Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

The New York Times is running an interesting article Old Viruses Resurrected Through DNA. It’s a little scanty on the details, but basically French scientists–clearly the craziest kind–have brought to life a virus that entered our genome millions of years ago. Since this virus was essentially brought to life again, they’ve called it Phoenix, for the name of the mythical (real!) bird which dies and is reborn in its own fiery ashes.

The abstract of their paper points out the dangers of their work:

Phoenix, produces viral particles that disclose all of the structural and functional properties of a bona-fide retrovirus, can infect mammalian, including human, cells, and integrate with the exact signature of the presently found endogenous HERV-K progeny. We also show that this element amplifies via an extracellular pathway involving reinfection, at variance with the non-LTR-retrotransposons (LINEs SINEs) or LTR-retrotransposons, thus recapitulating ex vivo the molecular events responsible for its dissemination in the host genomes. We also show that in vitro recombinations among present-day human HERV-K loci can similarly generate functional HERV-K elements, indicating that human cells still have the potential to produce infectious retroviruses.

The problem, as I see it, is that they’ve brought to life a virus which infects the human genome and can be transmitted genetically. Since they don’t know exactly what this virus does–no one even knows what this class of viruses do–they can’t say whether having a virulent copy of it is harmful to human life or not. It’s a dangerous thing, and a potent biological weapon. Imagine, if instead of killing outright, you could assure the systematic crippling of all future generations of a group of people? Terrible.

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