A POX TO BLIGHT WITH

E-mail ^ | 9.29.02 | Fred Reed

[Pistol]

A Pox To Blight With

Technology Is Good For You  

    

I've decided that I support the exploration of Mars. I want to go first. And hide there, in a sealed space suit.

I was boring myself to death on one of those diabolical exercise machines at Gold's, and in desperation reading Scientific American, a magazine of left-wing politics and occasional science. I ran across a small blurb about Eckhard Wimmer, of the State University of New York at Stonybrook. He and some other folk had built artificial polio virus, said SciAm, starting with mail-order chemicals. And it worked. It infected mice. Which is just real interesting. In fact, it's scary.

First you have to think what a virus is. Basically it's a long strand of DNA or RNA. Some viruses are long loose strands, like Ebola. Some ball into a glob and have protein coats around them. At bottom they are strands of ribonucleic acids, the stuff that tells cells what to do.

DNA is a sort of double chain of little chemical building blocks called nucleotides. The details aren't critical here. The important thing is that everybody in biochemistry understands nucleotides, and they are widely available. They're not evil. They're like nails. You can buy them.

Think of them as beads on strings. They come in four colors, so to speak, cytosine, guanine, adenine, and thymine. (OK, and uracil in RNA.) The language is technoglop, but the point is that if you string them together in the same order as natural DNA, the result is indistinguishable from natural DNA.

Maybe you're thinking, "So what, Fred? Why are you doing this to me? Do I look like a chemistry geek? " Wait a paragraph or two.

Many viruses have been "sequenced." That is, we know what the order of nucleotides is in them. Wimmer, to show what bioterrorists might do, downloaded the sequence for polio from the Internet, and built the virus, using chemicals you can get from a biological supply house. When he injected it into the brains of mice (mental note to self: don't be a mouse) the beasts duly got polio. The artificial strain wasn't as virulent as the natural variety, but it functioned.

Why is this important?

Because it means that you don't need a culture of a virus to release it into the world.

In principle, all you need is the DNA sequence and some lab equipment that is getting better by the week. Then you can build viruses on your own. Think psychotic graduate students.

Putting it otherwise, any virus whose sequence is known isn't extinct. Further, when people can build viruses from sequences, governments cannot have monopolies on sequenced viral pathogens.

Today in various journals of military affairs you see assertions that smallpox, officially pronounced extinct many years ago, exists in labs in Russia, maybe England, and America. People express concern that it might somehow escape or get into the hands of terrorists. But, if viruses can be strung together like tinker toys, it doesn't matter whether these countries have a sequenced virus. Anybody, before too long anyway, will be able to make it.

Being the endlessly dutiful reporter that I am, I got on the horn to Stonybrook to check the story out, left a message with the PR woman, and never heard back. Maybe Wimmer's next project can be to synthesize a functioning PR woman. Judging by comments on the web from members of Wimmer's team, smallpox would be trickier to make than polio, and maybe impossible—today. But molecular biology is just booming along.

Now, get on Google, and search on "smallpox" and "sequencing." Bingo. "Although the complete genomic sequence of selected isolates of variola virus is known…." **

Smallpox is thirty percent fatal. It's also highly contagious, as anthrax is not. If your population is 300 million, that's about a hundred million dead. Those who don't die end up looking as if they had. Nobody is much vaccinated these days. Incredibly effective vectors for viral transmission today exist. (The major one is called a "Boeing 747.") The public-health system could not remotely handle so many patients. Worth thinking about. Second interesting point: The creation of life.

Are viruses alive? Tricky question. On one hand, they are just boring polymers, drab chemical compounds that usually just sit there if they aren't inside a living cell. On the other hand, inside a cell they take over the cellular machinery, make multiple copies of themselves, and often explode the cell so the new viruses can go infest other cells. They sound kind of alive. Whether they are predators or poisons isn't real clear.

If they are alive (whatever that means, and the answer isn't clear either), then building one in a lab amounts to the creation of life. So far, life has always come from other life. Live women give birth to live babies, live trees produce live seeds that grow into live plants. Nobody has done it from scratch.

This is different from the question of whether life originally evolved by accident from some postulated primeval soup. Copying a '57 Chevy differs from inventing one. Yet creating something that was actually alive from something that actually wasn't would be, this column thinks, of philosophical importance.

On the other hand, if a virus isn't alive, which is certainly an arguable position at this point, then recreating one would be like copying an aspirin tablet: Whoopee-doo. If I knew what life really was, I'd take my Nobel prize go live in Tahiti.

Synthesizing viruses creeps up on a massive question: Is life just the juxtaposition of complicated chemical reactions? Or is there more involved?

If you could take a cat, and copy it somehow, atom for atom (which is wildly impossible, but never mind), until you had two physically indistinguishable beasts—would the copied cat be alive, chase mice, and miss its litter box? Would it be a real cat? Or would it be a mass of gunch that you would want to throw out as soon as possible? Dunno. I'm just a working-stiff columnist. I don't get paid for cosmic truth. But Mars makes more and more sense.

Nekkid In Austin

Buy Fred's new reprehensible book, Nekkid In Austin! Barnes and Noble has the sucker. Another collection of Fred's collected outrages, irresponsible ravings, and curmudgeonry from Fred On Everything and some innocent magazines that foolishly published him. Put Fred Reed in the search at thingy at B&N and the book will pop like mushrooms on a decaying stump. On request, they may ship it in a plain brown wrapper marked "Sex Books" so your neighbors won't suspect.

        

[Pistol]

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[gcruse]

I like Fred. Fred invents good stuff.

[aruanan]

If they are alive (whatever that means, and the answer isn't clear either), then building one in a lab amounts to the creation of life. So far, life has always come from other life. Live women give birth to live babies, live trees produce live seeds that grow into live plants. Nobody has done it from scratch.

If life, it's still life coming from life; it's just the means that have been altered. Also, that group using the polio virus used only part of a small virus (7441 bp). The small pox virus is huge by comparison (185578 bp). And no, just because a DNA or RNA sequence is known doesn't mean an extinct virus or other form of life is not extinct. The DNA is the cell's recipe book for making everything it needs to continue living. The DNA itself, though, is inert. It doesn't control. It doesn't make decisions. It doesn't even respond to the cell because it has no means of response. If you don't have the living cell, you're pretty much screwed. Even if you have a living cell to insert genomic DNA into, you may still be screwed unless the cell is of a plant or animal sufficiently like the one you're trying to clone (because this is what would be the result). Although the cells contain mitochondria which have their own DNA, not all the mitochondrial genes necessary for the operation of the mitochondria lie in the mitochondrial genome. Get too big a mismatch between genome and the exnucleated cell into which you're attempting to insert it and you'll get nothing. You may as well expect to generate a fully functioning French kitchen from a French cookbook. That would be much, much simpler than trying to create a cell into which an artificial genome could be successfully introduced.

[HiTech RedNeck]

This is a virus, not a cell. Viruses hijack cells. Now building a bacterium would be another question.

[aruanan]

This is a virus, not a cell. Viruses hijack cells. Now building a bacterium would be another question.

Yes, but the researchers didn't even build the viral envelope from scratch, just part of the genome.

[HiTech RedNeck]

So what if they built a smallpox core and stick it in a chickenpox envelope?

[HiTech RedNeck]

... i.e. once they get this thing into a suitable cell at all, they can breed it like crazy. The initial virus might be a jury rigged hack, but once it got into a human cell, it would churn out a faithful replica of the actual smallpox virus.

[aruanan]

So what if they built a smallpox core and stick it in a chickenpox envelope?

If they didn't get the entire smallpox genome into a cell and do it in such a way that it could activate and use various cell processes to replicate itself, they wouldn't be able to wind up with the genuine article. Getting the cDNA sequence and thinking that it'll be trivial to whip up a functional virus is like getting the blueprints for a 1964 Mustang and thinking how cool it'll be when people see you driving down the street in a brand new 1964 Mustang.

[HiTech RedNeck]

Well, one hopes that a chickenpox virus shell is not similar enough to a smallpox virus shell that it could be co-opted for smallpox. It's like yes the Mustang blueprint needs an engineer to carry it out, but the blueprint will
not care whether it is carried out by a German, as opposed to an American, engineer.