WHO Recommends Smallpox Virus Alteration

An influential World Health Organization committee is sending shock waves through the scientific community with its recommendation that researchers be permitted to conduct genetic-engineering experiments with the smallpox virus.

The idea is to be able to better combat a disease that is considered a leading bioterror threat though it was publicly eradicated 25 years ago.

The WHO had previously opposed such work for fear that a "superbug" might emerge. Because the disease is so deadly, the WHO has even at times recommended destroying the world's two known smallpox stockpiles, located in secure labs at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta and in the former Soviet Union.

The recommended policy shift has reignited a debate over whether such research will help or hinder bioterrorism defenses.

The World Health Assembly - the ruling body of the 192-nation WHO - would make a final decision on whether to approve the experiments, which would include splicing a "marker" gene into the smallpox virus so its spread can be better tracked in the laboratory. The WHO committee said inserting the marker gene wouldn't make the disease any more dangerous, and that allowing such experimentation would speed depletion of the remaining smallpox virus stocks.

It has been U.S. policy to refrain from genetically engineering smallpox, but that would undoubtedly change if the WHO endorses such research.

"It's absolutely the right decision," said Dr. Ken Alibek, a former top scientist in the Soviet biological weapons program who said the Soviets covertly developed smallpox as a weapon in the 1980s.

Alibek, who defected to the U.S. in 1992 and now teaches at George Mason University, said it's now possible to genetically engineer smallpox to render current vaccines useless.

"The bad guys already know how to do it," Alibek said. "So why prohibit legitimate researchers to do research for protection."

Other scientist argue that such research has little value and is too risky.

"We have seen no evidence of a threat that would justify this research," says Sujatha Byravan, Executive Director of the Council for Responsible Genetics, a Boston nonprofit. "A decade ago, the WHO was planning to destroy the world's last remaining samples. Today, it is proposing to tinker with the virus in ways that could produce an even more lethal smallpox strain. This is a devastating step backwards."

Smallpox has plagued humans for centuries, and it's believed to have killed more people than all wars and epidemics combined. Death typically follows massive hemorrhaging.

A similar debate was set off last year when researcher Mark Buller of Saint Louis University announced that he had genetically engineered a mousepox virus that was designed to evade vaccines. Buller created the superbug to figure out how to defeat it, a key goal of the government's anti-terrorism plan. He designed a two-drug cocktail that promises to defeat the exceptionally deadly virus.