The Scariest Ideas in Science

Reanimated Infection

Up to 50 million people worldwide perished in the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Within a year, the virus mutated, immunity spread, and the flu vanished. In October 2005, a team led by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention pieced together the virus´s genome from lung tissue of a 1918 flu victim buried in Alaskan permafrost and brought her killer back from the dead. It´s out there, in a lab fridge, deadly as ever, right now.

WHY, GOD? WHY? The scientists say that the virus can help reveal the mechanisms of a pandemic and that it offers timely insight into how the emerging H5N1 avian flu might have leapt from birds to humans. Reanimating the monster is a â€practical curiosity,†says Erling Myhre, an infectious-disease physician at Lund University in Sweden and a former United Nations weapons inspector in Iraq. â€It gives a better understanding of how genetic information in [influenza] can change over time.†The work goes on. Last October, members of the group debuted a vaccine to protect against the reanimated virus.

FEAR FACTOR The project is what experts call â€dual-use researchâ€: It has beneficial uses but potentially nefarious ones too. Risk, researchers believe, is inherent to research on human threats. â€The public has to understand that in order to be prepared for pandemics and bioterrorism, dangerous work has to happen,†says Michael Stebbins, director of biology policy at the Federation of American Scientists.

The work also freaks out scientists, however. â€The 1918 flu reconstruction is a bad example to other countries,†argues Harvard University virologist Jens Kuhn, a member of the science working group for the nonprofit Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. With proper resources, â€anyone can now also reproduce this virus [from the published genome].†A team in Canada is already studying its own version. And escape from the kind of high-level containment labs that store the virus isn´t unheard of-SARS samples inadvertently saw daylight several times during that epidemic several years ago.

Although current antiviral drugs-
and the new vaccine-thwart the reconstructed flu in mice, there´s no guarantee that they work as well on humans (a problem because nobody born after 1930 is immune to the 1918 strain). â€To proceed with the construction of this virus under those circumstances is irresponsible,†says Rutgers University microbiologist Richard Ebright, a prominent critic of the research. â€If it had to be done,†Kuhn agrees, â€it should have been done in a different way.â€

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