The Better Half by Sharon Moalem

Author:Sharon Moalem [Moalem, Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241396902
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2021-01-07T00:00:00+00:00

GEOGRAPHICALLY SPEAKING, the cities of Atlanta, Georgia, and Koltsovo, in the Novosibirsk region of Russia, are worlds away from each other.25 But they have something in common: the two cities hold the last two batches of the smallpox virus.

Since the World Health Organization declared the world free of smallpox in 1980, there has been a lot of talk but little action when it comes to destroying the last batches of the disease. We’ve managed to do the seemingly impossible—rid the entire world of one of history’s deadliest viral diseases. But after everything we’ve been through with smallpox over the years, breaking up entirely has been hard to do. Like a shoebox with keepsakes from a teenage romance that we can’t bring ourselves to part with, samples of this virus still exist, locked far from view.

There is a good reason for this reluctance to destroy them. You never know when they may come in handy. Especially if you need to create a new vaccine against smallpox.

It’s not only viruses that are kept on ice, under lock and key. Some of my own research has involved developing an antibiotic treatment for the possibility of a weaponized microbe—specifically Yersinia pestis, the dreaded cause of the black death and bubonic plagues.26 Much deadlier than even smallpox, this microbe in the pneumonic form of the plague can kill 90 percent of those infected. The killing potential of Y. pestis is amplified, just as it is for many other bacterial pathogens, with a plentiful source of biologically available iron from its host.27 Young and middle-age genetic males often have the greatest amount of iron stores within their bodies, as they do not normally lose any through menstruation or pregnancy. This can put them at a disadvantage to genetic females when they have to fight off iron-dependent microbes like Y. pestis.

For all its killing potential, Y. pestis is surprisingly sensitive to existing antibiotics—but that’s before it has been weaponized. To make an already deadly microbe into an even more lethal one is surprisingly easy today. If given a small DNA upgrade, Y. pestis can become completely immune to all our currently available antibiotics. Giving Y. pestis the genetic ability to acquire more iron and at a faster rate from its host—through DNA-editing techniques—can put genetic males, with their iron-rich stores, at even greater risk.28

We have to prepare for the fact that a weaponized black death can make its return at any time and begin killing millions unabated if it’s released. That’s why it’s crucial that we always keep some Y. pestis microbes in reserve, so that we can tinker with its DNA and develop and test new drugs to fight it. Drugs that hopefully we will never need to use.

The same possibility exists for smallpox. It’s possible to synthesize the virus in the lab. It was after the defection of Soviet scientists during the 1980s that we began to learn how smallpox was being weaponized into even more potent bioweapons. It took until 1992 for Russian president

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