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'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.'"
Grisoft Antivirus has detected a dangerous virus and has blocked access to TFA.
Does anyone else hear that quote from that movie Jurassic Park "Life always finds a way" when they see this? I mean, what could possibly go wrong, huh? Other than a little hemorrhagic(sp?) fever?
Cheers!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Do not worry, George W. Bush has announced a plan to invade Wisconsin claiming that they are developing weapons of mass destruction and biological weapons against his kidney.
The university tried to open a line of communication with the president to reason with him but was met with difficulty when he retired to the war room to pout and 'play with his toys.'
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The idea is that when you take air out of the room, you control the path of the outflow, and thus you can filter the particulates, including viruses. Otherwise, when you open the door, they just tend to diffuse out.
...air pressure in the room is less than the pressure outside, so any leak would mean air flowing inwards rather than outwards.OK, I'm not an expert in biosecurity, but wouldn't the reduced air pressure in the room be accomplished by pumping air out of the room?
Off course the experts have thought of that and put the exhaust of the pumps right next to the leaks so the air will get sucked in again immediately.
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
Before everyone panics, just think for a second. Ebola is NOT AIRBORNE. It is transmitted by direct contact and bodily fluids. It's classified as BSL4 because it's so deadly once you actually get it, not due to its ease of transmission.
Currently, only a few groups have access to BSL4 laboratories, and this has been severely hampering Ebola research. If by taking out the VP30 gene they have reduced the pathogenicity of the virus enough to get the authorities to apply the more appropriate BSL3 tag to the mutant strain, they've succeeded in making an important stride towards expanding the field, while introducing a very minimal risk of an outbreak.
I don't think anyone is talking about drinking the recombinant virus, but merely making it BSL3 instead of BSL4... or even just reducing the risk of working with Ebola under BSL4 conditions.
Has anyone ever read Demon in the Freezer (about smallpox) or The Hot Zone (about Ebola)? (both of which are very good books) All I know is that any biological agent like Ebola or smallpox scares the hell out of me. I think it was in The Hot Zone (could be another book, I was reading all I could find about Ebola for a while) where there WAS an Ebola outbreak in the US that WAS airborne. Monkeys were dying in a lab and the best explanation for this was that the strain (Reston) was airborne. Luckily this strain is only KNOWN to affect monkeys. You can read about it here
Maybe I'm just being paranoid but it seems extremely dangerous to be playing with Ebola.
Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on mine.
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
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)
OK, I'm not an expert in biosecurity, but wouldn't the reduced air pressure in the room be accomplished by pumping air out of the room?
If the secure research facility is air-tight, pumping a little bit of air out would produce a vacuum / differential pressure (compared to the positive pressure suit systems) that would could be maintained without pumping out any more air.
Furthermore, the little bit of air that does get pumped out can be processed to eliminate or kill viruses -- it can be filtered, passed through a High-Output Ozone emitter or Ultraviolet array, pass through a chemical wash, or even burned (in the case of a novel I read about a theoretical BSL5 facility).
Its currently in human trials and has 100% efficacy. They don't even need the virus on hand to R&D the vaccine, and only conduct actual FDA trials at a BSL 4 site
The scientists still want the virus to replicate in order to study it, so they developed monkey kidney cells which contained the protein needed.
Hey, isn't that how the Rage virus got started? Pretty soon those monkeys will develop a taste for human brains, the military will see this as a promising new bio-weapon and, 28 days later, Milla Jovovich is naked on your shower floor washing away the zombie blood...again.
Do these people NEVER learn?
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
If there are only eight genes, why is this specific one called VP30? Why not VP1-8? (Or VP0-7?)
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)