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Dangerous Virus made from
mail-order kits.
Should this have been
done?
Thursday, 11 July 2002
A small group of US researchers reported on Thursday they had built an
infectious poliovirus from scratch, using only a genetic blueprint from the
Internet as a guide and mail-order, and tailor-made sequences from a
laboratory supply service to assemble the deadly virus. The man-made virus
led to paralysis or death in mice engineered to carry the human receptor
for poliovirus.
"The world had better be prepared. This shows you can recreate a
virus from written information," Eckard
Wimmer, who led the study,
told newsagents.
"One has to be aware that humans can
recreate a virus," Wimmer said, "even
if you think it's not around anymore."
It is the closest anyone has yet come to creating life in a test tube —
although the scientists deny a virus, which is not a living cell but which
can replicate itself, is alive in the same sense as a bacterium, plant, or
a human being.
Nonetheless, it contain genetic material like all other life, enough to
cause disease and replicate and spread itself.
"If the ability to replicate is one of life's attributes, then
poliovirus is a chemical with a life cycle," the researchers at
the State University of New York in Stony Brook wrote in their report,
published in the journal Science Express.
Eckard Wimmer denies that he has created
life.
"No, I would not say I created life in a test tube,"
Wimmer said. "We created a chemical in a test tube that, when put
into cells, begins to behave a little bit like something alive. Some people
say viruses are chemicals and I belong to that group."
Wimmer said once the right genetic parts were in place, the virus virtually
self-assembled in a lab dish.
Poliovirus does not have DNA like most organisms, but starts out with RNA
instead. Normally DNA carries the genetic code in cells, and is transcribed
into RNA, which controls the production of individual proteins.
Wimmer said once the right genetic parts were in place, the virus virtually
self-assembled in a lab dish.
Poliovirus does not have DNA like most organisms, but starts out with RNA
instead. Normally DNA carries the genetic code in cells, and is transcribed
into RNA, which controls the production of individual proteins.
To make a poliovirus, Wimmer and colleagues Jeronimo Cello
and Aniko
Paul first took a step
backward.
"You cannot synthesise RNA," Wimmer said. "So we
converted the sequence from RNA into DNA. And DNA you can synthesise. Then
we had to go back to RNA. That was very simple — by using an enzyme that
can read DNA and synthesise RNA, called a transcriptase," he
added.
"Now you have the RNA. That RNA we put into a cell-free juice that
we developed in 1991 ... and loo and behold out came the virus. It built
itself."
The "cell-free juice" is made by taking the virus's
favourite home — a human cell — shredding it up and removing the pieces
such as the nucleus, mitochondria and other large structures within the
cell.
"The remaining juice that is there contains all the goodies that
you need for the process," Wimmer said.
This is similar to a regular cell free reticulocyte extract used for in
vitro protein synthesis.
There were not too many ingredients to throw into this mix. The poliovirus
consist of a single, long "pro-gene" that produces what is
called a polyprotein. The virus also can cut this long polyprotein into its
functional smaller pieces, which are needed for its few functions. This
"synthetically-derived" poliovirus acted like wild-type polio
both in the test tube and in mice — genetically engineered to be
susceptible to polio, which in nature prefers to infect human beings —
which were paralysed after infection.
So, what are the implications of this experiment?
Should this have been done all together?
- The ability to synthesise poliovirus could pose a bioterror
threat if mass polio vaccination were to end.
- Polio infection itself causes paralysis or death in only a
small percentage of people infected with the virus. But it is also
possible to do with other viruses, such as influenza or Ebola, to be
synthesised using only published information on the make-up of the
virus.
- Eradicating a virus in the wild may not mean it is gone
forever. Now biochemists can reconstruct any virus in the laboratory.
If other deadly viruses can be made in the lab from scratch, they may
always be at least a theoretical threat — which means vaccination may
have to continue even when a disease no longer naturally exists.
- This process might be used to create genetically weakened
versions of other viruses for use as vaccines. Wimmer’s team is also
working with the hepatitis C virus.
Wimmer conclude:
"It is a wake-up call for everybody to say that what is in the
public domain can be used for the betterment of mankind — namely to combat
disease — and it can be misused. You could argue that it could be misused
for bioterrorism."
"The reason we did it was to prove that it can be done and it now
is a reality," said Wimmer.
"This approach has been talked about, but people didn't take it
seriously," he further said.
In response to criticism that this should not have been done, Wimmer said:
"Bioterrorists didn't learn anything from us. Everything we did has
been published before. We just put the steps together. Many laboratories
could repeat what we have done."
"Now people have to take it seriously. Progress in biomedical
research has its benefits and it has its down side. There is a danger
inherent to progress in sciences. This is a new reality, a new
consideration."
In my opinion, this was a necessary experiment to do, not so much
for any scientific reasons, but to increase the general public’s awareness
that this could be done.
We often have this Dr. Jekyll
and Mr. Hyde situation in modern biomedicine
today. However, that is no reason to try to stop or prohibit this kind of
research. The only thing possible is to improve the information to the
public, what can and can’t be done at the moment. Thus this is a good and
important example of an "educational" experiment. Rest assure,
that scientist’s in rough states, like Iraq, Syria, Sudan, and North Korea,
have been very well aware of this possibility for a long time already,
someone even "successful" enough to have artificially
created one or the other dangerous and deadly virus already.
The most disturbing fact in this context is, in my opinion, how cheap this
kind of experiment is to do. If you only have access to a reasonably modern
and well equipped biomedical laboratory, it will not take more than a few
thousand US$, at least less than 10,000, to repeat this kind of procedure.
The only thing that takes time and planning is to find the
"right" people (one or two would be enough) with the technical
competence and skill to perform the really simple mixture of pre-fabricated
chemicals. And there are thousands, even tens of thousands around in the
world with this knowledge, but how many of these would do this type of
experiment for an evil cause? Probably quite a few, unfortunately.
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Computergenerated model of polio virus
Dr.Eckard Wimmer
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