Free Republic

The creation of a chimeric SARS-like virus has scientists discussing the risks of gain-of-function research. Ralph Baric, an infectious-disease researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, last week (November 9) published a study on his team’s efforts to engineer a virus with the surface protein of the SHC014 coronavirus, found in horseshoe bats in China, and the backbone of one that causes human-like severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in mice. The hybrid virus could infect human airway cells and caused disease in mice, according to the team’s results, which were published in Nature Medicine.The results demonstrate the ability...

A Pox To Blight WithTechnology 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...