Scientists modify H5N1 virus, could kill millions if set free, going to tell everyone how they did i

mrk

mrk

mrk

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Locked up in the bowels of the medical faculty building here and accessible to only a handful of scientists lies a man-made flu virus that could change world history if it were ever set free.

The virus is an H5N1 avian influenza strain that has been genetically altered and is now easily transmissible between ferrets, the animals that most closely mimic the human response to flu. Scientists believe it's likely that the pathogen, if it emerged in nature or were released, would trigger an influenza pandemic, quite possibly with many millions of deaths.

In a 17th floor office in the same building, virologist Ron Fouchier of Erasmus Medical Center calmly explains why his team created what he says is "probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make"—and why he wants to publish a paper describing how they did it.
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Taken from Sciencemag where the full article resides.

One scientist was quoted in the article saying:

"I can't think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one," adds Keim, who has worked on anthrax for many years. "I don't think anthrax is scary at all compared to this."
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Unlike the media faff surrounding Cern's non life threatening experiments with the LHC, this thing actually has some pretty severe risks if the papers find their way into the wrong hands no?

Science is absolutely brilliant but some things like this maybe should not be made public, or if it is then how it was done should not be!

Fouchier initially tried to make the virus more transmissible by making specific changes to its genome, using a process called reverse genetics; when that failed, he passed the virus from one ferret to another multiple times, a low-tech and time-honored method of making a pathogen adapt to a new host.
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:eek:

12 Monkeys, anyone? :P
 
Unlike the media faff surrounding Cern's non life threatening experiments with the LHC, this thing actually has some pretty severe risks if the papers find their way into the wrong hands no?
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The hardware required to synthesis it at this time is prohibitive - beyond even the reach of most rogue states let alone the expertise to actually operate it and produce a working finished product we are a long way atm from it being a real danger "in the hands of the wrong people".
 
meh not bothered, this world could do with millions being wiped out to be honest. If a war isnt gonna happen anytime soon this is the next best thing.

ooohh controversial.....
 
It may sound scaremongery from the OP, but honestly it doesn't surprise me, there is a fairly well known example of this with a plasmodium (malaria). They made it super pathogenic to see what would happen... And what do you know, they all got chronically ill.

Too much 'could we' and not enough 'should we'.
 
mrk said:
Unlike the media faff surrounding Cern's non life threatening experiments with the LHC, this thing actually has some pretty severe risks if the papers find their way into the wrong hands no?

Science is absolutely brilliant but some things like this maybe should not be made public, or if it is then how it was done should not be!
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This isn't like baking a cake. You don't get get a chicken to cough on a tissue add 30g of flour and hey presto super killer death virus.

Even if they were to set out all the instructions in detail there are probably like 6 labs in the world that could do it and none of them are in countries loopy enough to let it loose.

Hopefully they learn something that can help us in the event we DO get an epidemic or something like the Spanish Flu rears it ugly head again. Somewhere between 3 and 6% of the world population was killed in that one.
 
Todge said:
This isn't like baking a cake. You don't get get a chicken to cough on a tissue add 30g of flour and hey presto super killer death virus.

Even if they were to set out all the instructions in detail there are probably like 6 labs in the world that could do it and none of them are in countries loopy enough to let it loose.

Hopefully they learn something that can help us in the event we DO get an epidemic or something like the Spanish Flu rears it ugly head again. Somewhere between 3 and 6% of the world population was killed in that one.
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I doubt there are even 6 labs in the world that can produce something viable for mass infection in the wild tho there probably are that could experiment with it (and potentially produce viable results).
 
Rroff said:
I doubt there are even 6 labs in the world that can produce something viable for mass infection in the wild tho there probably are that could experiment with it (and potentially produce viable results).
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I have to ask, what are you basing that on? :p
 
I think it's interesting that the flu virus in its current state only needs a few specific mutations for it to be a killer virus. It's likely to happen at some point, I guess having genomes altered in a lab and producing superviruses that way is going to make it slightly more likely one appears in public a bit sooner, but it also helps us understand them better to fight them when they do crop up. I'd rather this research is done than not.
 
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