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Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'?
HughPickens.com writes: Smallpox was one of the most devastating diseases humanity has ever faced, killing more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone. But thanks to the most successful global vaccination campaign in history, the disease was completely eradicated by 1980. By surrounding the last places on earth where smallpox was still occurring -- small villages in Asia and Africa -- and inoculating everyone in a wide circle around them, D. A. Henderson and the World Health Organization were able to starve the virus of hosts. Smallpox is highly contagious, but it is not spread by insects or animals. When it is gone from the human population, it is gone for good. But Errol Moris writes in the NYT that Henderson didn't really eliminate smallpox. In a handful of laboratories around the world, there are still stocks of smallpox, tucked away in one freezer or another. In 2014 the CDC announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in a refrigerator located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. How can you say it's eliminated when it's still out there, somewhere? The demon in the freezer.
Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there's neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science Magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, "I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation." It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?
Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there's neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science Magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, "I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation." It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?
It could be highly useful in future medical research, and the damage it could cause if it gets back into the wild would be minimal.
In 2014 the CDC announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in a refrigerator located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. How can you say it's eliminated when it's still out there, somewhere?
Even if you eliminate all the stocks you know about there's still the stocks you don't know about, if it ever gets out it probably came from a forgotten sample.
I don't think it's a huge deal either way but if we want to understand how a truly nasty virus works then you can't really do it without a really nasty virus to study.
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Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'?
Because this isn't Resident Evil or some stupid Hollywood movie?
Elok
Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses
This is the one I have to wonder about.
The vaccine for smallpox is not smallpox, It is vaccinia which is closely related to cowpox.
If someone releases smallpox and you need to vaccinate, then you still don't need to have any smallpox.
If someone makes a new type of smallpox and releases it, then you want the new smallpox to develop a defense against and test and now you have it from the infected people.
And it seems unlikely that the old smallpox (deadly) would be used to make a vaccine against any new smallpox, but I admit the possibility.
Smallpox is a member of the poxviridae family. If you need a virus like smallpox to fool around with in your lab, there are 28 genera and 69 species of pox.
On the other hand, smallpox is not the only disease we have eradicated.
Rinderpest is the other. Rinderpest is closely related to measles and measles probably evolved from rinderpest.
Stocks of Rinderpest remain, but rinderpest vaccine is made from a rinderpest virus variant, so it makes sense that we would keep some of that for just in case.
This is one of them...
Now that being said... stockpiles of the live virus should not be kept very many places and there needs to be a "destroy plan" in the event these locations become compromised. (such as war, civil unrest, the end of the world, etc.)
Perhaps in the US, UK, France, Russia, and China... Each nation can have stored samples of the virus in known locations under guard.
For the same reason we'll never really get rid of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or anything else, there is a greater than non-zero value to having them. But we don't need "lots" of them.
A virus is about as 'alive' as the average piece of computer software, and when it comes down to the choice of the death of hundreds of people, or the virus, the choice should be easy enough. That some people apparently have so much trouble with their moral compass that they believe there is in fact some kind of ethical trade off here scares me.
Not that size matters: I'm also happily in favor of fully eradicating other diseases and parasites, including multicellular ones. Anything that only causes untold grief and misery, and has no benefit other than its own miserable existence, I have no compunction removing from the planet.
The thing is, the existing vaccines aren't even derived from smallpox. They're derived from a related virus that isn't fatal. We don't need smallpox to exist just to produce vaccines unless somebody genetically engineers a modified smallpox virus that doesn't contain any of the same markers as cowpox, monkeypox, or vaccinia. And if somebody does that, the odds are very high that A. having a sample of smallpox won't help in creating the vaccine either, and B. the organization that someday creates that modified virus wouldn't have been able to get their hands on it if we had destroyed all the samples in a timely manner instead of keeping it around just in case we need to engage in biowarfare....
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Then zap it. They can already create viruses from scratch anyhow - https://www.newscientist.com/a... So, just dump its DNA sequence to a tar file, and then snuff it out. That simple. And no moral dilemas about genocide because well, we can always tar xvf smallpox.tar, if we need to.