In his book
Biovalence: Preventing Biological Terror and Crime, author Barry Kellman
talk about the various ways in which biological weaponry have been used, and
could be used, to inflict mass causalities.
While this is certainty a good read, he mentions in one section how
soviet scientists spliced Venezuelan equine encephalomyelitis (VEE) genes into
smallpox to create a “chimera” virus that would be resistant to vaccines and
anti-viral treatments. I was curious
what genes were spliced, and how these could possibly confer resistance.
VEEV virus is a member of the togaviridae viral family, and
is positive sense single stranded RNA virus, while smallpox is a member of the
poxviridae family and is a double stranded DNA virus. On a practical level one has to admire how
splicing these genomes together in the cold war era would have been quite a
technological feat. Why did they do it then? What qualities did VEEV have that
smallpox could have benefited from to make a deadlier bioweapon?
My initial theory was that VEE genes when combined with the
variola (virus that causes smallpox syndrome) genome, would result in a hybrid
virus capable of the neurological symptoms of VEE, such as headache and coma,
and the conventional smallpox symptoms in a chimera virus they named VeePox. I though this was unusual, as smallpox
already seemed symptomatic enough, and the source does not elaborate on why VEE
was chosen specifically. There are numerous sources that quote the soviet
scientist Ken Alibek, who defected to the U.S. and gave us the intel on what
the soviets were doing, but I have been unable to find what specific genes were
spliced.
However, after investigation it was not the symptoms of VEEV
that made it appealing as a potential bioweapon, but rather the expense in
producing a biological weapon. The VEE
virus is cheap to produce on a large scale, and much much more stable than the smallpox
virus. Without knowing more about the
specific genes that were spliced, I would argue that it was the practical
aspects of VEEV that made it a good candidate for recombination.
 A person possibly infected with VeePox |
| Image credit |
-Cynthia Taylor
Sources:
1 comment:
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