(EDITOR'S NOTE: What is the difference between recombinant genetic engineering
and bio-terrorism?)
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 criss-crossing 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 or "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 Stahr 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 indicate 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 screen 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
bio-terrorism
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 bio-terrorism 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
bio-terrorism 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 bio-terrorists 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 â€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
newrecombinants 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, ie, 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 weâ€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 thatâ€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 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 â€accountableâ€, 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.
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Tompkins County Green Party
http://www.tcgreens.org/gl/article.php?story=20030417054058720
