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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.
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.
Yeah, besides... How will destroying all known samples prevent the case of "cardboard box in a refrigerator" that we don't know about...
If that storage method was a surprise, the clearly efforts to burn all stored samples wouldn't have included that one..
Obviously, though we really should increase control, regulation and security around these things.
It'll take you years to get from a gene sequence back to a functional virus with which to build a research program to look into the 'new variant' or whatever concern made growing smallpox again worthwhile. And there'd still be some doubt about if you got it right since some virus particles grab important proteins from the host cell that aren't encoded in their own genome.