Build Your Own Virus 381
Wire Tap writes "Scientists have assembled the first synthetic virus. The US researchers built the infectious agent from scratch using the genome sequence for polio. The most amusing part is this snippit: 'To construct the virus, the researchers say they followed a recipe they downloaded from the internet and used gene sequences from a mail-order supplier.' Heck, don't we all have our own mail-order suppliers for gene sequences?"
Not surprising, unfortunately (Score:2, Interesting)
Huge medicine possibility (Score:2, Interesting)
Ask Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
How hard would it be to reduce this to a stepwise procedure that any reasonably intelligent, resourceful, dedicated person could carry out?
Making LSD from scratch required a lot of skill. But with detailed how-tos now widely available, practically anyone can make acid.
Re:Huge medicine possibility (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Huge medicine possibility (Score:3, Interesting)
It's Hard (Score:5, Interesting)
Doing this kind of work takes a lot of time and skill and equipment. It's not particularly hard to get the stuff, but you do need stuff, and the knowledge to go about doing it, and you're not just going to get that knowledge from nowhere.
This team worked for 2 years on this, and they are dedicated scientists with plenty of experience in this sort of work. How long would it take one person working in a home lab to start from scratch? Well over two years. If they don't know anything about Molecular Biology besides what they got out of high school (like your LSD-making example) probably at least triple that.
Everyone is very paranoid about the synthetic virus thing. This is hard work. No, what's more scary is the technology that's been around for three decades or so now, which is the ability to modify existing viruses. Why would someone really go to the trouble to make a new superbug from scratch when they can just use what nature's already done?
Or do you think that you can do a much better job than evolution has over millions of years?
Not that there aren't problems with creating superbugs (even Ebola and HIV have major weaknesses) and it wouldn't be easy, but it'd be far easier to modify something that already exists than it would to build something from scratch.
They *think* they made an exact copy... (Score:4, Interesting)
Be very afraid...
Re:Disturbing (Score:4, Interesting)
Did these guys create "life"? (Score:3, Interesting)
If the "frankensteined" (a good word here) polio virus replicates and acts in other ways like a regular virus...
Did these guys create life from lifelessness?
W
Pure BS - here's why (Score:2, Interesting)
1) "While rare, sporadic case reports of AIDS and sero-archaeological studies have documented human infections with HIV prior to 1970"
http://www.avert.org/his81_86.htm
Why wasn't it identified earlier? It's extremely easy to imagine a situation where hundreds or thousands of Africans were dying of AIDS for decades, though no one knew what they were dying from. It wouldn't have caused a great deal of alarm because deaths would be sporatic (occuring years apart) and deep inside the least medically advanced continent on the planet.
There is even some speculation about deaths as early as 1955 from AIDS, though no one is entirely sure if the "mystery disease" that killed back in 1955 was actually AIDS.
2) AIDS exists in chimpanzee populations, too. It is a different from the strain found in humans.
Smallpox Virus (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm all for public knowledge of such sequences if they lead to productive research in the areas of disease control. However, with the current technology of being able to construct viruses from sequence data, it might be prudent to restrict such data to only respectable research centers.
Re:Tools Still Need Knowledge (Score:3, Interesting)
But no matter what they'd have to have some basics down, like how to run a gel or transfect bacteria. Not hard stuff, but they'd have to know how to do it. The more and more stuff people build up, like the antibiotic resistance example, the more abstract it can be, just like today you don't have to write to the hardware, you can use something like Perl. They'd still have to learn the equivalent of Perl to do it, which is no small task in itself, but even today there's no need to go around isolating your own restriction enzymes and such.
It is very much an engineering question, just like in software. The more complex your library is, the less you have to worry about. There's a lot of premade stuff out there that can be pieced together already. We're not really at scripting language level, but we're well beyond assembly. Things can be absracted, but only to a point. Like if you want to write your own OS, you can't really do it in Perl (or perhaps bash is a better example there, perl is an organism unto itself