Landmark polio experiment sets worrying precedent: experts

The announcement that United States researchers have manufactured the polio virus from scratch in a laboratory using mail-order DNA has set alarm bells ringing among experts.

But rather than worrying about what this says about the ease with which rogue groups or nations could synthesise more devastating biological weapons such as smallpox, some experts appear to be more concerned with the fact the experiment was done in the first place.

The study by the New York researchers, who reconstructed the virus using a genetic blueprint pulled off the web and chains of DNA bought from a scientific supply store in Iowa, was merely "a proof of concept", one leading molecular biologist says.

"Everybody knew it was theoretically possible, there wasn't any intellectual leap here," Chicago Northwestern University molecular biology Professor Robert Lamb said.

Given the necessary gene-sequencing equipment, expertise and time, a couple of postgraduate students could pull off the same thing Professor Lamb says, who is also the current president of the American Society for Virology.

Professor Lamb says that in much the same way, scientists with the necessary genetic background could synthesise Ebola, the deadly haemorraghic fever that has killed hundreds of people in parts of Africa, or encephalitis, a virus which can poses a huge threat to livestock.

A 1998 outbreak of Japanese encephalitis forced the Malaysian Government to destroy 300,000 pigs the World Health Organisation says.

But smallpox, the contagious disease that was declared eradicated in 1979, but which scientists have speculated that terrorists might try to recreate, is a different matter.

Experts say it would be far more challenging to reconstruct smallpox because of its genetic complexity, 190,000 chemical units called nucleotides compared to the 7,500 in the polio virus.

Professor Lamb is skeptical that it could be done because of the difficulties involved in combining the DNA of the smallpox virus with the requisite protein that is a key ingredient of the deadly viral organism.

But at the State University of New York at Stony Brook virologist Eckard Wimmer, who led the team that recreated the polio virus from scratch - an experiment detailed in the journal Science this week, is less sanguine.

"It is much more difficult to do currently but with progress in science and technology it will be possible in 10 to 15 years to make smallpox," the virologist said.

Therein lies the nub of the problem.

While Professor Lamb and others fret that the New York researchers, backed by $US300,000 in funding from the Pentagon, have "let the genie out of the bottle," by advertising how easy it is to manufacture these deadly weapons of germ warfare, the authors of the study argue that they are providing a public service.

"This work is very important to put society on alert," Mr Wimmer said.

"This is an inherent danger in biochemistry and scientific research.

"Society has to deal with it, it won't go away if we close our eyes," he said.

The Pentagon's research projects agency that commissioned the study argued the research is key to its preparedness efforts.

"Understanding the process of viral DNA production is key to identifying new ways to kill viruses and understand how viruses could change and escape from vaccines," the agency DARPA, says in a statement.

Not convinced

But Edward Hammond, director of the Sunshine Project, a nonprofit group that monitors US compliance with the International Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention which bars the development of germ-based weapons, does not buy that argument.

He worries that US authorities, not rogue terrorists or rogue states, is the pioneer in the field of biological weapons.

"The US biodefence program... is creating and publicising techniques for the creation of biological weapons that are far more advanced than anything else we know about," Mr Hammond said.

He says the US military's track record, creating weaponised anthrax and now funding the first laboratory reproduction of the polio vaccine from scratch, underlined the need for greater regulation of official experimentation in the field.

"There is a need for a new international agreement to regulate genetic engineering experiments with pathogens, which could create new pathogens or alter the pathogenicity of known pathogens," he said.

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