In the course of reading up on RNA and genetic engineering, I happened across an article that proves SARS was potentially the result of an engineered virus. This abstract from the Journal of Virology, entitled “Strategy for Systematic Assembly of Large RNA and DNA Genomes: Transmissable Gastroenteritis Virus Model” or the TGEV (a common intestinal swine virus) shows how the researchers made a synthetic infectious and transmissable virus and published their success in the spring of 2000. “Full-length infectious constructs of TGEV will permit the precise genetic modification of the coronavirus genome” –the virus identified in SARS and the ‘common cold’. http://jvi.asm.org/cgi/content/abstract/74/22/10600 More on the subject of SARS as the forerunning event for pandemic management is in an article here called “Quarantine”. I found this abstract on a tangent, searching for material to pad out a review of a Nature magazine article that struck me as a classic bit of scientific spin. Here’s a link to that piece, called “A New Code For Life”, http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v5/n4/full/7400131 and I’ll be back to share some thoughts about it and see if I can update the state of the research… Btw, Nature’s piece treats bioengineering as if it’s breakthrough technology in this decade and mentions only two ‘lifeforms’ developed by its (then 2004) publication. If you read the piece, know that “minimal genome” experiments were very successful in the 1970s and I’ll be continuing this post…..
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