Scientists Are Getting Seriously Worried About Synthetic Smallpox

An anonymous reader quotes ScienceAlert: Earlier this year, scientists published a paper describing how they pieced together segments of DNA in order to bring back a previously eradicated virus called horsepox. The paper, written by two University of Alberta researchers and the co-founder of a New York pharmaceutical company, was controversial because, as various experts told the magazine Science, someone could use a very similar process to bring back a related virus: smallpox. Smallpox, you'll recall, killed hundreds of millions of people before the World Health Organization declared it eradicated in 1980. That was the result of a long vaccination campaign — so the idea of piecing the virus back together from bits of DNA raises the specter of a horrifying pandemic.

Two journals rejected the paper before PLOS One, an open access peer-reviewed journal, published it. Critics argue that the paper not only demonstrates that you can synthesize a deadly pathogen for what Science reported was about US$100,000 in lab expenses, but even provides a slightly-too-detailed-for-comfort overview of how to do it. Some of the horsepox scientists' coworkers are still pretty upset about this. PLOS One's sister Journal, PLOS Pathogens, just published three opinion pieces about the whole flap, as well as a rebuttal by the Canadian professors. Overall, everyone's pretty polite. But you get the sense that microbiologists are really, really worried about someone reviving smallpox. MIT biochemist Kevin Esvelt, for instance, wrote on Thursday that the threat is so grim that we shouldn't even talk about it.

This is the least of our worries

[Anonymous Coward]

Hubble went dead last week, followed by Chandra this week. Am I the only one that sees what is happening here? What's the first thing you do before you invade a country? Blind them. Take out their eyes and ears, their radar installations, etc. Then you send in the forces. With Earth effectively blinded I bet there are massive battle cruisers hidden in the asteroid belt that are even now powering up their engines and finalizing battle plans. Wake up people!!!!

I was vaccinated

[olsmeister]

However my two younger brothers were not. I doubt it would provide much protection after this long anyway.

Re:

[epyT-R]

You both should be left on an island so the rest of us can watch you fight out of morbid fascination..and to remind ourselves just how close we came to losing liberty to the likes of nazis and 'social justice' fascists.

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

Smallpox immunity is lifelong, so you may very well be protected, or at least protected enough to get a less severe form of the disease. The real problem is that a synthetic smallpox could be designed to evade the antibodies that common vaccines produce, so the vaccine might still not be very protective in immune people.

Re:

[olsmeister]

Wait are you saying that unmodified smallpox could selectively take out the hipsters and millennials? Whoa, hold on, I need to rethink this.

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

Real immunity is often lifelong, though the often re-vaccinate every 10 years just to make sure. Re-vaccination is cheaper than taking antibody titers.

Re:

[HornWumpus]

Is _guaranteed_ effective for about 10 years. For most, the immunity lasts much longer, but it becomes a crapshoot.

Re:

[HiThere]

IIUC, the induced immunity is lifelong, but the strength of the immunity starts declining after about 7 years. It never really goes away, but when it gets weak enough it can't prevent infection, but only weakens the attack by speeding up the immune response. OTOH, as you get older, your entire immune system becomes weaker...so, e.g., special flu vaccines are prescribed for the elderly.

Re:

[b0s0z0ku]

Fortunately, it's not actually that simple: some humans will likely have a mechanism (or develop one) to get rid of the virus. Even things like Ebola and rabies which are nearly 100% fatal aren't 100% infectious -- i.e. some unvaccinated people will have some sort of mechanism (be it a strong immune system, a missing surface antigen, etc) that will keep it from infecting cells.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Ebola isn't "nearly 100% fatal". While earlier estimates put its mortality rate at about 85% to 90%, the much bigger outbreaks of the past few years have caused that figure to be revised down. Wikipedia lists the highest fatality rate of any outbreak in the past 10 years as 74%.

Can we just make more vaccine

[Actually, I do RTFA]

At least in the US, it should be trivial to get funds to make a release a vaccine, because it's preventing a terrorist attack.

Re: Can we just make more vaccine

[Anonymous Coward]

Smallpox vaccine is made using cowpox. You do not need smallpox pathogens at all.

Re: Can we just make more vaccine

[ShanghaiBill]

Smallpox vaccine is made using cowpox. You do not need smallpox pathogens at all.

Centuries before Dr Jenner made the first vaccine from cowpox, the Chinese had developed inoculation using smallpox directly. Smallpox is most deadly when it infects the lungs first, suffocating the victim before any immunity develops. So the Chinese would take scabs from pustules, crush them up, and use a needle to poke it into the skin of uninfected people. This would cause a mild form of the disease with about a 2% mortality rate, far below the 30-50% rate from airborne infections, but induce full immunity.

The technique spread from China through the Islamic world to West Africa, and was taught to white Americans by African slaves.

Smallpox inoculation [wikipedia.org]

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere between the usual revisionist history and tinfoil hats.

Remember folks, if white people invent or discovered something, within a year Chinese "scholars" will find proof that they did it first. Conveniently with evidence that no westerner is allowed to see and verify. Wait a decade or two and the humanities department will find a way to inject black slaves or oppressed women as the real saviors of the west.

Re:

[HiThere]

I've seen convincing evidence of information flowing in the other direction too often to write off a claim that it happened previously. This doesn't mean that the claim is valid in this case, but it does mean I won't summarily reject it just because it's not what they taught in school.

Re: Can we just make more vaccine

[ShanghaiBill]

Remember folks, if white people invent or discovered something, within a year Chinese "scholars" will find proof that they did it first.

Nobody is claiming that. Vaccination and innoculation (variolation) are two different things. Vaccination was discovered in England in 1798. Variolation was discovered in China in the 10th century. Both of these are backed up by contemporaneous historical records.

There are written records as early as 1721 of Americans being inoculated with variola, that specifically state that the technique was learned from Africans. That is 80 years before the cowpox vaccine was discovered in England.

Re:

[DNS-and-BIND]

Do you get 50 cents every time you post pro-China propaganda? I thought they only did that with their own people. They started with English speakers now? I guess it's a natural extension.

Re:

[Megol]

Only something similar enough, AC below says cowpox.

Don't think terrorists would want to use this

[Solandri]

Same reason mustard gas wasn't used extensively in WWI - a shift in the wind could blow the gas over your own troops. The rationale of a terrorist is to inflict death and destruction among a target population. If a bioengineeered smallpox virus attack were successful and started an epidemic in a target country, it's almost certain to travel around the world and eventually arrive back at the terrorists' home country. As fatality rates would be higher in countries with poor medical care, and most terrorist

Re:

[Waffle Iron]

The only people I could see trying to do this are anarchists, and reckless researchers or home biologists.

I think that far more likely than those is some cult with a doomsday obsession.

Re:

[robsku]

And why on earth would an anarchist have any more incentive to do this than terrorists? I don't think you understand what anarchism is about, but it's not about destroying and fscking up everything.

As for religious nutjobs, I bet some of them would just love the idea. After all, it don't matter what happens here, but what's in it for the afterlife - and killing a sh*tload of infidels would definitely earn one a prime seat in afterlife.

Re:

[robsku]

...also, it is totally possible that a group of terrorists might underestimate the risk of the disease spreading into their own country from the one they are targeting. Especially religious nutjobs are often not the brightest people around.

Re:

[pnutjam]

I was listening to this podcast [behindthebastards.com] the other day. It had a section where the host talked about Robert LeFevre (32:00). Many people think of anarchists when they mean autarchist [wikipedia.org]. Anarchists actually believe in helping each other. Autarchrists are every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

Re:

[robsku]

Yuck. Good point.

Re:

[CaffeinatedBacon]

But if you show how easy something is, all the script kiddies will want to have a try.

If it is possible someone would do it ...

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

If you cripple your own products to avoid cannibalizing your existing products, your competition would do it for you.

If it is possible to synthesize a smallpox vaccine, someone would do it. For every one publishing there are perhaps a few hundred who have had the idea occur to them. If you stigmatize it and drive it underground, when some one unleashes it, we would not even know what hit us.

To borrow a phrase from our second amendment friends, if you outlaw synthesized smallpox only outlaws will have synthesized small pox.

worried?

[umghhh]

They should be but this will happen anyway whatever the attempts to prevent it. You probably should not write it in the daily sun but my understanding is this is not the level of propagation we talk about here. Instead of worrying we should get to know what we can do about the eventual but right now still hypothetical threat. What will happen however everybody gets excited now and nothing will happen besides some sloppy attempts at preventing such research from getting into open.

Oh please, what's the worst that could happen?

[Gravis Zero]

Come on, it's not like we are dangerously unprepared for pandemic. [washingtonpost.com]

A few months ago, a disease caused by an engineered biological weapon played the antagonist in a fictional outbreak scenario that ended with more than 100 million dead and the global economy crippled.

Re: We ARE the dangerous pandemic!

[Anonymous Coward]

A great line ruined by the fact that it is just not a fact. Rats, mice, etc will breed as long as their is food, even to the point that they fill their environment and live, get sick and die in their own faeces.

Re:

[HiThere]

Goats are a better example. There are plenty of small islands where they have wiped out all sizable life, including themselves, by over grazing and destroying the soil (via erosion after the plants have been stripped off it).

Re:

[Sique]

Because since 1980, there is no smallpox vaccination anymore. So everyone younger than 38 years might be affected.

You know, vaccination actually works and has eradicated smallpox. We just have the means to revive it again.

Re:

[Scarletdown]

I was born in 1968, and just missed out on the vaccination back then. However, before going to Afghanistan in 2006, I had to get a smallpox vaccine.

Fortunately, I had it easy since I never had it before, and it was only like 2 or 3 pokes. Those who did get it when they were little for some reason received considerably more than us first timers.

Re:"Vaccination campaign?" LOL!

[Calydor]

You do realize that when it was declared eradicated we stopped vaccinating against it, right?

Anyone under the age of 30 (and probably a couple of years over, but 30 is a nice round number) is at direct risk if there's a smallpox outbreak - and if the virus was reverse-engineered it may be JUST different enough that even the people who WERE vaccinated would be at risk.

Re:

[mysidia]

Anyone under the age of 30

Actually: It's anyone under age 46. Routine vaccination against smallpox ended in 1972.

Re:

[Megol]

Vaccination works but it's not 100% effective. Nothing real ever is. Vaccination becomes less efficient as time passes, the immune system "forgets" what should trigger it.

Re:

[robsku]

If you're claiming that smallpox inoculation [wikipedia.org] didn't work, and all that history is just a hoax, then you're delusional - and no arguments win over delusions. Don't bother replying if you haven't read that wikipedia link above - I mean it; read it first or shut up.

horsepox?

[Hognoxious]

As Col. Potter would say, cowfeathers!

Re:

[kackle]

Having just seen that episode the other day, I believe it's "Horse feathers!"

Papers get rejected all the time

[93 Escort Wagon]

Typical practice is to first submit to the prestige journals like Science or Nature, since those give you more points towards tenure and also look better on future grant applications. Then, when that get rejected, you rewrite slightly and submit to the next tier. Lather, rinse, repeat...

Clickbait

[pesho]

While scientist are worried about synthetic smallpox, they have not suddenly become more worried as a result of this paper. The reasons is that the DNA synthesis and virus production techniques are not new. The whole process has been published before and every step is well understood. The virus production is not even the focus of the paper, because there is nothing new about it. The story is that the small pox vaccine from vaccinia virus has some side effects. The authors of the paper decided to check if the related horse pox virus may work better as vaccine. As luck will have it the damn thing is extinct, so they made it themselves using published protocols. The horse pox virus they made seems to work well as a vaccine. The fact that making a synthetic virus was considered just a bump in the road towards some other goal should tell you how easy it is to do. The reason the paper was rejected from more prestigious journals is not that it was conveying some dangerous new information that should be suppressed. Quite the opposite, there isn't anything significantly new in the work. The reason it went to PLOS One, is that the editorial policy of this journal is to publish soundly executed research and not consider if the research discovered something new or significant.

Would we have the nuclear weapons threat today

[Sqreater]

if scientists had not been fascinated by the possibility and made one? Scientists do what they do, and amorality is immorality.

Re:

[evil_aaronm]

Would scientists have created nuclear weapons just out curiosity? I doubt it. Many of the top scientists were opposed to building weapons: they understood the kind of hell it would unleash. Nuclear research - sure. Weapons manufacture? Not so much. But, if you recall, it wasn't just the scientists that were pushing that little project: It was the government, particularly the military. Feel free to read The First War of Physics: The Secret History of the Atom Bomb, 1939-1949, by Jim Baggott.

Open source?

[ElizabethGreene]

Has the genome of the virus been published?