Did Pox Virus Research Put Potential Profits Ahead of Public Safety?

In the brave new world of synthetic biology, scientists can now brew up viruses from scratch using the tools of DNA technology.

The latest such feat, published last month, involves horsepox, a cousin of the feared virus that causes smallpox in people. Critics charge that making horsepox in the lab has endangered the public by basically revealing the recipe for how any lab could manufacture smallpox to use as a bioweapon.

The scientist who did the work, David Evans of the University of Alberta in Canada, has said his team had to synthesize horsepox because they wanted to study the virus and there was no other way to get it.

There was another possibility, NPR has learned. Evans could have done research on a specimen of horsepox collected from the wild, but he didn't pursue that alternative.

He says using the natural virus might have prevented the pharmaceutical company he is working with from commercializing horsepox as a new vaccine for smallpox. But the head of the company told NPR that he had not been aware that this stored sample of horsepox was potentially available — and would not have wanted to synthesize the virus from scratch if he had known.

"There was some confusion," Evans told NPR, "probably my fault although I'd thought we'd discussed it back around 2014."

If he didn't talk about it with the company, Evans says, it's because his own inquiries had convinced him that the stored virus "wasn't suitable for our goals."

Evans says the virus-making techniques his team has developed will advance the field of pox viruses and help turn them into new vaccines or therapies for diseases like cancer.

"To say that somehow