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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.
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.
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)
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