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Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'? 287

Posted by BeauHD from the freezing-point dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Smallpox was one of the most devastating diseases humanity has ever faced, killing more than 300 million people in the 20th century alone. But thanks to the most successful global vaccination campaign in history, the disease was completely eradicated by 1980. By surrounding the last places on earth where smallpox was still occurring -- small villages in Asia and Africa -- and inoculating everyone in a wide circle around them, D. A. Henderson and the World Health Organization were able to starve the virus of hosts. Smallpox is highly contagious, but it is not spread by insects or animals. When it is gone from the human population, it is gone for good. But Errol Moris writes in the NYT that Henderson didn't really eliminate smallpox. In a handful of laboratories around the world, there are still stocks of smallpox, tucked away in one freezer or another. In 2014 the CDC announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in a refrigerator located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. How can you say it's eliminated when it's still out there, somewhere? The demon in the freezer.

Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses. Meanwhile, opponents of retention argue that there's neither need nor practical reason for keeping the virus around. In a letter to Science Magazine published in 1994, the Nobel laureate David Baltimore wrote, "I doubt that we so desperately need to study smallpox that it would be worth the risk inherent in the experimentation." It all comes down to the question of how best to protect ourselves against ourselves. Is the greater threat to humanity our propensity for error and stupidity, or for dastardly ingenuity?
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Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'? More

Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'?

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  • Truly Epically Dumb to Destroy It (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 19, 2016 @10:32PM (#52146547)

    It could be highly useful in future medical research, and the damage it could cause if it gets back into the wild would be minimal.

    • Re:Truly Epically Dumb to Destroy It (Score:5, Interesting)

      by meerling ( 1487879 ) on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:50AM (#52147173)
      Actually, there is no known medical use for it anymore, and I do believe they've completely sequenced it and could recreate it if that were ever necessary for some reason.
      As to minimal damage in the wild? That's B.S.. Have you been vaccinated against smallpox in the last decade? Probably not as routine vaccinations were stopped in 1972, and unfortunately the high level of resistance it gives only lasts 4-7 years. Nobody really knows what the resistance level, if any, is after 20 years, much less than 45+ years.

      We currently don't have stockpiles of the vaccine, and as such, if there was an outbreak, it would run rampant long before enough vaccine to matter had been made. There would be a lot of dead people. Ok, you say, let's just stock up on it ahead of time. Well, there's a couple of issues with that. First, it might expire, so you'd have to keep making it constantly. I don't know what it's actual shelf life is, but vaccines of any kind aren't exactly canned peas and some of them are positively short time get it while it's fresh only.
      Then there's your second big problem. Cost. You'd have an expensive production facility, and storage, and security, and you'd have to keep replacing the stock once you'd built it up enough, and probably some other things you'd have to pay for. Now mind you that this is all for a virus that is dead in the wild, and has very limited lab samples remaining. That's like making 14k gold Tasmanian Tiger repellents for everyone in Australia! It's a very expensive exercise for something that's about as likely as a meteor strike at this point.

      But it gets worse. One of the big issues with all vaccines is they work best before you get exposed. (Many only help if you've had them before you've been exposed.) I've seen some stuff saying that the smallpox vaccine takes close to a week before it's protecting you. So that means you're going to have to be vaccinating the population, and revaccinating them about every 7 years to keep the immunity levels high. DO YOU HAVE AN IDEA HOW EXPENSIVE AND FREAKING DIFFICULT THAT IS THESE DAYS, ESPECIALLY WITH ANTI-VAXXERS?
      Yeah, we can't get them to vaccinate for Polio and Whooping Cough, two other diseases that were on the fast track to oblivion before those morons made a whole new generation of potential victims and cut down the herd immunity system.

      The scientists that had the samples had a death date set. There was going to be a celebration afterwards. Then some fools pushed through an injunction to prevent the total and final extinction of smallpox.

      By the way, if you don't know, the longer something is around, and the more it's fooled with, the more likely there will be an accident. Smallpox is currently sitting in locked freezers and they don't even like to move the samples around. What do you think will happen when they have to start culturing large quantities of it to start making vaccines? Yep, it's probably going to get loose. (I don't know their current setup, my info on their storage was before they started making limited quantities of the vaccine for certain 'key personnel' in 200X (two thousand something).

      If you want to find out more, there are plenty of science articles, even some real video journalism and the like on it, but please avoid the flaky sites out there, especially the conspiracy nut dumps.

  • The summary answers the question (Score:5, Informative)

    by quantaman ( 517394 ) on Thursday May 19, 2016 @10:49PM (#52146589)

    In 2014 the CDC announced that vials containing the deadly virus had been discovered in a cardboard box in a refrigerator located on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, Maryland. How can you say it's eliminated when it's still out there, somewhere?

    Even if you eliminate all the stocks you know about there's still the stocks you don't know about, if it ever gets out it probably came from a forgotten sample.

    I don't think it's a huge deal either way but if we want to understand how a truly nasty virus works then you can't really do it without a really nasty virus to study.

    • Re:The summary answers the question (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jopsen ( 885607 ) <jopsen@gmail.com> on Friday May 20, 2016 @12:02AM (#52146737) Homepage
      Yeah, besides... How will destroying all known samples prevent the case of "cardboard box in a refrigerator" that we don't know about...
      If that storage method was a surprise, the clearly efforts to burn all stored samples wouldn't have included that one..


      Obviously, though we really should increase control, regulation and security around these things.
      • Funnier still is that while a cardboard box in a fridge sounds scary, most viruses are not stable enough to just sit in a fridge for very long at all before they break down. I'm not sure off the top of my head about smallpox, but I'd be shocked if what was in that box was infectious.
      • The cardboard box was once a known sample that nobody bothered to destroy.
    • Yup, it's what you don't know that will get you. Plus they still find active virus samples in old graveyards and things like that. It is also a stupid virus. It was unpleasant in its day but it had one form, stuck to one species, and was not particularly infectious. It was the first eradicated disease because it was simple. If you are an evil mad scientist, you won't reach for the smallpox tube. AIDS is a pretty class act. The common cold is awesome. I don't think smallpox matters much either way. A label

    • I don't know enough about the smallpox virus, but is it something where we can just map the genome and destroy the real-world copies, then recreate it if we ever need to?

      If so, storing it on a USB stick instead of in a test tube might reduce the risk of accidentally killing a few million people.

  • Why Don't Scientists Kill The Demon In The Freezer (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Eloking ( 877834 ) on Thursday May 19, 2016 @10:53PM (#52146603)

    Why Don't Scientists Kill The 'Demon In The Freezer'?

    Because this isn't Resident Evil or some stupid Hollywood movie?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by krkhan ( 1071096 )

      Or the NYT bestseller "I Am Pilgrim". In which the antagonist jihadist steals one of these vials to unleash smallpox on humanity again.

      (But he cuts out some guys eyes first to get through the lab's retina scanner and we all know that can't happen IRL.)

      • [blockquote](But he cuts out some guys eyes first to get through the lab's retina scanner and we all know that can't happen IRL.)[/blockquote]
        Well theres the Capt America version where a bunch of heavily armored dudes just smash into the CDC through the front door.

        Just make sure Scarlet witch stays at home incase she accidently explodes some dudes building.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Because this isn't Resident Evil or some stupid Hollywood movie?

      Pretty much. Random people who happen to catch a rare disease that the doctor would never have seen before nor have any real reason to believe the pasient has instead of something more common could spread a while before anyone realizes the severity. The people who work on these kinds of diseases in a lab would quickly raise all the warning flags and the incident be shut down real quick. The only truly dangerous situation would be if someone stole it, mass produced it and intentionally caused a mass infectio

      • The only truly dangerous situation would be if someone stole it, mass produced it and intentionally caused a mass infection

        Fortunately, a government lab worker with inside access stealing a deadly bioweapon and using it in a terrorist attack is the kind of thing that only happens in the movies [wikipedia.org]. Right?

    • and only 'Hollywood' thinking leads to the idea that there could be some global agreement to destroy it all. Anybody who thinks that nation-states with official-secrets regimes would actually destroy all of their samples is a special kind of stupid.

      The article is as meaningful as asking why scientists don't simply block gravity - all available evidence points to the idea being impossible.

      • You seem to forget that it was a global agreement to eradicate it in first place. Not, Hollywood thinking, but real life. A soviet member of the WHO has suggested this, WHO accepted the suggestion and despite the cold war western countries and ussr worked together to make it happen. In fact, the soviets have donated a large part of the required vaccine. This kind of cooperation was unheard of before.

  • Why don't we just keep a record of the genetic sequence of the virus? Doesn't the technology exist to rebuild the virus if we know its DNA sequence? Even if it doesn't exist now, it could reasonably be expected to exist in the relatively near future, right?

    Then we could destroy all the actual samples, but no information would be lost. If it became necessary for research at a later date, whatever couldn't be simulated could be made from scratch.

  • Don't need it for just-in-case (Score:5, Insightful)

    by clovis ( 4684 ) on Thursday May 19, 2016 @11:07PM (#52146639)

    Some scientists say that these residual stocks of smallpox should not be destroyed because some ruthless super-criminal or rogue government might be working on a new smallpox, even more virulent than existing strains of the virus. We may need existing stocks to produce new vaccines to counteract the new viruses

    This is the one I have to wonder about.
    The vaccine for smallpox is not smallpox, It is vaccinia which is closely related to cowpox.
    If someone releases smallpox and you need to vaccinate, then you still don't need to have any smallpox.

    If someone makes a new type of smallpox and releases it, then you want the new smallpox to develop a defense against and test and now you have it from the infected people.
    And it seems unlikely that the old smallpox (deadly) would be used to make a vaccine against any new smallpox, but I admit the possibility.

    Smallpox is a member of the poxviridae family. If you need a virus like smallpox to fool around with in your lab, there are 28 genera and 69 species of pox.

    On the other hand, smallpox is not the only disease we have eradicated.
    Rinderpest is the other. Rinderpest is closely related to measles and measles probably evolved from rinderpest.
    Stocks of Rinderpest remain, but rinderpest vaccine is made from a rinderpest virus variant, so it makes sense that we would keep some of that for just in case.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      If someone releases smallpox and you need to vaccinate, then you still don't need to have any smallpox

      Until it develops into a strain that is different enough from cowpox that the current vaccine does not work.

      Come on people, influenza mutates every single year to that point and it makes all of the major media outlets - surely you can connect the dots.

      • Different viruses have different mutation rates. The major cause of that difference between influenza and smallpox is that one uses DNA and one uses RNA. RNA viruses are very sloppy copiers while DNA viruses like smallpox are much more consistent. If you look at the history of smallpox vaccination it mutates so slowly that over centuries the same vaccination methods, like accidental exposure to cow pox, are still effective.

        That doesn't mean that there's no utility in keeping samples, but there's so littl

    • Rinderpest also doesn't infect humans, and most humans have little to no exposure to cattle, so it's not an equal comparison of the risks involved.

  • seems dumb (Score:3)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Thursday May 19, 2016 @11:53PM (#52146725)
    The biggest risk is from someone accidently releasing it from unknown/unmanaged sources or from an intentional release for malicious purposes, in either case destroying what you know about doesn't help. You never know what the future may bring, perhaps smallpox will be the source of a vaccine for an as yet unknown variant. If we can't possibly keep it safely stored then we are fucked anyway as there are a shitload more deadly diseases that we haven't fully eradicated yet that we also need to store to do research on.

  • sequence it (Score:3)

    by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Friday May 20, 2016 @12:12AM (#52146757) Homepage Journal

    sequence it's genome, then destroy all samples of it. If some criminal mastermind breaks out a new strain of it, you culture the strain from the unfortunte souls who have been infected and fight it off with by comparing it to the sequence of the original strain.

    If we ever get to the point that we can reconstruct any virus from the digitized sequences, then we've got way bigger problems on our hands than smallpox.

    • My understanding is that this has already been done: smallpox has been sequenced, and if all samples were destroyed and then for some reason we really needed to have smallpox again, we could reconstruct it. It eight years since scientists created a synthetic bacterial genome [jcvi.org] of 580,000 base pairs. Smallpox is (according to Wikipedia) 186,000 base pairs.

      • It is a matter of how long it would take to get a research program back up and running. If someone released 'new smallpox' and I needed to get setup to culture it, then I would culture up 'old smallpox' which is well known, perfect my technique, and then try with the new one and tweak as needed. Without the reference of the old one, or with needing to hope I reconstructed it correctly, by the time I've gotten the culture techniques ready for 'new smallpox' it has been a few years.

        • If 'new smallpox' is dangerous, there isn't any need to culture it - you can just take samples from the myriad of victims.

          • You can start a research program with clinical samples, but it would be hard to get enough material if you couldn't culture the virus. To develop a vaccine you'll need virus stocks to develop the animal model, as controls for assays, and to check for drift in the infected population, among other things. Given stability issues you aren't going to be able to just drain all the bodily fluids from the deceased and you can only get so much at a time from a living person.

  • There are some things we simply should not destroy (Score:5, Insightful)

    by FlyHelicopters ( 1540845 ) on Friday May 20, 2016 @12:25AM (#52146799)

    This is one of them...

    Now that being said... stockpiles of the live virus should not be kept very many places and there needs to be a "destroy plan" in the event these locations become compromised. (such as war, civil unrest, the end of the world, etc.)

    Perhaps in the US, UK, France, Russia, and China... Each nation can have stored samples of the virus in known locations under guard.

    For the same reason we'll never really get rid of nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, or anything else, there is a greater than non-zero value to having them. But we don't need "lots" of them.

  • Genocide... when's it OK? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jimduchek ( 13246 ) on Friday May 20, 2016 @01:01AM (#52146873) Homepage

    Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not a virus is 'life' -- this question would apply to a bacterial disease as well -- how is this any different than the attempts in the last century to eradicate the North American wolf? They were dangerous (and quite inconvenient) to humans. Thankfully (to some...) we failed, and many people are happy they are returning. The reasons we wanted them gone haven't changed (although hardly as much an issue with the hugely reduced numbers).

    If it's not OK to eradicate a species that looks like the family dog, what about if they were squirrel-sized? Insects? Where's the line, exactly, where we say 'OK, on this side, it's good and right to completely remove this species from existence, but on the other side of the line, it's a 'protected species' to be preserved, and we just control it? One could argue that wolves served a purpose in the ecosystem by controlling deer and other game population -- but honestly, we will never allow the grey wolf population to grow to a number to have any real effect on that anymore.

    Not really taking a side on whether or not to eliminate the stocks we have of smallpox, but I feel like there certainly is an ethical question in whether or not it's OK to do so.

    (As a side note, I think 'genocide' only applies to killing humans, but you get the idea, I'm sure)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dbIII ( 701233 )

      Where's the line, exactly

      Normally local versus introduced species. For example the Australian Brushtail Possum is about as cute as a Koala but the greenest of the green New Zealanders don't bat an eyelid at people selling possum fur to tourists. An introduced pest in large numbers is an introduced pest no matter how cute it is.

      That said a lot of people object to culling feral horses and it caused a bit of a scandal near where I live when a Park Ranger didn't get rid of the bodies before some tourists cam

    • Re:Genocide... when's it OK? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by johannesg ( 664142 ) on Friday May 20, 2016 @01:31AM (#52146961)

      A virus is about as 'alive' as the average piece of computer software, and when it comes down to the choice of the death of hundreds of people, or the virus, the choice should be easy enough. That some people apparently have so much trouble with their moral compass that they believe there is in fact some kind of ethical trade off here scares me.

      Not that size matters: I'm also happily in favor of fully eradicating other diseases and parasites, including multicellular ones. Anything that only causes untold grief and misery, and has no benefit other than its own miserable existence, I have no compunction removing from the planet.

    • Leaving aside, for the moment, the question of whether or not a virus is 'life' -- this question would apply to a bacterial disease as well -- how is this any different than the attempts in the last century to eradicate the North American wolf?

      I think 'life' is an ambiguous term, and confuses moral issues. Bacteria are biologically alive, but so are individual human cells (e.g. skin cells), and individual human cells do not have a right to life. A person could be brain dead, but their body might be kept o

  • there is not some colony of wild pigs, horses, or monkeys which are incubating the virus.

    Keep it around, you don't know if there is a time when you need it.

  • Archive its DNA (Score:5, Interesting)

    by tonywestonuk ( 261622 ) on Friday May 20, 2016 @02:08AM (#52147071)
    Then zap it. They can already create viruses from scratch anyhow - https://www.newscientist.com/a... [newscientist.com] So, just dump its DNA sequence to a tar file, and then snuff it out. That simple. And no moral dilemas about genocide because well, we can always tar xvf smallpox.tar, if we need to.

    • Re:Archive its DNA (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Gilgaron ( 575091 ) on Friday May 20, 2016 @06:56AM (#52147855)
      It'll take you years to get from a gene sequence back to a functional virus with which to build a research program to look into the 'new variant' or whatever concern made growing smallpox again worthwhile. And there'd still be some doubt about if you got it right since some virus particles grab important proteins from the host cell that aren't encoded in their own genome.
  • Wouldn't that make it an endangered species?

  • And decide which species live or die? I know we have done it before, e.g. wiping out the tasmanian tiger, but is morally and ethically defensible?

  • Is medical science at the point where smallpox can be synthesized from gene sequence data and organic molecules? If so, why not kill the batches and keep the data if you ever really need some? And if synthesis isn't possible, why not?

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