A most dangerous game

Natural History, July-August, 2004 by Wendy Orent

And the bioweaponeers are nothing if not inventive. In the 1980s, for instance, Popov placed conotoxin, a deadly poison derived from marine snails, in vaccinia and tested it at the Vector Laboratories. Smallpox combined with other toxins is easy to imagine, once the technology has developed. Bullet argues that what is needed is a treatment regime designed to confront a large number of possible chimeras. The goal, he says, should be to find an antiviral drug that interrupts viral replication at a different stage than cidofovir does. Administered together, the two antivirals might be effective in clearing even a bioengineered virus from the body. No such second drug yet exists, and Peter B. Jahrling, also at USAMRIID and the army's leading virologist as well as a poxvirus expert, is not optimistic that two antivirals will work better than one. "If cidofovir doesn't work, why would it work any better if you combine it with another antiviral?" he asks.

"The moment this construct [IL4-mousepox chimera] was made, the vulnerability was opened," says Richard H. Ebright, a microbiologist at Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. "That vulnerability will close only when the requisite two antivirals are stockpiled and ready."

The window of vulnerability is now open--and a lot of difficult questions emerge. How many new chimeras must be created and tested, if people are to be safe? Should research laboratories take even one more step in that direction? Does the very research seeking to protect against chimeras make them more likely, not less likely, to emerge from the mind and into reality? Is the National Institutes of Health, which sponsors Buller's work, really "turning into the research wing of al-Qaeda," as Ebright puts it?

But there clearly is another horn to the dilemma. What was reportedly done in the research laboratories of the former Soviet Union--after the Soviets signed the bioweapons convention--is sobering. And what happened at that time took place in the days before gene synthesizers, when novel genetic material had to be assembled by hand. Are we deluding ourselves if we do not try to protect against novel genetic threats? After all, if Buller is right, joint therapy with two antivirals might work against all smallpox chimeras, even ones no one has yet imagined.

Buller's research--an effective proof of principle for smallpox bioengineering--continues. Not everyone accepts that the Soviet bioweaponeers did what they say they did--some people have brushed off their accounts of genetic engineering as, well, chimerical. But Buller has demonstrated the truth of the matter: Genetically engineered diseases can kill, even if they can't spread. The window of vulnerability will remain open whether chimeric research ceases or continues.

We had better figure out, and quickly, how to close it.