Why Revive a Deadly Flu Virus?

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Why Revive a Deadly Flu Virus?

By JAMIE SHREEVE

Published: January 29, 2006

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/magazine/29flu.html

The New York Times

 

Excerpts:

 

The 1918 flu virus is remarkable for two reasons. First, it caused perhaps the

most lethal plague in the history of humankind. In the fall of that year it

spread across the planet, perversely striking down healthy young adults. Once

ensconced in their lungs, the virus triggered a havoc of inflammation,

hemorrhage and cell death. Trying to draw air into such lungs was like breathing

through meat. Many of the afflicted died within hours after they first began to

feel a little feverish. Others succumbed more slowly to secondary bacterial

infections. By the spring of the following year, the virus had disappeared as

mysteriously as it had come.

The second, and in some ways even more remarkable, thing about the 1918 flu

virus is that it has literally been brought back to life. In October, a team of

scientists, Tumpey among them, announced that they had recreated the extinct

organism from its genetic code - essentially the scenario played out in the

movie " Jurassic Park, " albeit on a microbial scale. In the movie, the

scientists' self-serving revivification of dinosaurs leads to mayhem and death.

Tumpey and his colleagues say they hope that their resurrected microbe will help

prevent a calamity, not cause one. They want to know what made the 1918 flu,

which began as a virus native to wild birds, mutate into a form that could pass

easily from one human to another. That question has been weighing on the minds

of flu experts since 1997 - since the first fatal case in Hong Kong of the avian

flu that has since killed more than 70 people in Asia. So far, all of its

victims probably caught the disease from handling infected

poultry and not from other people. How close is it to crossing the same lethal

line that the 1918 virus did? What can be learned from the virus that caused the

great pandemic that might help us avert another one?

The risks involved in trying to answer such questions are hard to calculate,

because the experiment has no precedent. In essence, Tumpey and his colleagues

have brought one serial killer back from the grave so that it can testify

against another. How dangerous is the 1918 virus to today's population? Its

genetic code is now in public databases, where other researchers can download it

to conduct experiments. Scientists from the University of Wisconsin and the

National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada have already collaborated to

reconstruct the virus from the publicly available sequence. How easy would it be

for a bioterrorist to exploit the same information for malevolent ends?

" Give me $100,000 and two months, and I can recreate it right here in my lab, "

says Earl Brown, a flu researcher who specializes in the evolution of virulence

at the University of Ottawa. " You wouldn't be able to tell it from the real

thing that was around a hundred years ago. Would it kill at the same rate as in

1918? Probably. But you really don't want to have to find that out. You don't

want to give this thing a second time around. "

Terrence Tumpey is not moved by such talk. Even if the virus was to get out

into the population, he says he believes it would cause far less sickness than

it did in 1918. And he is sure that it is not getting out, ever, at least from

his lab at the C.D.C. But whatever the danger posed by the virus in his freezer,

it is literal living proof that science has crossed into an uncertain new world,

where the drive to know life on its most fundamental level has given birth to

the means to create it.

 

 

 

" Our ideal is not the spirituality that withdraws from life but the conquest

of life by the power of the spirit. " - Aurobindo.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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