Poliovirus Synthesis: Case Study of Dual-Use Research

The FAS Biosecurity Project is developing course materials to teach graduate students in life sciences about their responsibility to mitigate the risks that their research could be misappropriated for biological weapons.

Because there are often no right answers when dealing with the dual-use science, we decided that case studies would be an effective teaching tool. The first case study we are developing is that of a poliovirus synthesis experiment that sparked alarming news headlines in 2002: “Deadly Polio Recipe Ready for Download” and “Man Creates Life in Deadly Virus.”

In the early 1990s Dr. Eckard Wimmer and his colleagues at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook began the process of synthesizing poliovirus from scratch. By 2001 they had succeeded in fusing together small bits of mail-ordered DNA to create the entire poliovirus genome. The experiment was the first major demonstration synthesis of a virus from basic chemical building blocks. The work was published in Science in July 2002.*

The possibilities of dual-use applications of this work, that it could show terrorists how to build the virus, were not obvious to Wimmer’s team in the 1990s. He said the purpose was to prove that a virus is a chemical and can be explained in purely physical and chemical terms. “To synthesize virus for evil intentions seemed to be ludicrous because all viruses that could be used as bioterrorist agents were available either through mail order or you could isolate them yourself, with the exception [of] smallpox. To think about bioterrorism as a threat for the security of the U.S. if we synthesized poliovirus was not a prominent thought.”

The poliovirus synthesis case is instructive for three reasons: (1) how the benefits and risks were weighed by the researchers at the time they performed the experiment; (2) how the publication of the results was handled, because the paper was published without editorial explanation; and (3) retrospectively how emerging national guidelines and regula­tory legislation would have affected the process.

The case study will include primary literature, news articles, and a first person account from Dr. Wimmer. It will end with a series of questions for discussion.

* Cello, Jeronimo, A.V. Paul, and E. Wimmer. “Chemical Synthesis of Poliovirus cDNA: Generation of Infectious Virus in the Absence of Natural Template.” Science 2002 297: 1016-1018. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint /297/5583/1016.pdf