to churn out more viruses.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
This is a possiblity, but pretty much anyone who's serious about this (ie, actually doing work in the field) is using a virus that can't replicate on its own. It just doesn't have the machinery to do so, because we've taken it out all together. Believe it or not, the space in a viral genome is very valuable, and you want to make as much use of it as you can, so you take out everything that's not necessary to your work.
So if the virus mutates (which isn't likely, given that most mutations happen during genomic replication) it would just sit there, doing nothing. I suppose that potentially another, wild-type virus could coinfect the cell with the mutant (also relatively unlikely) and supplement the necessary machinery, but this is no more likely than if the wild type virus itself had mutated, in which case you have a new strain on your hands (although with the originally synthetic mutant, it would still need to be supplemented by the wild type each time it infected a cell in order to replicate).
While you do raise a good point about mutation, it's not any different than what happens in nature. In fact, it's probably far more controllable.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
When someone who is in the business of "using a modified adenovirus to deliver a suicide gene", is using a sig like this, it scares the bejeebers out of me...
Word game?
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."
Be very afraid...
Ebola is scary scary stuff.
But it's also limited. Why is it that we haven't had a major outbreak all over the world, killing billions? Ebola is an RNA virus, which makes it very unstable (RNA is far less stable than DNA, and more prone to mutations). Because of this, Ebola was able to evolve in the first place in to something so deadly, due to its high mutation rate.
But Ebola never lasts too long, it comes in outbreaks, then it goes. That's because of two reasons. One is that the same instability which made it deadly also causes it to become ineffective at a quick pace. Mutations can work against these organisms too. The other reason is that it kills too quickly. It can't spread because people die before it gets a chance to move effectively. It's just too damn lethal.
Ebola is terrifying, but it's not all powerful. Any kind of pathogen has to balance infectivity with lethality, and Ebola is too far on the lethal side to be massively infective right now, thankfully.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.
Think "12 Monkeys".
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?
Do it yerself gene sequencing...ooops
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.
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.
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."
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."
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.
This is very true (you're thinking of influenza by the way) but the thing about the chicken strain is that it was able to reproduce in areas other than the upper respiratory tract, where the human influenza virus is stuck in. Mixing the human genes with the chicken ones allowed the new strain to reproduce in any human cell, which would have killed scores of people.
This is a very real danger, but how does this change anything related to the technology? With the old technology, you could have easily done this by hand, rather than synthesizing from scratch, you could shuffle a bunch of coinfected influenza viruses around until you got what you wanted, essentially speeding up the natural process. You could also modify the existing virus to do this.
Just like nature did in creating the Influenza strain you're talking about.
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."
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.)
You're very right, biology can be more abstracted, up to a point. If someone decided to place a bunch of virulent genes on a single plasmid, or just took one from one of the bacteria that already have them, and simply put a multiple cloning site (a piece of DNA that can be cut in multiple different ways easily) in to it and sold it, there's a real big problem for everyone. Then the person using it isn't much better than a script kiddie, but yes it could certainly be abstracted in that way so that the person wouldn't have to know jack.
;-), and no matter what you're going to have to get down to some assembly at some time or another. Same thing with this. You can do some very basic things now, like make bacteria turn blue, which many high school biology classes do each year (the technology is over 25 years old!) but to do something as complex as synthesizing polio from scratch requires really knowing nuts and bolts. It's all a question of how much you want to do. Something simple? Doesn't take much knowledge. Something really tough? You'd better really know what you're doing.
But no matter what they'd have to have some basics down, like how to run a gel or transfect bacteria. Not hard stuff, but they'd have to know how to do it. The more and more stuff people build up, like the antibiotic resistance example, the more abstract it can be, just like today you don't have to write to the hardware, you can use something like Perl. They'd still have to learn the equivalent of Perl to do it, which is no small task in itself, but even today there's no need to go around isolating your own restriction enzymes and such.
It is very much an engineering question, just like in software. The more complex your library is, the less you have to worry about. There's a lot of premade stuff out there that can be pieced together already. We're not really at scripting language level, but we're well beyond assembly. Things can be absracted, but only to a point. Like if you want to write your own OS, you can't really do it in Perl (or perhaps bash is a better example there, perl is an organism unto itself
"I may not have morals, but I have standards."