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