It might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone.
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.
It might be possible to reintroduce Smallpox and I guess that idiots who also think coal is a good idea might actually be stupid enough to make it happen. But, fortunately humans did wipe out one other disease and unlike Smallpox it wasn't deemed useful as a biological weapon so AFAIK nobody kept copies, it's just gone.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rinderpest
> AFAIK nobody kept copies
Unfortunately this is not the case: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-63707-z
:(
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Funnily enough, RFK Jr. is doing what he can to bring its human cousin back:
"Measles virus evolved from the then-widespread rinderpest virus most probably between the 11th and 12th centuries."
Good thing that smallpox wasn’t eradicated due to a vaccine.
Vaccinia is very different from Smallpox. Or perhaps I misunderstand you?
That was sarcasm, right?
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> Construction of an infectious horsepox virus vaccine from chemically synthesized DNA fragments
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
In theory, it's very much doable. We brought back an extinct cowpox virus a while ago using mail-order DNA. Did you know that Smallpox's nucleotide sequence is freely available online?
You're going to have to link that for me because I know the longtermism people are nuts about this, but their actual understanding is pretty poor.
There's a gulf between assembling a vaccine - which is a commonplace technology, and assembling a viable infectious viral particle.
Being able to order all the oligos of a viral sequence isn't even step 1.
I'm not sure if I understand your comment, but they were able to grow and propagate scHPXV in their lab. Link the sequence? Sure, it's on NCBI
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1
As for getting the nucleotides themselves, there are numerous services for ordering oligonucleotides which you can "stitch together." I think this used to be done with phosphoramidite synthesis, but the article I linked says they used plasmid synthesis, and ordered from ThermoFisher.
https://www.thermofisher.com/us/en/home/life-science/cloning...
I'm not sure what the price would be on this (I would imagine very high?), but it has to be cheaper than phosphoramidite chemistry. Nevertheless, the price of doing this sort of things w/ plasmids is plummeting.