[Mb-civic] MUST READ: A Flu Hope, Or Horror? - Charles Krauthammer - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Flu Hope, Or Horror?

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, October 14, 2005; Page A19

While official Washington has been poring over Harriet Miers's long-ago 
doings on the Dallas City Council and parsing the byzantine comings and 
goings of the Patrick Fitzgerald grand jury, relatively unnoticed was 
perhaps the most momentous event of our lifetime -- what is left of it, 
as I shall explain. It was announced last week that U.S. scientists have 
just created a living, killing copy of the 1918 "Spanish" flu.

This is big. Very big.

First, it is a scientific achievement of staggering proportions. The 
Spanish flu has not been seen on this blue planet for 85 years. Its 
re-creation is a story of enterprise, ingenuity, serendipity, hard work 
and sheer brilliance. It involves finding deep in the bowels of a 
military hospital in Washington a couple of tissue samples from the 
lungs of soldiers who died in 1918 -- in an autopsy collection first 
ordered into existence by Abraham Lincoln -- and the disinterment of an 
Alaskan Eskimo who died of the flu and whose remains had been preserved 
by the permafrost. Then, using slicing and dicing techniques only 
Michael Crichton could imagine, they pulled off a microbiological 
Jurassic Park: the first-ever resurrection of an ancient pathogen. And 
not just any ancient pathogen, explained virologist Eddie Holmes, but 
"the agent of the most important disease pandemic in human history."

Which brings us to the second element of this story: Beyond the 
brilliance lies the sheer terror. We have brought back to life an agent 
of near-biblical destruction. It killed more people in six months than 
were killed in the four years of World War I. It killed more humans than 
any other disease of similar duration in the history of the world, says 
Alfred W. Crosby, who wrote a history of the 1918 pandemic. And, notes 
New Scientist magazine, when the re-created virus was given to mice in 
heavily quarantined laboratories in Atlanta, it killed the mice more 
quickly than any other flu virus ever tested .

Now that I have your attention, consider, with appropriate trepidation, 
the third element of this story: What to do with this knowledge? Not 
only has the virus been physically re-created, but its entire genome has 
also now been published for the whole world, good people and very bad, 
to see.

The decision to publish was a very close call, terrifyingly close.

On the one hand, we need the knowledge disseminated. We've learned from 
this research that the 1918 flu was bird flu, "the most bird-like of all 
mammalian flu viruses," says Jeffery Taubenberger, lead researcher in 
unraveling the genome. There is a bird flu epidemic right now in Asia 
that has infected 117 people and killed 60. It has already developed a 
few of the genomic changes that permit transmission to humans. 
Therefore, you want to put out the knowledge of the structure of the 
1918 flu, which made the full jump from birds to humans, so that every 
researcher in the world can immediately start looking for ways to 
anticipate, monitor, prevent and counteract similar changes in today's 
bird flu.

We are essentially in a life-or-death race with the bird flu. Can we 
figure out how to preempt it before it figures out how to evolve into a 
transmittable form with 1918 lethality that will decimate humanity? To 
run that race we need the genetic sequence universally known -- not just 
to inform and guide but to galvanize new research.

On the other hand, resurrection of the virus and publication of its 
structure open the gates of hell. Anybody, bad guys included, can now 
create it. Biological knowledge is far easier to acquire for Osama bin 
Laden and friends than nuclear knowledge. And if you can't make this 
stuff yourself, you can simply order up DNA sequences from commercial 
laboratories around the world that will make it and ship it to you on 
demand. Taubenberger himself admits that "the technology is available."

And if the bad guys can't make the flu themselves, they could try to 
steal it. That's not easy. But the incentive to do so from a secure 
facility could not be greater. Nature, which published the full genome 
sequence, cites Rutgers bacteriologist Richard Ebright as warning that 
there is a significant risk "verging on inevitability" of accidental 
release into the human population or of theft by a "disgruntled, 
disturbed or extremist laboratory employee."

Why try to steal loose nukes in Russia? A nuke can only destroy a city. 
The flu virus, properly evolved, is potentially a destroyer of 
civilizations.

We might have just given it to our enemies.

Have a nice day.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/13/AR2005101301783.html?nav=hcmodule
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