Scientists May Recreate Killer Flu Virus...06/19/00

BY Nigel Hawkes, Science Editor An Oxford team is considering the possibility of reconstructing the 1918 influenza virus which killed 20 million people around the world.

The experiment would have to be done in the strictest possible containment, Professor George Brownlee of the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology in Oxford, said.

Its aim would be to try to discover just what made the 1918 "Spanish flu" so deadly, and to devise better protection against future flu pandemics.

The virus could be rebuilt, at least in part, because research by scientists at the US Armed Forces Institute of Pathology in Washington has worked out the sequence of two of the most important genes in the 1918 flu virus, using post-mortem material from the institute's archives and from a woman who died of the flu and was buried in the Alaskan permafrost.

A scientist in Professor Brownlee's team, Dr Ervin Fodor, has developed a method for recreating old viruses from DNA molecules. The method is to be shown at this week's New Frontiers in Science Exhibition at the Royal Society in London.

"The technique is very simple," Professor Brownlee said. "It involves adding 12 plasmids - rings - of DNA to a cell in tissue culture, and out pops a virus."

The recipe for the plasmids would be based on what the American scientists, Jeffry Taubenberger and Ann Reid, have discovered about the 1918 virus. They have the sequence of two of the most important genes, those for the protein haemoglutinin and the enzyme neuraminidase, both found on the surface of the virus.

These have cast no obviouslight on why the virus was so lethal and Dr Reid believes that its secret may not lie in a single gene, but in how well all the viral genes work together.

New Frontiers in Science is open daily, 10.30am to 4.30pm, at the Royal Society, 6 Carlton House Terrace. http://www.the-times.co.uk/news/pages/tim/2000/06/19/timnwsnws01005.html