Daily News, at yahoo.com (The article can no longer be accessed at the original source.)

Aussie scientists stumble across the Doomsday Bug

PARIS, Jan 10 (AFP) - Australian gene engineers accidentally created a mouse virus that kills every one of its victims by wrecking their immune system, a discovery with the potential for making the ultimate terrorist weapon,New Scientist reports. The killer bug was invented quite inadvertently, while the researchers were trying to create a contraceptive vaccine for mice as a pest control, the British weekly reports in next Saturday's issue.

They inserted into a mousepox virus a gene that creates large amounts of interleukin 4 (IL-4), a naturally-occurring molecule that produces antibodies in the immune system. The idea was to stimulate antibodies to destroy eggs in female mice, thus making the rodents infertile.

Mousepox, a close relation to smallpox, normally only causes mild symptoms among the type of mice being used in the study, and was only being used as a vehicle to deliver the IL-4. But when the IL-4 gene was inserted, the engineered virus ran amok, attacking the "cell-mediated response" - the part of the immune system that fights viral infection. All the animals in the study were wiped out in just nine days. Worse, the engineered virus was astonishingly resistant to vaccines. A vaccine that would normally protect these mice from mousepox only worked in half of the mice exposed to the killer version.

Co-researcher Ron Jackson, of the Canberra-based institute CSIRO, said the discovery was a frightening indicator of what could happen if the human smallpox virus was similarly modified. "It would be safe to assume that if some idiot did put human IL-4 into human smallpox, they'd increase the lethality quite dramatically," he told New Scientist. "Seeing the consequences of what happened in the mice, I wouldn't want to be the one to do the experiment."

"It's surprising how very, very bad the virus is," said Anne Hill, a vaccine expert from Oregon Health Sciences University in Portland, Oregon.

Smallpox has been eradicated as a disease thanks to a global vaccination campaign, although two laboratories - one in the United States, the other in Russia - still have ampoules containing the virus, under an arrangement with the World Health Organisation (WHO).

The incident highlights how easy it could be for some with bio-engineering knowledge to create a murderous virus for which there would be no cure or effective vaccine, New Scientist said.

"Vast amounts of time and effort have gone into policing the military's use of biotechnology. But the activities of civilian biologists have been ignored," it said. "Yet genetic engineering techniques are now so widespread that potentially dangerous results are bound to emerge accidentally."

It suggests tougher vetting of research proposals; a greater effort to train students in biological subjects about potential dangers arising from lab work; and encouraging greater openness among biologists to discuss the misuse of genetic engineering.

The material contained in this file is made available courtesy contributors and editors of Pro-LifeE-News.