Bioterrorism and SARS
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.
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.
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