Weapons research quietly marches on.

In My Humble Opinion
1

In this article, at Science Now passing mention is made of a reverse genetic engineering method being used to recreate the virus from 1918. The article makes no particular point of it, but given the studies among primates that were discussed it is absolutely necessary that the University of Wisconsin at Madison is currently in possession of live virus of the same strain. The fastest killer of history, and they brought it back from the dead! Not only that, but the analysis discussed seems to imply an ability to alter it more or less at will, to change its characteristics.

Would someone explain to me just how this isn’t the terror weapon of the century, or in fact pretty much all time? It’s an airborne pathogen with a proven lethality and virility to make a pandemic attack with half a dozen suicide attackers easily possible. “Weaponizing” this pathogen seems redundant. Unless the University of Madison is the preeminent practitioner of viral biology, it seems to me that there are only a few years to go until weapons of mass destruction are easily available to any entity with the resources of a medium sized university. That includes every nation in the world, every major multinational corporation, and a fair number of smaller ones if they have the specializations in house.

Me, I’m worried. I don’t have any particular plan of action, but it seems to me we are on the road to hell, and moving at high speed.

Tris

2

[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
Would someone explain to me just how this isn’t the terror weapon of the century, or in fact pretty much all time?
[/QUOTE]

Because we now have the ability to create flu vaccines?

3

[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
The article makes no particular point of it, but given the studies among primates that were discussed it is absolutely necessary that the University of Wisconsin at Madison is currently in possession of live virus of the same strain. The fastest killer of history, and they brought it back from the dead! Not only that, but the analysis discussed seems to imply an ability to alter it more or less at will, to change its characteristics.
[/QUOTE]

Either a lab at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has magically transformed itself into “a high-level biosafety laboratory (BSL 4) at the Public Health Agency of Canada’s National Microbiology Laboratory” in Winnepeg, or you were so busy getting worked up that you failed to take notice of this rather important fact. For pete’s sake, materials like the Spanish flu virus aren’t left laying around on a student’s workbench, for the reseachers’ health as much as anyone else’s. Do give people some credit here.

The recreation of the virus in the lab is a major feat, designed ultimately to protect public health, not work against it. Your thread title is inflammatory and grossly unfair to the researchers involved in the project. Perhaps this story from the Washington Post will help you to understand why this was actually important to do.

4

Sorry, my last link was to the story of how the virus was recovered, interesting in and of itself.

This link covers an earlier finding as to why the flu was so deadly.

Why would you not want to know this, if knowing also gives you the possibility of saving potentially millions of lives through effective vaccination?

5

Not only do we now understand how the 1918 influenza virus killed millions of mostly healthy people, the virus can be used to understand how cytokine storms occur, and now research into suppressing them can proceed - vital for dealing with future viruses like a possible avian flu mutation.

Si

6

And there is no way that research could have been done without actually recreating the virus?

Which facility it was is really not the point. It happened. A potentially lethal and very contagious virus that did not exist, now exists. No one mentioned any plans to track and destroy all the samples.

Yes, we can make vaccines. So I guess it’s all just fine. Scienctists are never careless, and laboratory accidents never happen, and evil people are never able to gain access to such materials. I don’t know why I didn’t stop to think of that.

Tris

7

[QUOTE=Finagle]
Because we now have the ability to create flu vaccines?
[/QUOTE]
We aren’t set up to make enough, especially on short notice. I’ve always heard that a new version of the 1918 flu would be almost as lethal as the last pandemic, because of how few take the vaccine, and how little there is.

I hope that they did destroy all live samples of the thing, after gene sequencing it. It seems too dangerous to leave alive.

8

[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
And there is no way that research could have been done without actually recreating the virus?
[/quote]
Er, yeah. Just like you can’t go out and become a surgeon without cutting into a few cadavers. Viruses don’t just escape from a lab and wander around reproducing until they wipe out the human race; most are rather delicate and even modest containment and sterilization procedures are sufficient to give a high degree of confidence for safety.

Regarding bioweapons, while they play a signficant part in fiction thrillers, weaponizing and distributing effective biological weapons is problematic at best. They are a “terror weapon” in the sense of inducing fear in the population at large, but the amount of damage that could be reasonably predicted by any known pathogen–particularly given modern sanitation and medical knowledge–is pretty low. You’ll note that there have been very few truly widespread outbreaks anywhere in the industrialized world in the last sixty years (despite a few scares) and even the most virulent pathogens either peter out quickly (hemorrhagic fevers) or have a modest mortality rate.

blue sky dreamer, thanks for the level-headed response and citations. I hope you stick around.

Stranger

9

everybody Panic!!!

10

I suppose I was just being foolish.

It’s not like someone could get hold of a vial of some pathogen, like say . . . anthrax and send it through the mail. I mean all that stuff is in really secure places. No way at all anyone could release it into the population. What was I thinking? So, since only the most saintly of people ever become scientsts, it is downright insulting of me to worry about recreating the most efficient killer of humans ever. I should just trust the scientific establishment. If they say no way a genetically altered lifeform could escape into the wild, who am I to doubt their authority.

Tris

Tris

11

Nice; follow up intelligent explanation and citation with passive-aggressive self-deprecation. For the record, the anthrax attacks of 2001 resulted in a total of five deaths and a hell-on bunch of media attention. A would-be terrorist could cause more deaths and disruption by sniping at random people.

If this were actual weapon research, you wouldn’t be reading about it in the news. And yes, Virginia, in order to treat disease you must first replecate the conditions and causes. Despite the ongoing research in hundreds if not thousands of labs with virulent infectious diseases, a full scale epidemic (either by carelessness or malfeasance) has failed to manifest itself.

Indeed, if you were a self-proclaimed terrorist who wanted to do great harm, you could dig up a little bit of plain earth, which contains (among other organisms) staphylococcus aureus, clostridium botulinum, or vibrio vulnificus, cultivate these organisms to large quantities (a scientific task at the level of an advanced high school science fair project), and release them in water or air. This takes no special knowledge of virual replication or weaponizing infectious organisms.

In short, you are, in ignornance, making a mountain out of a molehill.

STranger

12

C’mon. Give Tris a break.

I mean, he’s wrong, but please consider the fact that both the anthrax attacks and the DC sniper attacks took place in his (and my) neighborhood, basically. When crap like that goes down, it can wear on a guy.

13

[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
I suppose I was just being foolish.

It’s not like someone could get hold of a vial of some pathogen, like say . . . anthrax and send it through the mail. I mean all that stuff is in really secure places. No way at all anyone could release it into the population. What was I thinking? So, since only the most saintly of people ever become scientsts, it is downright insulting of me to worry about recreating the most efficient killer of humans ever. I should just trust the scientific establishment. If they say no way a genetically altered lifeform could escape into the wild, who am I to doubt their authority.
[/QUOTE]

It is extremely difficult to weaponize most disease-causing agents. The anthrax attack that actually managed to kill a few people showed a degree of knowledge in its preparation that suggested that the person actually had access to DOD information on how to make an effective package, and yet it still didn’t do much. Anthrax is focused on as one of the things it would be easy to make a bioweapon from simply because it’s a bacteria that’s relatively common (several strains can be found in the soil in many places) and easy to grow, it is extremely hardy, can be made into a dry preparation (i.e.: requires no living host to remain effective), and is pretty nasty once it manages to get started.

Even with all these advantages, it’s still hard as hell to make something that will actually kill someone. It doesn’t spread easily. You’ve got to have direct contact with it to even contract anything. Making it into a fine enough powder that it will be inhaled and cause a lung infection is very hard. If you just get it on your skin it’s nasty, but not usually deadly. Most of the common forms are not particularly virulent. The really good stuff is kept under lock and key, and no one has managed to ever get ahold of those outside of the labs that produced them. The stuff that got mailed was something that whoever made it had isolated and purified on their own from one of the strains that is available to pretty much anyone who would take the trouble to find some good soil samples.

Nasty viruses that have caused problems in the past like influenza or smallpox, and new exotic scary ones like ebola are usually pretty fragile and constantly need new hosts to infect, or they burn themselves out. It’s close to impossible to make inert preparations with these kinds of pathogens that will be effective; you pretty much need a living host with an active infection of the agent to have any chance of spreading it.

Research labs take elaborate precautions not because the chance of something getting out is so high, but because the potential repercussions are huge. If a pathogen did actually make it out into the population and by some borderline miracle found something it could infect, lots and lots of people could die. On the other hand, there’s never, to my knowledge, been a really big incident connected with disease research.

The worst near-disaster I know of in the US is something that you probably wouldn’t know of unless you follow infectious disease research. Or unless you read the punched-up version of events in The Hot Zone, later distorted almost beyond recognition when it was made into a movie :slight_smile: There was an outbreak of an airborne strain of ebola among some monkeys imported from the Philippines that they initially thought was related to ebola Zaire, which is a particularly nasty strain; 90% casualty rate among those infected. A bunch of monkeys died, a couple of handlers tested positive for exposure (they weren’t following containment protocols closely enough) but no humans contracted the disease. It was kind of scary at the time, especially when electron micrographs of the virus once it was isolated looked so very close to Zaire.

Look up the ebola outbreak in Reston, Virginia for more information. (Yes, Virginia. I’ll be you didn’t know there was an über-scary ebola outbreak in the US in the 90s.) It’s important to note that the monkeys were infected before they reached any research lab. In fact, they were still in quarantine to prevent any diseases they might be carrying from spreading to local animals or humans. Whadda ya know, quarantine works.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t worry about outbreaks caused by nature, but the precautions researchers take to make sure that nothing gets out of their labs border on the paranoid. They’re pretty darn safe. Research like this is vital to our understanding of diseases. Nothing beats working with the real thing. Models and gene sequences don’t cut it because we still have only a dim idea of how all the pathways fit together. That’s one of the reasons that we still have a few samples of smallpox around. It’s hard to do any prevention research when you don’t have the necessary tools. It’s been a long time since we had to deal with that particularly nasty bug, but without preserving some samples for reference we might be up the proverbial creek if we ever run into it again.

14

[QUOTE=Mr. Moto]
C’mon. Give Tris a break.

I mean, he’s wrong, but please consider the fact that both the anthrax attacks and the DC sniper attacks took place in his (and my) neighborhood, basically. When crap like that goes down, it can wear on a guy.
[/QUOTE]

The OP starts off with a massive misrepresentation of the research he links to, and responds to people by adopting an attitude that reflects fear and paranoia rather out of proportion to the situation. If in fact his attitude is related to fears brought on by events from four years ago and longer, I respectfully suggest that he speak to someone about post-traumatic stress. (I say this as someone who came close to losing a sibling in the attacks on 9/11.) And it’s not out of place for other folks to point out that he is overreacting, for the benefit of other curious people reading the thread.

Thanks for the kind words, Stranger. Not sure yet if I should cave into the temptation to sign up, since I already suffer from procrastination troubles, but who knows? :slight_smile:

15

[QUOTE=Weirddave]
everybody Panic!!!
[/QUOTE]

Quit bitin’ my style.
:wink: :smiley:

16

Okay, without any sarcasm, and with some patience, I will try to explain my response.

The article gives as its source “University of Wisconson-Madison.” It was led by a faculty member of that institution, although it was based on work conducted in Canada. So much for my “gross misrepresentation” of the source. This kind of nitpicking ignores the point of my OP entirely, and offers nothing. Yes, I ignored it in my next post. I shall ignore it hereafter.

The effectiveness of the Anthrax attacks is also absolutely irrelevant to the point. The existence of the Anthrax attack simply points out those assurances that the pathogens “are stored in secure facilities” is nothing but a specious bureaucratic promise of the same stripe as a dozen other cases of genetically altered material that “would never be released”, yet somehow was. Someone has recreated a virus that has not existed in eighty years, and produced enough of it to run tests on monkeys. This virus represented no threat to anyone until it was recreated in a laboratory. How much of a threat it is now is not measurable, but it is certainly greater than zero.

The explanation that it was necessary to study the effects on the immune system falls short of compelling defense, because the authors themselves note that: “The same excessive immune reaction is characteristic of the deadly complications of H5N1 avian influenza, the strain of bird flu present in Asia and which has claimed nearly 150 human lives but has not yet shown a capacity to spread easily among people.” Since that is the case, and ample supplies of the H5N1 virus are available, recreating this virus was not necessary for the research claimed to be “worth the risk.” If the research was done with the H5N1 virus it would be at least as relevant to modern application as that done with the resurrected virus.

Do I really thing that this particular veterinary medicine researcher is planning a bio attack? Of course not. But he and his team have recreated a disease with a proven history of pandemic potential. Anthrax has no such history, and its failure as a weapon is not germane to the assessment of risk from 1918 influenza. Now everyone on this board says that because they are scientists, we should accept assurances that it was necessary, and is completely safe. The level of trust implied is both illogical, given the history of genetic research, and absurd, given the absence of any discussion of the possible dangers. In fact the general tenor of the respondents has been that it is ridiculous to even consider that there are dangers at all.

We have antivirals. We know how to make vaccines. Sometimes they work. We don’t have any ready for immediate antipandemic response, and could not make enough to matter in less time than the probable duration of a naturally spreading pandemic, much less a deliberate use vector system. And all of this is a risk which did not exist before the virus was recreated. There is a fairly short list of extraordinarily dangerous substances that need to be controlled very closely to avoid mass casualties. That list just got longer by one. Pretending that that is not true is . . . well, just stupid. Pretending that the assurances of those involved that it is securely controlled is naïve.

Tris

17

[QUOTE=Triskadecamus]
The explanation that it was necessary to study the effects on the immune system falls short of compelling defense, because the authors themselves note that: “The same excessive immune reaction is characteristic of the deadly complications of H5N1 avian influenza, the strain of bird flu present in Asia and which has claimed nearly 150 human lives but has not yet shown a capacity to spread easily among people.” Since that is the case, and ample supplies of the H5N1 virus are available, recreating this virus was not necessary for the research claimed to be “worth the risk.” If the research was done with the H5N1 virus it would be at least as relevant to modern application as that done with the resurrected virus.
[/QUOTE]

And how were the researchers supposed to know that the Spanish Flu and H5N1 virus cause similar reactions without seeing the reaction of the Spanish Flu first-hand?

18

[QUOTE=Rysto]
And how were the researchers supposed to know that the Spanish Flu and H5N1 virus cause similar reactions without seeing the reaction of the Spanish Flu first-hand?
[/QUOTE]

Shhhh! Don’t distract him with common sense, he’s on a roll.

19

I didn’t finish my last post:

And this discovery was potentially an exciting one for immunologists: there have been suggestions that this immune reaction(called a cytokine storm) is the main cause of death in all such flu pandemics. If this is true, then finding a way to prevent this reaction would be critical in ending a future pandemic. If this theory is wrong, then it’s important that we know this so that research doesn’t focus solely on cytokine storms.

20

[QUOTE=Rysto]
I didn’t finish my last post:

And this discovery was potentially an exciting one for immunologists: there have been suggestions that this immune reaction(called a cytokine storm) is the main cause of death in all such flu pandemics. If this is true, then finding a way to prevent this reaction would be critical in ending a future pandemic. If this theory is wrong, then it’s important that we know this so that research doesn’t focus solely on cytokine storms.
[/QUOTE]
If it is present in all flu pandemics, doesn’t that just mean studying any flu virus would do? Once again, even the experts say that the 1918 virus is not unique in this regard. It is unique in its proven danger to the world.

I also have trouble believing that research is going to focus on cytokine storms even if it is verified by this research. It means one research group is going to study it, and the benefit to society would be the same.

Tris