A Planet of Viruses - Carl Zimmer [32]
Outbreak by outbreak, the virus was beaten back, until the last case was recorded in Ethiopia in 1977. The world was now free of smallpox.
While the eradication campaign was a huge success, the smallpox virus had not disappeared completely. Scientists had established stocks of the virus in their laboratories to study. The WHO had all the stocks gathered up and deposited in two approved laboratories, one in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk in the Soviet Union, and one at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia. Smallpox experts could still study stocks from the two labs, but only under tight regulations. Most experts assumed that before long those last two collections of smallpox would be destroyed as well, and then the virus would become truly extinct.
It turns out, however, that there might actually be more smallpox virus in the world. In the 1990s, Soviet defectors revealed that their government had actually set up labs to produce a weaponized smallpox virus that could be loaded onto missiles and launched at enemy targets. After the fall of the Soviet government, the labs were abandoned. No one knows what ultimately happened to all the stocks of smallpox virus. We are left with the terrifying possibility that ex-Soviet virologists sold smallpox stocks to other governments or even terrorist organizations.
When these revelations emerged, some scientists and government officials decided the research stocks had to be preserved. Scientists could study them to help prepare for biological warfare. There remains much scientists don’t yet understand about smallpox. In recent years, scientists have started to decipher the strategies smallpox uses to fight the immune system. They have discovered an arsenal of weapons the virus deploys. Smallpox proteins can jam the signals the immune cells pass to each other to mobilize an attack, for example. Scientists have yet to figure out why smallpox is so deadly. Some researchers argue that the virus causes the immune system to attack a victim’s own body, rather than the virus. But that’s just a hypothesis still to be tested. Solving mysteries like these could conceivably lead to better vaccines, and even to antiviral drugs that might be effective against smallpox infections or other dangerous viruses that are equally deadly to humans.
In 2010, the WHO reopened the debate over whether to finally destroy the two remaining officially declared stocks smallpox in Russia and the United States. But now the debate has taken a twist that previous generations of smallpox fighters could never have dreamed of. Today scientists know the full genetic sequence of the smallpox virus. And they have the technology necessary to synthesize the smallpox genome from scratch. Synthesizing viruses is not the stuff of science fiction; scientists have already manufactured the genetic material of other viruses, like polio and the deadly 1918 influenza, and have used it to generate full-blown viruses.
There’s no evidence that anyone has tried to resurrect smallpox in the same way, but, then again, there’s no evidence that it would be impossible to do so. After thirty-five hundred years of suffering and puzzling over smallpox, we have finally figured it out. And yet, by understanding smallpox, we have ensured that it can never be utterly eradicated as a threat to humans. Our knowledge gives the virus its own kind of immortality.
Epilogue
The Alien in the Watercooler
Mimivirus
Wherever there is water on Earth,