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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.
Smallpox vaccine is made using cowpox. You do not need smallpox pathogens at all.
Centuries before Dr Jenner made the first vaccine from cowpox, the Chinese had developed inoculation using smallpox directly. Smallpox is most deadly when it infects the lungs first, suffocating the victim before any immunity develops. So the Chinese would take scabs from pustules, crush them up, and use a needle to poke it into the skin of uninfected people. This would cause a mild form of the disease with about a 2% mortality rate, far below the 30-50% rate from airborne infections, but induce full immunity.
The technique spread from China through the Islamic world to West Africa, and was taught to white Americans by African slaves.
Smallpox inoculation
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...
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Remember folks, if white people invent or discovered something, within a year Chinese "scholars" will find proof that they did it first.
Nobody is claiming that. Vaccination and innoculation (variolation) are two different things. Vaccination was discovered in England in 1798. Variolation was discovered in China in the 10th century. Both of these are backed up by contemporaneous historical records.
There are written records as early as 1721 of Americans being inoculated with variola, that specifically state that the technique was learned from Africans. That is 80 years before the cowpox vaccine was discovered in England.