From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Aug 18 2002 - 07:17:56 MDT
On Sun, Aug 18, 2002 at 04:24:58AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> Simplified it is to put into place a bioterrorism rapid response capability.
> Since all pathogenic attacks (vs. chemical attacks) require a vector and
> all existing (and likely to exist in the near future) vectors contain
> DNA, it is relatively easy to isolate the carrier and sequence the DNA.
I'm no epidemologist, but isn't this a somewhat optimistic assumption?
People start to get sick, and the carrier is caught within a few days. I
saw a documentary yesterday about a cryptosporidium outbreak, and despite
the pathogen being known in the literature it still took quite a while
for the authorities to even identify it.
> We have multiple genome centers that can sequence an entire bacterial
> genome in less than a day. Since really novel toxins are unlikely
> to be developed in the near future you simply scan the genome for
> a gene sequence related to known toxins and determine the protein
> structure (using both computer methods, X-ray and NMR studies).
> Novel toxins are likely to stick out as well because they will
> presumably involve genes dissimilar to those currently in public databsses.
What about adding the IL-4 gene as in the Australian mousepox
experiments? This is a gene which occurs naturally, and might
be disregarded as a normal gene despite making at least the mousepox
virus very nasty. It seems likely that by simply picking one or a few
immune-affecting genes one would have a pathogen that did nasty things
without having any obvious toxic effects when viewed as a genome - the
effect is only due to the host reaction.
And there are plenty of conotoxins, few of which have been sequenced...
> You then dedicate everyone in the country who understands molecular modeling
> to devising an antitoxin. One could even design a system to utilize
> a huge amount of computational capacity, e.g. AntiToxinDesign@Home, similar
> to my Nano@Home proposal.
You seem to miss a step here. If I come up with a great in silico
antitoxin, it still has to be tested in vitro before starting to brew it
everywhere. Again, this takes a while, especially if it is not obvious
how to synthetise it (how quickly can biochemists devise a workable
synthesis pathway with no problematic residues? and if it is protein
based, don't you have to solve the folding problem to see if it sticks to
the toxin?).
Also, what about in vivo testing? In a crisis people might prefer to be
the guinea pigs of untested antitoxins rather than a fairly certain
death, so safety considerations might be ignored, but considerations of
effectiveness are very relevant. It seems that the proper approach would
be to try to have a number of antitoxins being developed and tested in
parallel rather than betting all on a single card.
> If we were prepared with something like the above, I think you could
> start treatments within a week of discovery and prevent "vast amounts"
> of people from dying. If you prepublish the plans for this capability
> it would make bioterrorism a much less likely weapon for terrorists
> to choose. It requires a public & private sector cooperation plan
> be in place and people be trained so they know what their job is
> to facilitate the response.
I think a project like this could be done, and it might be very useful
for a huge crisis. But I think you are overly optimistic about how fast
it could produce a stopgap measure even if the infrastructure was in
place.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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