In 2002, Dr. Eckard Wimmer and his team at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, mail-ordered short sequences of synthetic DNA strands (oligonucleotides) and pasted them together into a functional version of poliovirus. (They injected their de novo virus into to confirm that the pathogen worked.”) When this extreme genetic engineering feat was announced to the world, Wimmer and his team were attacked for their irresponsible work which could be inspiration for terrorists to make a bioweapon. According to Wimmer, the experiment was to illustrate the possibility of constructing such a dangerous pathogen using mail-order parts.
In the last century(1918-1919) H1N1 killed around 50 million people worldwide – higher than that of World War I. In the 1950s when H1N1 strain was eradicated from the earth efforts to reconstruct the highly communcable virus begun. In 1997, Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger of the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC succeeded in recovering and sequencing fragments of the viral RNA from preserved tissues of 1918 flu victims buried in the Alaskan permafrost. Eight years later, Taubenberger’s team and collaborating researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the US Centers of Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta announced that they had resurrected the lethal virus. About ten vials of the flu virus were produced with the possibility that more could be made to accommodate research needs.Craig Venter later described the resurrection of the 1918 flu virus as “the first true Jurassic Park scenario”. Two leading technology thinkers, Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil wrote,“The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb…revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.” for publishing the full genome of the 1918 flu virus in the GenBank database.
Richard H. Ebright, a biochemist at Rutgers University, clarified for The Washington Post that it would now be possible and “fully legal for a person to produce full-length 1918 influenza virus or Ebola virus genomes, along with kits containing detailed procedures and all other materials for reconstitution…it is also possible to advertise and to sell the product…” Eckard Wimmer is even more blunt about the potentially deadly combination of accessible genomic data and DNA-synthesizing capabilities: “If some jerk then takes the sequence of [a dangerous pathogen] and synthesizes it, we could be in deep, deep trouble.”
In June 2006, The Guardian (UK) announced that one of its journalists ordered a fragment of synthetic DNA of Variola major (the virus that causes smallpox) from a commercial gene synthesis company and had it delivered to his residential address. The company involved in The Guardian’s investigation, VH Bio Ltd., based in Gateshead, UK, did not screen the requested sequence against the known genome sequences of dangerous microorganisms.
In the last century(1918-1919) H1N1 killed around 50 million people worldwide – higher than that of World War I. In the 1950s when H1N1 strain was eradicated from the earth efforts to reconstruct the highly communcable virus begun. In 1997, Dr. Jeffrey Taubenberger of the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington, DC succeeded in recovering and sequencing fragments of the viral RNA from preserved tissues of 1918 flu victims buried in the Alaskan permafrost. Eight years later, Taubenberger’s team and collaborating researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York and the US Centers of Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta announced that they had resurrected the lethal virus. About ten vials of the flu virus were produced with the possibility that more could be made to accommodate research needs.Craig Venter later described the resurrection of the 1918 flu virus as “the first true Jurassic Park scenario”. Two leading technology thinkers, Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil wrote,“The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb…revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.” for publishing the full genome of the 1918 flu virus in the GenBank database.
Richard H. Ebright, a biochemist at Rutgers University, clarified for The Washington Post that it would now be possible and “fully legal for a person to produce full-length 1918 influenza virus or Ebola virus genomes, along with kits containing detailed procedures and all other materials for reconstitution…it is also possible to advertise and to sell the product…” Eckard Wimmer is even more blunt about the potentially deadly combination of accessible genomic data and DNA-synthesizing capabilities: “If some jerk then takes the sequence of [a dangerous pathogen] and synthesizes it, we could be in deep, deep trouble.”
In June 2006, The Guardian (UK) announced that one of its journalists ordered a fragment of synthetic DNA of Variola major (the virus that causes smallpox) from a commercial gene synthesis company and had it delivered to his residential address. The company involved in The Guardian’s investigation, VH Bio Ltd., based in Gateshead, UK, did not screen the requested sequence against the known genome sequences of dangerous microorganisms.
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