Slashdot Mirror
'Safe Ebola' Created for Research
Nephrite writes "By removing a gene from the virus Ebola, UW-Madison scientists have managed to stop the deadly pathogen from replicating. This first step may be a start down the path to a vaccine or drug screening. 'The scientists still want the virus to replicate in order to study it, so they developed monkey kidney cells which contained the protein needed. Because the cell was providing the protein, and not the virus itself, it could only replicate within those cells, and even if transferred into a human, would be harmless.'"
Why is it on Slashdot that any thing that restricts any sort of digital rights is a massively bad thing and any research that breaks those elements (even if they are used for nefarious purposes) are good, physics and astronomy research is also always "good", meanwhile massive advances in bio-tech are always "think of the children" topics.
Sure Ebola is dangerous, but labs are working around the world with massively dangerous pathogens. Britain's numpties in the bio-farming area managed to release Foot and Mouth into the wild (genius) so of course there is a risk. The question is whether it is safe and what can be achieved by doing this, not simply thinking about the Horror flick that played a ridiculous story line out. Bio-shock story lines are just as realistic as techno-shock ones, i.e. about as realistic as a George Bush explanation on Iraqi WMD.
Bio-science is one of the most real frontiers in science today and its simply stunning what is being done. Sure there need to be controls, but educated people need to stop behaving like Fox News Anchors.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
I don't think Ebola has ever had a vital component of the transcription machinery removed before. It's not a very large virus, and I don't think it can find another gene to replace it. Furthermore, I don't think anyone is talking about releasing this virus into the wild, merely making it easier to work with in the lab, as well as safer.
Why wouldn't you support that?
Which is why imho vaccine efforts should be directed at the animal host pool in order to eradicate the filovirus, ie make it extinct.
The host is widely considered to be bats http://www.emedicine.com/MED/topic626.htm and if only a tiny portion of the grant money spent on dna twiddling was spent establishing this and looking at either eradicating the bats or vaccinating them then, perhaps, the whole filovirus family could be eradicated.
Before all the bat-lovers start crying foul I would like to point out that it is only ebola's high mortality rate that keeps it contained. If mother nature dose a bit of her own dna twiddling and hits the sweet spot for mortality versus infectivity then haemorrhagic fever will reach Hollywood proportions.
But, call me cynical, this would leave no recurring income for vaccine makers.
we are all cosmic nuclear waste
That's what I thought to begin with, but then again, it's not as if kids will be snorting lines of this stuff for fun, it will be used in sealed laboritories with extreme care. If ebola must be studied in more flexible environments than BSL4 for it to be understood as the article claims, then a mutant virus that probably is harmless is probably a better choice to a natural virus that brings hemorrhagic fever to all it infects. Sure, don't give it to fresher biology classes, don't play with it without serious protection etc. but for the higher risk experements that absolutely must be done before this virus is understood, use this stuff instead of the authentic virus.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
I hope that this was a sarcastic post, given the amount of ignorance it contained.
We would like to study ebola, so that we can save your sorry ass if you get it. To do that, we've modified it to weaken it, so we don't kill ourselves studying it. We're not really going to put it in your food and air supply!
As far as why Bush hates funding genetic engineering as a whole you're correct. Your post illustrates PRECISELY why people hate funding it - they are ignorant, scared sheet, and content remaining such.
What do you think happens should "something go wrong" when you're assembling a skyscraper? Pouring molten steel? Flying a plane? Heck, just driving a car can kill you in the most horrible ways.
If you want safe, you're pretty much hosed.
If you want to balance risk with precaution, work in an industry where the life and death of not just you, but lots of others are on the line. You'll quickly find that the level of precaution taken is burdensome, but quite reassuring.
PS: It doesn't kill everyone. To quote Wikipedia: Mortality rates are extremely high, with the human case-fatality rate ranging from 50% - 89%, according to viral subtype.[3] The cause of death is usually due to hypovolemic shock or organ failure.
-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebola (citation from http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/EID/vol11no02/04-0533.htm)
If there are only eight genes, why is this specific one called VP30? Why not VP1-8? (Or VP0-7?)
Just a guess, but for some people, a cure to this miserable disease, and for others, one heck of a biological weapon. It is so limited in transmission that one might feel safe using it in certain situations to cripple an enemy. It is so incredibly debilitating while one has it that it would render combatants or other individuals incapacitated and too weak once they recovered, though they probably would not recover.
Ebola is just another tool in this case.
InnerWeb
Freud might say that Intelligent Design is religion's ID.
Except that the modified virus doesn't spread WITHIN a host either. So nobody gets sick.
It amazes me how there are so many people who, in one breath, will argue that we desperately need more funding to the basic sciences, and in the next will claim that any actual research should be halted because of the couldbe's.
Look, the people studying ebola are smart and they are safe. The people at the CDC and elsewhere have, I'm sure, explored the full spectrum of Michael Crichton related disasters. They may even have considered some other pulp fiction horrors, as well as actual real life threats.
Viral research is important, and yet, despite all the armchair virologists here on slashdot somehow we glossed over that this actually is making the virus safer to study, so that perhaps someday, Outbreak can be prevented.
You could inject every enemy soldier with 500ml of Ebola solution. Of course then you could also inject them with 500ml of Coca Cola, which would be far more cost effective and just as deadly. Or just inject them with a combat knife, which already is popular with the military.
But still, if you get every enemy soldier to line up for the biggest shot of their life you could easily wipe them all out with this strain.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)