When risk outweighs benefit

In October 2005, a team of US scientists, headed by Jeffery Taubenberger from the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (Rockville, MD, USA), published the full sequence of the highly virulent strain of influenza virus that caused the Spanish influenza pandemic in the winter of 1918– 1919 and killed up to 50 million people worldwide (Taubenberger et al, 2005). Further work based on the sequence led to the synthesis of an influenza strain containing all eight gene segments from the 1918 pandemic virus, which showed a high virulence and mortality rate when tested in mice (Tumpey et al, 2005). Both the sequencing and the reconstruction of the Spanish influenza virus are paradigmatic proof that recent developments in genetics, genomics and other areas of the biomedical sciences might create new possibilities for biological warfare. The resurrected 1918 virus has been described as “perhaps the most effective bioweapons agent now known” (von Bubnoff, 2005), and, given the availability of its full genome sequence on the Internet, its reconstruction by rogue scientists is now a real possibility.