It was on this date, 33 years ago, that the UN declared smallpox eradicated. Since smallpox was the greatest killer of human beings of all time, this easily ranks as one of the most monumental achievements in history, although it is barely mentioned in textbooks.

(Yes, I am old enough to have gotten the smallpox vaccine when I was in elementary school as part of the worldwide effort to eliminate the disease.)

We humans can pull together and do great things, when we have a mind to. This year India is on the verge of eradicating polio.

On the downside of the story, while the rest of the world has destroyed all samples of smallpox, so the disease can never plague humanity again, the United States and Russia are still holding on to their last samples of the virus, just in case it proves useful someday as a biological weapon.

That is humanity in a nutshell - the glory and the tragedy all rolled into one.



Child with smallpox


(BTW, smallpox was the reason face powder became popular as makeup, for obvious reasons.)

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th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time

A warning before that pic would have been nice. I briefly paused before taking the next bite of my breakfast sammich.

I've been vaccinated against smallpox, and anthrax, and have a handful of anti-malaria pills still in one of my deployment bags. I am the 1% (/sarcasm)

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There are plenty of reasons to keep one of the worlds most 'successful' viruses besides for weaponization. What if it turns out to be the perfect vector to deliver cancer fighting drugs to specific tissues in the body? Nature has crafted us a really strong biological device here, I for one dont think it should be eradicated. It should be further studied and possibly genetically modified to do our bidding.

That's a great POV - for example, these guys engineered e. coli to eat sugar and shit diesel.

http://articles.cnn.com/2008-08-12/tech ... _s=PM:TECH

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You obviously didn't see Jurassic Park!
kidding - actually appreciate the insight.

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This time, like all times, is a very good one, if we but know what to do with it.
--Emerson

The smallpox genome was sequenced in the 1990s. There is no longer a genetic reason to keep the actual virus around.

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th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time

Having a list of nucleotides is nice, no doubt, but we still have to have actual "living" tissue to manipulate in vitro.

That's not true. Give me a minute, I'll find the article. We can totally create life.

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Well?

He's creating life. Give him a minute!!!!

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lol...that was fucking hilarious, I just choked on my own saliva and am in my office coughing my ass off.

Sorry. Had about 6 servers die. BRB.

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http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/ ... etic-life/

So yeah, apparently they needed a host cell (if I'm speed-reading correctly) that was alive, but injected completely new DNA into it. Unless I'm mistaken, that means they don't need an "original" strain of smallpox to sequence the DNA and manipulate it the way they want.

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Yes, you're mistaken. That is bacteria...we can do lots of fun shit with bacteria, but as with viruses we still need the 'shell', in which we can put the genetic information. Even if we CAN clone an entire genome synthetically, that doesnt mean we have anywhere to put it.

A bunch of G.A.T.C does NOT a virus make.

i always spelled virus GATC though...

I don't think they cloned a genome - they made their own?

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I'm sorry. That was a really lazy response. I JUST got home from a very long day, have hours of troubleshooting ahead of me tomorrow, but wanted to keep the conversation going. This is something that really fascinates me, I just can't find the energy at this time to make much more of a response

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There are a hand-full of labs in the world capable of recreating the virus from its genome, which was sequenced in the '90s (the first engineered virus - a polio virus - was created in the labs of the State University of New York in Stony Brook in 2002) .

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and the Russian State Research Center of Virology and Biotechnology in Koltsovo are two such labs. They are also the labs that currently house the last remaining samples of variola, the smallpox virus.

It is very dangerous and very expensive to work with live virus strains.

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th' only knower of th' cosmic mysteries alive at this time

Well color me interested...apparently you're right: http://www.stonybrook.edu/research/milestones1/page4/page4.html

That link is only someone saying they've done it...i'm still trying to find some sort of proof that they've been able to construct a protein coat out of DNA fragments.