Oct. 2005: Using a technique called reverse genetics, scientists at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology recreate the 1918 virus. They recovered the genome information from a flu victim who had been buried in Alaskan permafrost since 1918.
See also what I found on the website for the US Mission to Italy:
italy.usembassy.gov.../file2005_10/alia/a5101018.htm
From the NY Times 1/29/2006:
The second, and in some ways even more remarkable, thing about the 1918 flu virus is that it has literally been brought back to life. In October, a team of scientists, Tumpey among them, announced that they had recreated the extinct organism from its genetic code - essentially the scenario played out in the movie "Jurassic Park," albeit on a microbial scale. In the movie, the scientists' self-serving revivification of dinosaurs leads to mayhem and death. Tumpey and his colleagues say they hope that their resurrected microbe will help prevent a calamity, not cause one. They want to know what made the 1918 flu, which began as a virus native to wild birds, mutate into a form that could pass easily from one human to another. That question has been weighing on the minds of flu experts since 1997 - since the first fatal case in Hong Kong of the avian flu that has since killed more than 70 people in Asia. So far, all of its victims probably caught the disease from handling infected poultry and not from other people. How close is it to crossing the same lethal line that the 1918 virus did? What can be learned from the virus that caused the great pandemic that might help us avert another one?www.nytimes.com...
The risks involved in trying to answer such questions are hard to calculate, because the experiment has no precedent. In essence, Tumpey and his colleagues have brought one serial killer back from the grave so that it can testify against another. How dangerous is the 1918 virus to today's population? Its genetic code is now in public databases, where other researchers can download it to conduct experiments. Scientists from the University of Wisconsin and the National Microbiology Laboratory in Canada have already collaborated to reconstruct the virus from the publicly available sequence. How easy would it be for a bioterrorist to exploit the same information for malevolent ends?
"Give me $100,000 and two months, and I can recreate it right here in my lab," says Earl Brown, a flu researcher who specializes in the evolution of virulence at the University of Ottawa. "You wouldn't be able to tell it from the real thing that was around a hundred years ago. Would it kill at the same rate as in 1918? Probably. But you really don't want to have to find that out. You don't want to give this thing a second time around."
I am starting to think that this is not just nature doing nasty things. Could this be something put out there by some really nasty people?
[edit on 26-4-2009 by finemanm]
