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Scientists Are Getting Seriously Worried About Synthetic Smallpox (sciencealert.com)
An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall,
killed hundreds of millions
of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.
Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.
Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.
Hubble went dead last week, followed by Chandra this week. Am I the only one that sees what is happening here? What's the first thing you do before you invade a country? Blind them. Take out their eyes and ears, their radar installations, etc. Then you send in the forces. With Earth effectively blinded I bet there are massive battle cruisers hidden in the asteroid belt that are even now powering up their engines and finalizing battle plans. Wake up people!!!!
However my two younger brothers were not. I doubt it would provide much protection after this long anyway.
Pest Jr. is immune to all kinds of diseases as a result of being born from a pile of smug feces. Whatever we develop should be tested on that family of traitors.
CRISPR kits are available for $150. Building a gene drives only takes undergraduate lab tech skills. Find the right gene(s), give it enough incubation time, and you can make get all of humanity to die out in an instant.
And we wouldn't even know if we already were in that incubation time.
You can bet money that all the big and nuts powers of the world are already working on it, and that somebody will cut corners in trying to get it to be selective. Let alone somebody just wanting to watch the world die. I know several of the latter off the top of my hat.
At least in the US, it should be trivial to get funds to make a release a vaccine, because it's preventing a terrorist attack.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Far more contagious.
is the weakest form of security there is. Haven't we learned this before in the electronics and software industries?
If it is possible to synthesize a smallpox vaccine, someone would do it. For every one publishing there are perhaps a few hundred who have had the idea occur to them. If you stigmatize it and drive it underground, when some one unleashes it, we would not even know what hit us.
To borrow a phrase from our second amendment friends, if you outlaw synthesized smallpox only outlaws will have synthesized small pox.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
They should be but this will happen anyway whatever the attempts to prevent it. You probably should not write it in the daily sun but my understanding is this is not the level of propagation we talk about here. Instead of worrying we should get to know what we can do about the eventual but right now still hypothetical threat. What will happen however everybody gets excited now and nothing will happen besides some sloppy attempts at preventing such research from getting into open.
Come on, it's not like we are dangerously unprepared for pandemic.
A few months ago, a disease caused by an engineered biological weapon played the antagonist in a fictional outbreak scenario that ended with more than 100 million dead and the global economy crippled.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Of course we shouldn't stand in the way of progress. After all progress is the MOST important thing in the world, above all else.
You know, vaccination actually works and has eradicated smallpox. We just have the means to revive it again.
You do realize that when it was declared eradicated we stopped vaccinating against it, right?
Anyone under the age of 30 (and probably a couple of years over, but 30 is a nice round number) is at direct risk if there's a smallpox outbreak - and if the virus was reverse-engineered it may be JUST different enough that even the people who WERE vaccinated would be at risk.
-=This sig has nothing to do with my comment. Move along now=-
Vaccination works but it's not 100% effective. Nothing real ever is. Vaccination becomes less efficient as time passes, the immune system "forgets" what should trigger it.
What do we call things that exponentially grow, and destroy everything in their wake, leaving nothing but death?
* Deadly pathogens.
* Explosions.
* Humans
Everything that survives, exists in a balance of several stable fully self-sustaining cycles.
Think about that, whenever you hear "growth". Or "stagnation". Or anybody suggesting we should become vegans or something to enable even more people to exist.
Same reason mustard gas wasn't used extensively in WWI - a shift in the wind could blow the gas over your own troops. The rationale of a terrorist is to inflict death and destruction among a target population. If a bioengineeered smallpox virus attack were successful and started an epidemic in a target country, it's almost certain to travel around the world and eventually arrive back at the terrorists' home country. As fatality rates would be higher in countries with poor medical care, and most terrorist organizations are based in developing countries, they would end up harming themselves more than their target.
The only people I could see trying to do this are anarchists, and reckless researchers or home biologists.
You change as many as you can.
One of the changes will get you.
As Col. Potter would say, cowfeathers!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Typical practice is to first submit to the prestige journals like Science or Nature, since those give you more points towards tenure and also look better on future grant applications. Then, when that get rejected, you rewrite slightly and submit to the next tier. Lather, rinse, repeat...
#DeleteChrome
Not true. Varies by country.
I was born in 79 in the US, not vaccinated for small pox (though I got the full regimen for my age).
My wife was born in 82 in Hong Kong and has the scar to prove vaccination.
Consider suicide
While scientist are worried about synthetic smallpox, they have not suddenly become more worried as a result of this paper. The reasons is that the DNA synthesis and virus production techniques are not new. The whole process has been published before and every step is well understood. The virus production is not even the focus of the paper, because there is nothing new about it. The story is that the small pox vaccine from vaccinia virus has some side effects. The authors of the paper decided to check if the related horse pox virus may work better as vaccine. As luck will have it the damn thing is extinct, so they made it themselves using published protocols. The horse pox virus they made seems to work well as a vaccine. The fact that making a synthetic virus was considered just a bump in the road towards some other goal should tell you how easy it is to do. The reason the paper was rejected from more prestigious journals is not that it was conveying some dangerous new information that should be suppressed. Quite the opposite, there isn't anything significantly new in the work. The reason it went to PLOS One, is that the editorial policy of this journal is to publish soundly executed research and not consider if the research discovered something new or significant.
I was born in 1968, and just missed out on the vaccination back then. However, before going to Afghanistan in 2006, I had to get a smallpox vaccine.
Fortunately, I had it easy since I never had it before, and it was only like 2 or 3 pokes. Those who did get it when they were little for some reason received considerably more than us first timers.
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My God! It's a millennial killer!
Bigly stockpiles.
if scientists had not been fascinated by the possibility and made one? Scientists do what they do, and amorality is immorality.
E Proelio Veritas.
Anyone under the age of 30
Actually: It's anyone under age 46. Routine vaccination against smallpox ended in 1972.
What a grand idea. Let's bury our heads in the sand and not even talk about the possibility of smallpox being revived. Then of course it will NEVER happen.
What a bunch of farking bullshit. It's possible, so let's talk about it. Let's get all the great minds together and discuss it and come up with ways to counter it so it doesn't wipe out millions of people around the world.
Just because you don't talk about it, and don't want it published doesn't mean there isn't someone out there playing around with ways to revive it.
Oh thanks, I'm already a cranky old man, an I already get the occasional gout. Now you tell me I have to watch out for vaginitis as well? I think I would have preferred not to know.
Too late by my reasoning.
its not progress that important, its investor value that is important you stupid clod!
My God! It's a millennial killer!
Great! rush it into mass production immediately sir!
If you're claiming that smallpox inoculation didn't work, and all that history is just a hoax, then you're delusional - and no arguments win over delusions. Don't bother replying if you haven't read that wikipedia link above - I mean it; read it first or shut up.
In capitalist USA corporations control the government.
They always have had predators keeping them in check. Which kept the predators in check too. It’s a system!
That's the only reason they still exist!
And to pick rats and mice, of all the animals! Who do just fine in the wild. With cats and foxes and birds and the like eating them.
Until our human cities came along. With our overabundance of food we just fucking threw on the ground, and keeping all predators out.
And, typical for humans, we then blame it on the mice and rats.
Not to mention that that whole "pied piper" fairy tale is nothing more than a fairy tale. ... spinning a fairy tale of a dystoptia that *we* create, as an argument against us creating a dystopia. You're a real human.
Great argument though
Everything that behaves like this, results in death.
The goats are just goats though. The bacteria are just bacteria.
We got the biggest brains on the planet. An organ, whose sole purpose it is, to predict the future, to improve our chances of survival.
Yet we can't see the extinction for the humans lives.
Keep on making excuses though. Earth had many great extinction events. Even a global thermonuclear war will be survivable by many species. (Like those around geothermic wells.) ... We're our own cure.
Nature is elegant like that: If we can't fix ourselves
Has the genome of the virus been published?