A process of making disease-causing viruses more deadly has been discovered in which it has been foreshadowed by a number of research groups worldwide, was made by the Co-operative Research Centre for the Biological Control of Pest Animals Canberra, as part of work to develop a biological contraceptive which would halt mouse and rat plagues and the damage they cause to the global food supply but the discovery in turn prompted the Australian scientists to urge a strengthening in the provisions of the global Biological Weapons Convention.

The discovery was made from a research carried out for completely humanitarian motives aimed to counter the enormous damage and human suffering which rodents cause by devouring a major part of the global grain harvest, especially in developing countries and in Australia as explained by CRC director Dr Bob Seamark.

“In the course of science you sometimes make unexpected discoveries - penicillin is one example.In this case, we’ve found that certain changes to a mouse virus can render it more lethal and harder to immunise against” he said.

Immunity in the mousepox virus is affected by the insertion of a particular gene thereby making it deadly for breeds of laboratory mice normally resistant to the disease while vaccines for mice against mousepox are made less effective.

“The best protection against any misuse of this technique was to issue a worldwide warning. We also want researchers to use this new knowledge to help design better vaccines”, he further stressed.

Researchers at the CRC noted that while mousepox virus does not infect humans or pose any threat to them, they are concerned that if the technique were to be adopted by biowarfare researchers it could be used to strengthen biological weapons based on viruses which do affect humans thus the need to strengthen the global Biological Weapons Convention to take account of the discovery, according to Dr Annabelle Duncan, the Chief of CSIRO Molecular Science and former deputy head of a United Nations team that investigated the development of biowarfare agents in Iraq following the Gulf War.

“Discoveries such as this are being made all the time,” she says. “The important thing is to ensure they are used for good - not for destructive purposes. That is why we urge awareness and vigilance.”

A report on the discovery will be published in the Journal of Virology in its February issue. The CRC researchers feel that informing the public, governments and the world scientific community is the best way to prevent misuse of such discoveries.

The Pest Animal Control CRC uses biotechnology to develop novel fertility control methods for pest animals such as mice, rabbits and foxes.

The CRC is a research collaboration of The Australian National University, CSIRO, the University of Adelaide, the University of Sydney, the University of Western Australia, the WA Department of Conservation and Land Management and the WA Agriculture Protection Board.

CRC scientists are experimenting with the use of various viruses to deliver an antigen to the pest animal which causes an immune response to its own reproductive cells. This is known as immuno-contraception.

The goal is to suppress the plagues of mice and rats which destroy billions of dollars worth of the world grain harvest both in farmer’s fields and in grain storages and spread human diseases.

In this particular experiment they modified a mousepox virus to include the gene for a substance called interleukin-4 which affects the immune system. The aim was to boost the level of the animal’s immune response to block reproduction.

They found that the extra gene also had the effect of suppressing part of the mouse’s immune system which deals with viruses - the cell-mediated response - with the result that lab mice normally resistant to the virus died. Furthermore it reduced the efficacy of vaccines used to protect them by about half.

The research was carried out under strict conditions of biological and physical security at the Australian National University.

The Deputy Vice-Chancellor of The Australian National University, Professor John Richards, said that ANU, like all Australian research institutions, has processes to ensure the integrity of research. “It is also important to capture unexpected research outcomes for the benefit of humanity. The knowledge gained from this particular discovery alerts us to previously unknown, yet significant, implications,” he said.

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The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2007 was jointly awarded to Albert Fert, of Unité Mixte de Physique CNRS/THALES,Université Paris-Sud, in Orsay, France, and Peter Grünberg, of Forschungszentrum Jülich in Germany for the discovery of giant magnetoresistance through the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

The technology that is used to read data on hard disks is this year’s physics prize awardee due to its wide-scale impact to modern life as it has been due to this technology that radical miniaturization of hard disks has been recently possible because sensitive read-out heads are needed to be able to read data from the compact hard disks used in laptops and some music players.

Albert Fert of France and Peter Grünberg of Germany each independently discovered in 1988 a totally new physical effect – Giant Magnetoresistance or GMR, in which a very weak magnetic changes give rise to major differences in electrical resistance in a GMR system and exploiting this phenomenon would result to a system which would be the perfect tool for reading data from hard disks when information registered magnetically has to be converted to electric current. It didn’t take long before researchers and engineers began work to enable use of the effect in read-out heads and in 1997 the first read-out head based on the GMR effect was launched and this soon became the standard technology. Even the most recent read-out techniques of today are further developments of GMR.

As hard disk stores information, such as music, in the form of microscopically small areas magnetized in different directions, the information is retrieved by a read-out head that scans the disk and registers the magnetic changes so that the smaller and more compact the hard disk, the smaller and weaker the individual magnetic areas needing morensensitive read-out heads if information has to be packed more densely on a hard disk. A read-out head based on the GMR effect can convert very small magnetic changes into differences in electrical resistance and there-fore into changes in the current emitted by the read-out head. The current is the signal from the read-out head and its different strengths represent ones and zeros.

The GMR effect was discovered thanks to new techniques developed during the 1970s to produce very thin layers of different materials. If GMR is to work, structures consisting of layers that are only a few atoms thick have to be produced. For this reason GMR can also be considered one of the first real applications of the promising field of nanotechnology.

Albert Fert is a French citizen. Born 1938 in Carcassonne, France, he received his Ph.D. in 1970 at Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France. He is a professor at Université Paris-Sud, Orsay, France, since 1976, and scientific director of Unité mixte de physique CNRS/Thales, Orsay, France, since 1995.

Peter Grünberg is a German citizen. Born 1939 in Pilsen, he received his Ph.D. in 1969 at Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany. He is a professor at Institut für Festkörperforschung, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany, since 1972.

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