In November 2016, virologist David Evans traveled to Geneva for a meeting of a World Health Organization committee on smallpox research. The deadly virus had been declared eradicated 36 years earlier; the only known live samples of smallpox were in the custody of the United States and Russian governments.
Evans, though, had a striking announcement: Months before the meeting, he and a colleague had created a close relative of smallpox virus, effectively from scratch, at their laboratory in Canada. In a subsequent report, the WHO wrote that the team’s method “did not require exceptional biochemical knowledge or skills, significant funds, or significant time.”
Evans disagrees with that characterization: The process “takes a tremendous amount of technical skill,” he told Undark. But certain technologies did make the experiment easier. In particular, Evans and his colleague were able to simply order long stretches of the virus’s DNA in the mail, from GeneArt, a subsidiary of Thermo Fisher Scientific.
If DNA is the code of life, then outfits like GeneArt are printshops—they synthesize custom strands of DNA and ship them to scientists, who can use the DNA to make a yeast cell glow in the dark, or to create a plastic-eating bacterium, or to build a virus from scratch. Today there are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of companies selling genes, offering DNA at increasingly low prices. (If DNA resembles a long piece of text, rates today are often lower than 10 cents per letter; at this rate, the genetic material necessary to begin constructing an influenza virus would cost less than $1,500.) And new benchtop technologies—essentially, portable gene printers—promise to make synthetic DNA even more widely available.
But, since at least the 2000s, the field has been shadowed by fears that someone will use these services to cause harm—in particular, to manufacture a deadly virus and use it to commit an act of bioterrorism.