From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Fri 18 Apr 2003 - 15:33:26 GMT
Although SARS is not an example of a man-made biological disaster, it does
point the way for such an event to happen.
Bioterrorism and SARS
by Mae-Wan Ho
The world has been whipped up into hysteria over terrorist attacks and
"weapons of mass destruction." Governments want to ban the publication of
sensitive scientific research results, and a group of major life sciences
editors and authors has concurred. Some even suggest an international body
to police research and publication. Dr. Mae-Wan Ho looks at the current SARS
epidemic and argues why all of those measures to control bioterrorism are
misplaced, and what's really needed.
Originally published by Institute of Science in Society April 16, 2003.
Published on KurzweilAI.net April 17, 2003.
The SARS episode
In the weeks that the "allied forces" were wreaking destruction and death in
Iraq to hunt down Saddam Hussein and his elusive "weapons of mass
destruction," a SARS epidemic has been crisscrossing continents carried by
air-passengers and spreading like molecular cluster bombs that explode to
liberate further millions of infectious particles soon after a target is
struck.
SARS—Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome—is a completely new infectious
disease spread by human contact, and kills about four percent of the
victims. The epidemic originated in Guangdong Province, South China. The
Chinese authority has admitted mishandling the crisis and to have been slow
to inform its citizens.
The disease first struck last November. In March, Liu Jianlin, 64-year-old
medical professor who was involved in treating patients, went from Guangdong
to Hong Kong to attend a wedding. He was taken ill soon after arrival and
admitted to hospital. He asked to be put into quarantine, but was ignored;
nor did the hospital warn his contacts. As a result, nine guests in the
hotel where he stayed caught the disease and carried it to Singapore,
Canada, Vietnam and other hospitals in Hong Kong.
On 10 February, news of the disease was posted on ProMed, an international
e-mail notification service for infectious diseases outbreaks. The next day,
China informed the World Health Organisation (WHO), but refused to let the
WHO team into Guangdong until early April. By 8 April, there were 2671
confirmed cases of SARS in 19 countries and 103 deaths.
A palpable sense of panic has gripped the health authorities around the
world. "Mother nature is the ultimate terrorist," says an editorial in the
journal Nature. "Powerless to stop the spread," says New Scientist magazine,
whose editor decries the lack of international control when it comes to
disease epidemics: "The international community has weapons inspectors
poised to force entry into a country at the first hint that it may possess
chemical weapons. But when it comes to disease, we have no international
body empowered to take charge, even though the disease may be vastly more
dangerous."
Eleven laboratories around the world participated in the hunt for the
disease agent, a collaborative effort organised via teleconferencing, since
March 17, by virologist Klaus Stöhr at the WHO headquarters in Geneva.
The journal Science says that Malik Pieris of the University of Hong Kong
was the first to identify coronavirus (which causes colds and pneumonia)
just four days later. This finding was replicated in other laboratories. The
virus and antibodies against the virus were detected in many, though not all
infected patients, but were not found in more than 800 healthy controls
tested.
The New Scientist says it was the death of Carlo Urbani, the WHO doctor who
first recognized SARS as a new disease that led to the discovery of
coronavirus. It was isolated from his lungs and sent to Joe DiRisi in
University of California at San Francisco, who made the identification. The
virus has since been named after Urbani.
There is some remaining doubt, however, whether the coronavirus is the
complete story. John Tam, director of virology at Prince of Wales Hospital
in Hong Kong, found another virus, the human metapneumovirus, in 25 out of
53 SARS patients, as have laboratories in Canada and Germany. Metapneumoviru
belongs to the family Paramyxoviridae, which includes viruses responsible
for parainfluenza, mumps and measles, as well as the Nipah and Hendra
viruses in recent outbreaks.
Coronavirus showed up in only 30 patients tested while the bacterium
Chlamydia has been identified in all samples in Hong Kong, though that
strain of Chlamydia is not known to cause disease.
Could it be that both viruses are bystanders of the disease while an as yet
unidentified virus could be responsible for SARS?
The coronavirus was atypical. It rapidly infected cells in culture dishes,
something that other human coronaviruses do not do. Viruses from the lung
tissue in Toronto patients readily infected monkey kidney cells, and no
known human coronavirus infects that cell line.
DiRisi's laboratory has a virus detector chip capable of screening for 1200
viruses all at once. When samples sent from the Centers of Disease Control
and Prevention in the United States (CDC) were screened, several species of
coronaviruses lit up; the strongest spots—indicating the closest
identity—were the avian bronchities virus and a bovine coronavirus. This
appears to fit China's statement that the earliest cases were in bird
handlers.
However, more detailed analysis using polymerase chain reaction (PCR) by two
groups who just published their results online in the New England Journal of
Medicine, indicates that the new virus is not closely related to any known
virus at all, human, mouse, bovine, cat, pig, bird, notwithstanding.
Furthermore, the virus was isolated from cell cultures only, and not from
the tissues of patients. The PCR fragments of the new coronavirus were not
detected in any healthy subject tested so far. But not all patients with
SARS tested positive for one of the PCR fragments. Where did this new virus
come from?
Genetic engineering super-viruses
While the epidemic has still to run its course, a report appeared in the
Journal of Virology, describing a method for introducing desired mutations
into coronavirus in order to create new viruses. A key feature of the
procedure is to make interspecific chimera recombinant viruses. It involves
replacing part of the spike protein gene in the feline infectious
peritonitis virus (FIPV)—which causes invariably fatal infections in
cats—with that of the mouse hepatitis virus. The recombinant mFIPV will no
longer infect cat cells, but will infect mouse cells instead, and multiply
rapidly in them.
These and other experiments in manipulating viral genomes are now routine.
It shows how easy it is to create new viruses that jump host species in the
laboratory, in the course of apparently legitimate experiments in genetic
engineering. Similar experiments could be happening in nature when no one is
looking, as the SARS and many other epidemics amply demonstrate.
It is not even necessary to intentionally create lethal viruses, if one so
wishes. It is actually much faster and much more effective to let random
recombination and mutation take place in the test tube. Using a technique
called "molecular breeding" (see "Death by DNA shuffling," this series),
millions of recombinants can be generated in a matter of minutes. These can
be screened for improved function in the case of enzymes, or increased
virulence, in the case of viruses and bacteria.
In other words, geneticists can now greatly speed up evolution in the
laboratory to create viruses and bacteria that have never existed in all the
billions of years of evolution on earth.
Controlling bioterrorism
John Steinbruner, University of Maryland arms control expert, has been
calling for mandatory international oversight of inherently dangerous areas
of biomedical research, specifically, an international body of scientists
and public representatives to authorize such research.
He has taken the proposal to meetings of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science and the World Medical Association in recent months,
and in April 2003, to a London bioterrorism meeting, sponsored by the Royal
Society of Medicine and the New York Academy of Medicine.
The oversight system would be mandatory and would operate before potentially
dangerous experiments are conducted. Access to results could also be limited
to those who pass muster.
Requiring scientists, institutions and even experiments to be licensed
"would have a devastating chilling impact on biomedical research," said
American Society for Microbiology (ASM) president Ronald M. Atlas. His
answer is self-regulation, already in line with ethical requirements to
prevent the destructive uses of biology.
The ASM orchestrated and supports a statement released February 15 by a
group of major life sciences editors and authors, acknowledging the need to
block publication of research results that could help terrorists.
Critics say even the self-censorship espoused by the journal editors and
authors group is an impediment to the rapid progress of science, which is
the best way to defuse the lethal potential of some biological research. But
Steinbruner fears that self-regulation does not go far enough to head off
terrorists.
Both Steinbruner and Atlas agree, however, that any effort to keep good
science out of the hands of ill-intentioned people must be international to
be effective. And both point to existing efforts to push a treaty making
bioterrorism an international crime, one long espoused by Harvard University
microbiologist Mathew Meselson and chemist Julian Robinson of the University
of Sussex.
Steinbruner and his critics, and the critics of his critics are all missing
an important point. They have yet to acknowledge that genetic engineering
experiments are inherently dangerous, as first pointed out by the pioneers
of genetic engineering themselves in the Asilomar Declaration in the mid
1970s, and as we have been reminding the public and policy-makers more
recently.
Who needs bioterrorists when we've got genetic engineers?
But what caught the attention of the mainstream media was the report in
January 2001 of how researchers in Australia "accidentally" created a deadly
virus that killed all its victims in the course of manipulating a harmless
virus. "Disaster in the making: An engineered mouse virus leaves us one step
away from the ultimate bioweapon," was the headline in the New Scientist
article. The editorial showed even less restraint: "The genie is out,
biotech has just sprung a nasty surprise. Next time, it could be
catastrophic."
The SARS episode should serve as a reminder of some simple facts about
genetic engineering.
In the first place, genetic engineering involves the rampant recombination
of genetic material from widely diverse sources that would otherwise have
very little opportunity to mix and recombine in nature. And, as said
earlier, some newer techniques will create in the matter of minutes millions
of new recombinants in the laboratory that have never existed in billions of
years of evolution.
In the second place, disease-causing viruses and bacteria and their genetic
material are the predominant materials and tools of genetic engineering, as
much as for the intentional creation of bio-weapons.
And finally, the artificial constructs created by genetic engineering are
designed to cross species barriers and to jump into genomes, i.e., to
further enhance and speed up horizontal gene transfer and recombination, now
acknowledged to be the major route to creating new disease agents, possibly
much more important than point mutations which change isolated bases in the
DNA.
With genetic-engineered constructs and organisms routinely released into the
environment, we hardly need the help of terrorists. That may be why we are
coming up against new epidemics of viral and bacterial diseases with
increasing regularity. Mother nature is not the ultimate terrorist, we are.
What needs to be done instead?
It is pointless to control the publication of sensitive scientific results
because there is nothing special about the recombination techniques; they
are already well known. "The only way we'll ever understand these natural
outbreaks is by first-rate science and getting it published," says Lynn
Enquist, editor of the Journal of Virology, referring to the creation of a
coronavirus that crosses from cat to mouse that's a routine part of a
genetic engineering technique.
Open publication is only half of the story. The other half is the importance
of biosafety. An international instrument for regulating biosafety already
exists, it is the Cartegena Biosafety Protocol agreed to in January 2000,
now signed by 43 countries including the European Union; though efforts to
undermine it has continued unabated, principally by the United States and
allies and the biotech industry. All we need to do is to strengthen the
Biosafety Protocol both in scope and in substance.
There is also an urgent need for democratic input into the broad areas of
scientific research that are to be supported by the public purse. Every
sector of civil society has been called upon to be "accountable," even
corporations; so why not scientists?
We have drafted a discussion document, Towards a Convention on Knowledge,
which contains some key ideas on how scientists could be socially
responsible and accountable.
A long list of sources and references for this article is posted on ISIS
Members' website. Details here.
© 2003 Institute of Science in Society. Reprinted with permission.
Join the discussion about this article on Mind·X!
"Geneticists can now greatly speed up evolution in the laboratory to create
viruses and bacteria that have never existed in all the billions of years of
evolution on earth."
— Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Exponential growth in mapping disease genomes
In 1990, the sequencing of the smallpox virus took three years. The
coronavirus was sequenced in 31 days.
Testifying before Congress on April 7, 2003, Dr. Julie Gerberding, director
of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said the CDC, WHO
and nine other sites worldwide were sharing data in real time via a secure
Web server and had set up a global satellite video conference with thousands
of clinicians to recognize the disease and establish means of treatment.
They also created a Web site for clinicians with example chest x-rays,
symptoms, quarantine measures, treatments, etc.
Within two weeks of identifying SARS (not the coronavirus), they were able
to come up with three separate tests to identify the disease and they
completed the sequence just 31 days after the disease agency identified SARS
as a problem—"a scientific achievement that I don't think has been
paralleled in our history," Gerberding said.
— Mike Giebelhaus
Grant
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