biotechnology for exam 3

BIOTECHNOLOGY: APPLICATIONS OF

MICROBIAL GENETICS

• Biotechnology: The use of microorganisms, cells, or cell components to make a product

• Foods, antibiotics, vitamins, enzymes

• Recombinant DNA technology: Insertion or modification of genes to produce desired proteins.

Monday, February 27, 2012

BIOTECHNOLOGY: APPLICATIONS OF

MICROBIAL GENETICS


BENEFITS FROM BIOTECHNOLOGY


BIOTECHNOLOGY & DUAL RESEARCH

IMPACTS ON BIOTERRORISM


Biological Research has led to the development of new drugs, treatments, and medical

advancements that have profoundly impacted our health and way of life

The General Public holds scientists and their work in high regard and trusts that they will act in the best interest of society


What is Dual-Use Research?

“Legitimate scientific work that could be misused to threaten public health or national security”


THUS: any medical advance that improves the ease of engineering,

handling, or delivering treatment has the potential to be applied by those wishing to do harm and can be considered "dual-

use


“advances in biotechnology … have the potential to create a much more dangerous biological warfare threat … engineered biological agents could be worse than any disease

known to man.” (CIA, 2003)


Case Studies


❖ Dr. Wimmer, Distinguished Professor in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook

❖ 1991: Published the chemical formula of the polio virus

❖ 2001:biochemically synthesized (deliberately) poliovirus according to its genomic sequence in the absence of a template without a DNA or RNA template, or the help of living cells

❖ 2002 published in Science

❖ DUAL USE Implications: unnecessarily demonstrating how bioterrorists could use modern scientific techniques to create dangerous pathogens

❖ POLICY: “prior to attempting synthesis of a microbial chromosome we commissioned an independent bioethical review of our proposed scientific plan.”


❖ Dr. Stuart Levy of the Tufts University School of Medicine (Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy, 2006) identified a gene in Yersinia pestis similar to an Escherichia coli gene known to cause multiple antibiotic resistance

❖ Yesinia pestis causes plague, famously known as the “Black Death” after it caused an estimated 50 million deaths throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia in the 1300’s.

❖ confers resistance to a variety of drugs, oxidative stress agents, and organic solvents

❖ transcriptional regulators of a multidrug efflux pump

❖ MarR protein represses transcription of the efflux pump, whereas the MarA protein increases its expression, thereby activating antibiotic resistance.


❖ In his 1945 Nobel Prize lecture, Fleming ended with a cautionary remark saying; “but I would like to sound one note of warning… it is not difficult to make microbes resistant to penicillin in the laboratory by exposing them to concentrations not sufficient to kill them, and the same thing has occasionally happened in the body.”


❖ PROS: experiments could uncover the reasons why the Spanish flu pandemic was so deadly and could offer insight into avian flu pathology and how it might become transmissible in humans.

❖ CONS:

❖ publication of the viral sequence, conditions under which the virus was handled and the threat of its escape into the environment;

❖ recreate deadly and transmissible though extinct or eradicated viruses;

❖ can be used for the design of a weapon of mass destruction; there is a risk verging on inevitability of accidental… or deliberate release of the virus.

❖ IMPACT TO PUBLIC HEALTH: advancement in tools to sequence genomes and synthesize DNA; BUT could be used to engineer biological weapons


We must PREVENT such MISUSE without IMPEDING research

PROGRESS!

“are there potential benefits to public health and safety from application or utilization of this information?”


biotechnology for exam 3

Health & Medicine

independent

modern scientific

proposed scientific

state university

public health

molecular

microbial

microbial