First Reproducing Artificial Virus Created

jrrl writes "USAToday is reporting that Craig Venter's research group has synthesized a virus from scratch and that it "became bioactive" (started reproducing). Particularly interesting is that it only took them two weeks to build, rather than several years that previous attempts had taken."

Comments

Chilling

[Space cowboy]

Yeah I know. Luddite reaction. Yadda yadda yadda.

I still don't really think the benefits (gene expression research, gene therapy in general) are good enough, considering the potential problems.

I'd like to know who's funding them. Is it civilian or military?

As if there weren't enough virii on the planet already, we have to go making more. Fantastic academic achievement, but wish they hadn't done it. A bit like a nuclear bomb, in its own way...

Simon.

Re:Chilling

[Space cowboy]

There is a very very small difference between a cancerous cell and a normal cell. They're identical except the cancerous one keeps on dividing. Just how much did you want that cancer-eating virus ? Given how often virii mutate ?

Simon.

Viruses and weapons

[Fux the Penguin]

I think the wonder of any scientific advance should be tempered by a clear-headed analysis of the dangers it might create.

I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.

Imagine a scenario where terrorists could alter a disease or organic biological weapon gene by gene to make it immune to current antidotes. Beyond that, I worry that the US itself might use it for its own cache of new-age weapons.

If WE convert it to a weapon, what's the difference? We can claim we're the good guys and we won't use it. But we can look at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

I hope I'm not fear-mongering here, but, I worry.

Re:Viruses and weapons

[Sheetrock]

You're not. This is a valid point that is all but ignored by scientists seeking continual funding and rationalizing that if they don't do it someone else will.

However, I think this sort of research is as or more likely to radically benefit society as it is to create catastrophe. Look at the genie released when we first split the atom; I'd argue that the current and future benefits from nuclear power alone outweigh the concern about the misuse of this knowledge. But I feel that ethical concerns must become a stronger part of scientific research and funding, not only because of this breakthrough but because of the ones we're about to make (nanotechnology will present similar worrying potential...)

Re:Viruses and weapons

[radish]

You're american right? Doesn't it strike you as kind of an odd coincidence that you come up with the US as the only "responsible" country in the world? Whilst you may be right (you actually missed out an entire continent) I'd hardly call your analysis objective.

Re:Viruses and weapons

[glgraca]

If those countries are so terrible,
why do you keep selling them weapons??

Who sold Saddam chemical and biological weapons?

The US insists on a monopoly on WMD technology
not for the safety of the world, but for
its own economic interests and to maintain
its power.

Re:Viruses and weapons

[TGK]

Gotta clear up a few things here.

1 - Terrorism isn't generaly a R&D effort. The act of terrorism isn't anything new, contrary to what GW Bush Inc. seems to belive. For centuries people have been committing acts of terrorism, but these are not the organizations that develop the new and frightening weapons of war.

Terrorism is, by it's very nature, a low budget enterprise. Until Mr and Mrs Smith can grow little Susie a custom built kitten with neon pink fur by hitting some buttons on the Recombinator (tm) you won't see gene level modifications as something available to terrorists.

2 - We've been making viruses resistance to treatment/immunization for years now. Read Ken Alblik's autobiography on his roll in the Soviet Bioweapons program. Until the 1970s the United States was engaged in offensive biological warfare . Today we still research defensive biowarfare, which means that we use developing treatments as an excuse to weaponize deadly organisims.

The former Soviet Union (according to most sources) weaponized the small pox virus. Weaponization, for the unaware, is a process of making a virus resistant to treatment and immunization techniques while increasing it's kill rate.

As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, if you have something insanely dangerous and you want to it to fall into the wrong hands, the best thing you can do with it it hand it to the Russian Army to guard.

I have the utmost respsect for the scientific community. The work they do is amazing and valuable research, but this isn't something I'm worried about. Somehow, I doubt that a bunch of PhDs in a lab can come up with anything (much) more deadly than billions of years of evolution and 50 years of cold war has produced.

Re:Viruses and weapons

[ishark]

If any country had to be in possession of these things, it should be the US. You don't want it to be the US?

Considering the recent record of the US of bombing and invading countries on purely imaginary perceived threats and very real economic reasons, I'd rather NOT have the US be the only one with such a weapon. I'd like a lot of different people to have it. Balance of terror is bad, but I've come to appreciate the advantages of unstable equilibrium compared to a (albeit very stable) death.

Re:Viruses and weapons

[bigberk]

Imagine a scenario where terrorists

Oh geez, terrorists, terrorists, terrorists, we're all so afraid of terrorists. You may be a terrorist, your neighbor might be a terrorist, and I'm petrified by fear. I'm so paralyzed by fear that I think we should pull the plug on any project that might be potentially used by terrorists. Whether it's technological, or medical... hell, who cares that we might be coming up with new biological agents to help fight cancer... throw that research out the window! The terrorists might somehow morph the results of the research and create an Osama-superbug that's even wors that SARS and anthrax!!!

Re:Should we really be doing things like this?

[Leroy_Brown242]

You would hope that they take great pains to make access to the virii as secure as possible.

But, things like this are very important in the fight to create vaccines to illnesses. Anyone who has taken apart and built a car, computer, or whatever will tell you that thier level of understanding is now MUCH greater than it was before they did it. Knowing how to assemble a virus, will hopefully allow us to defend ourselves against them.

Re:Should we really be doing things like this?

[f97tosc]

Probably the same as in handling any other virus.

Which is perfectly reasonable. People seem to be exremely afraid of anything made in a lab, but fail to recognize that the greater danger (by far) is from natural evolution of new viruses.

By the same token, the dangers of bio-weapons seem to be greatly excaggerated, when compared to natural pathogens. Some anthrax letters that killed half a dozen people seemed to get more attention and resources than the flu and aids, which kill tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone.

Tor

Re:Should we really be doing things like this?

[B'Trey]

Assembly is not necessarily the same as synthesis. Designing and building a computer (as oppossed to merely putting together what is essentially a kit created by someone else) certainly implies that you have enough knowledge to make intelligent decisions on how to go about protecting the computer.

Re:Should we really be doing things like this?

[Daemonik]

By the same token, the dangers of bio-weapons seem to be greatly excaggerated, when compared to natural pathogens. Some anthrax letters that killed half a dozen people seemed to get more attention and resources than the flu and aids, which kill tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone.

Perhaps bio weapons get more attention than natural viruses simply because if a natural virus kills you, it's an act of [insert deity here] and simply one of the risks of life, like getting hit by a bus.

Bio weapons on the other hand are purposely engineered to maximize the lethality of a disease for the intentional purpose of killing as many people as possible. In other words, it's the intent that matters.

human interference....

[mtrupe]

with nature seems to work so well, why not? I live in Illinois and each fall we are swarmed by millions upon millions of Japanese Lady-Bug-Like Orange Beatles. They were put here to fight Aphids, but they have no predators (birds won't even eat them because they emit this foul stench). They area all over the place and nothing can stop them.

So, what kind of checks and balances will there be on man-made viruses? None- you just cannot introduce anything into nature so quickly. I think the possible outcome is clear. This is downright frightening. I think I'll go rent The Stand this weekend.

Re:Scared now

[Saige]

All they actually did was to take commercially available DNA, link it together to duplicate the DNA of an existing bacteriophage, and pop it inside a cell, and watch it go on. They just demonstrated that they have the technology to make a copy of the DNA of an existing virus.

As anyone can tell you, learning how to copy something that already exists doesn't really mean you know that much more about how it works. Just because I could write out a copy of a Chinese story doesn't mean I know anything more about what the story says, just that I can duplicate the writing correctly.

Creating NEW life forms, not just copying existing ones, is still a ways off.

Theoretically, they should be able to do this with a mammal like a feline. Sequence the DNA, build a copy, and replace the DNA in a freshly fertilized egg, and it should grow up just fine. Though the complexity of the animal would add issues that I'm not educated enough to be aware of, certainly.

It's probably not a very effective virus

[iabervon]

Considering that this virus was synthesized from scratch, it's probably not something very effective. It's a long way from building a virus that works at all to building a virus that targets a particular organism or overcomes natural defenses.

Just because it's man-made doesn't make it more advanced than naturally-occurring viruses. It's been possible for a long time to build viruses from collected stocks, and these are generally much more frightening. What will be scary is when we have some clue as to how to design proteins, and could construct a virus with specific properties. Until then, we're not likely to create anything that doesn't arise in nature.

(Genetically modified foods are a slightly different issue; just because it might arise in nature doesn't mean we'd eat it if it did. Also, most of the organisms involved are much more resistant to mutation and genetic mixing than viruses and bacteria)

Re:Should we really be doing things like this?

[Waffle Iron]

People seem to be exremely afraid of anything made in a lab, but fail to recognize that the greater danger (by far) is from natural evolution of new viruses.

Unless somebody figures out how to make an artificial microbe that takes advantage of chemical processes that just aren't found in natural evolution. For example, the human body might not even be capable of attacking a hypothetical microbe that has a teflon or silicone-enhanced outer membrane.

At any rate, natural evolution proceeds at a slow rate, so the defending species has time to adapt. Anthrax, for example, implements a tricky chemical hack to breach animal cells and destroy them. Most animals are pretty defenseless against the special back door that antrax uses, and without it the anthrax bacteria would be no more harmful than a pimple. However, anthrax is a rather obscure organism that mostly lives in the dirt. The reason that animals haven't evolved a defense against its chemical attack is that it just doesn't spread that easily in a natural setting. If anthrax were contagious like a cold, animals would have evolved a defense against it long ago.

Now, people may soon have the knowledge to install anthrax's chemical attack into something like a common cold virus. This short-ciruits the evolutionary process. Instead of just having to resist natural random improvemts in microbes, we may soon also face improvements that take advantage of god-like knowledge of the weaknesses of the defenders.

By simultaneously combining the best parts of various different microbes found in nature, then adding unnatural chemical improvements and using our newly available schematics of human cell defense design, we will certainly be able to create microbes far more dangerous than anything nature is likely to randomly come up with.

I doubt that trying to control this kind of technology is going to do any good, however. Somebody somewhere in the world is going to work on this stuff whether its banned or not. Our only hope is probably to develop means to quickly detect any new microbes, along with adaptive technology to create unnatural defenses to unnatural new organisms in real time.

"Discussion"?

[AdamHaun]

I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.

But the problem is that we're not *going* to have a serious societal discussion because that phrase means nothing. Who's talking with whom? Who makes decisions? Who gets input?

When I hear "societal discussion", I get an image in my head of the entire country sitting at a great big table having a little chat about what to do. But in real life, that sort of thing doesn't happen. You have kooks who think that anything that looks like "playing God" is evil, you have people who think that every new invention must immediately be used to aid/fight terrorism, you have people who don't even understand the basic science behind what's going on(like Slashdot...oops, did I say that out loud?). And in the end, after all of these people have "had their say"(who are they talking to?), who decides what will be done? You want the government to say "Sorry, no more research on microorganisms"? Because that's about all it could do. What right does "society" have to control science? Most people will tell you that they don't even understand what "science" is! Who is qualified to do cost/benefit analysis of this sort of thing? Does anybody even *care* about cost/benefit analysis?

I understand(and sympathize with) your concerns, but no amount of talking is going to do anything about this situation. We can't halt our understanding of the world where it is just because a few people might cause problems with it. Hell, if we had taken that attitude to begin with, we'd be lucky to have fire by now!

Re:Scared now

[f97tosc]

Technically it's not life. There is still a bit of dispute as to whether virused are alive or not. They contain genetic material, but are not necessarily living organisms. Or that is what some bio major told me once.

Whether virus is life or not depends on the definition of life. There is no consensus on this defintion, so debates on the matter are rather meaningless, it is really disputes over the definition of a word.

What makes viruses controversial is that they cannot reproduce by themselves; they need to infect antoher cell. But then again, many parasites cannot live without some other organism, and they are usuually considered alive.

Tor

Re:Should we really be doing things like this?

[kiatoa]

There are two kinds of Luddites:

1. The "I don't understand it, we're all gonna die" crowd and...

2. The "I understand it, I don't trust those irresponsible buggers, if we don't do something we're all gonna die" crowd.

Large corporations (and some small ones) have repeated proven themselves to be untrustworthy and irresponsible. Crowd #2 have every reason to fear what they fear.

Re:Should we really be doing things like this?

[4of12]

Knowing how to assemble a virus, will hopefully allow us to defend ourselves against them.

As long as the rate at which the virus reproduces and the level of devastation it causes is not too fast or too irreversible.

Consider the effects of some natural virus and other life forms that have been unleased.

A fungus from the Eastern hemisphere pretty well wiped out the American chestnut tree in short order.

Russian thistle, introduced to North America in the 19th century has likewise become endemic, to the point where tumbleweeds are considered an essential ingredient in any Western film set.

Rabbits in Australia, etc., provide some indication of how rapidly reproducing organisms can spread and how much change they can cause.

Do we trust our knowledge of virus mechanics enough to believe that an inadvertent release of "grey goo" can be undone?

To put it another way:

Even if I'm extremely knowledgeable about cars, have built them from scratch, repaired them, etc., is that sufficient assurance I will be able to stop a speeding car running straight at me in time?