Newspapers are filled with stories of the debate over the ethics of creating
life through cloning techniques. Dolly the cloned sheep and the cattle,
swine, and goats that have followed in her footsteps have raised
ethical questions about scientists “playing God,” when they harvest genetic
material from an animal and create an identical organism from it,
as is the case with cloning.
Meanwhile, in a much less publicized event, scientists at the State
University of New York at Stony Brook succeeded in artificially creating
a virus that is virtually identical to natural poliovirus. They used DNA
nucleotides they bought “off the shelf” and put them together according
to the published poliovirus sequence. They then added an enzyme that
would transcribe the DNA sequence into the RNA genome used by
poliovirus. They ended up with a virus that was nearly identical to poliovirus
(see photograph). Its capsid, infectivity, and replication in host
cells are similar to the natural virus.
The creation of the virus was greeted with controversy, particularly
because poliovirus is potentially devastating to human health. The scientists,
who were working on a biowarfare defense project funded by the
Department of Defense, argued that they were demonstrating what could
be accomplished if information and chemicals fell into the wrong hands.
In 2003, another lab in Rockville, Maryland, manufactured a “working”
bacteriophage, a harmless virus called phi X. Their hope is to create
microorganisms from which they can harness energy—for use as a
renewable energy source. But the prospect of harmful misuse of the new