July 11–WASHINGTON–Experts can now download a genetic blueprint from the Internet and use mail-order materials to assemble a deadly virus, says a group of researchers who made a synthetic polio virus in the lab to demonstrate the threat.
“The world had better be prepared,” says Dr. Eckard Wimmer, leader of a biomedical research team at the University of New York at Stony Brook where the virus was assembled.
The team, according to The Associated Press, made the virus in the laboratory using data from the Internet and tailor-made sequences ordered from a laboratory supply service. They injected the virus into mice to show that it worked. The animals were paralyzed and then killed.
“The reason we did it was to prove that it can be done and it now is a reality,” says Wimmer, senior author of a study appearing Friday in the journal Science.
“This approach has been talked about, but people didn’t take it seriously,” he adds. “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.”
The laboratory demonstration, Wimmer says, proves that eradicating a virus in the wild may not mean it is gone forever. Now, he adds, biochemists can reconstruct viruses.
The polio virus assembled in the laboratory is one of the simplest of the human plagues, says Jeronimo Cello, first author of the study.
“It was very easy to do,” he says.
While smallpox and other lethal viruses are much more complex and difficult to assemble, Cello say the future will prit would be possible.”
Although smallpox and other lethal viruses are very difficult to re-create, both Cello and Wimmer say “eventually, you would be able to do that.”
After last fall’s terrorist and anthrax-by-mail attacks, U.S. officials became concerned about the threat of smallpox and arranged for the manufacture of enough vaccine to protect the U.S. population. They are now determining how that vaccine should be used.
Polio is on the brink of being eradicated worldwide and there are plans to stop inoculations against the disease after it disappears from nature. Wimmer warned against such plans, saying stopping vaccination could lead to a generation of people highly susceptible to polio, enhancing its danger as a weapon.
The World Health Organization is planning to stockpile polio vaccines and Wimmer said that should be done everywhere.
” Our message is that you have to keep stockpiles of vaccines for every agent that you try to eradicate,” he says.