Hey, River or Anthy or anyone else in related fields:how similar would a program to develop a vaccine against a bio-warfare virus be to one to develop a variant of the virus itself?
*waves at NSA*
It's for a novel.
Weaponized biological agents and vaccines
Not terribly similar. But...
To develop a vaccine you need an antigen...so they'd either need the virus or they'd need bits of the viral protein coat. If the latter, they wouldn't necessarily need a stock of the virus in their lab, they'd just need an expression vector of some kind. I went to a seminar on Ebola a few weeks ago and the speaker made her Ebola virus proteins using a system that did not involve in actual Ebola virus. But if it's useful to your plot to have a pile of virus in a vaccine lab, they could be making the vaccine from a weakened live strain or dead viral particles (think polio vaccines), in which case they need someone to provide weaponized virus or they need to be keeping/making a stock themselves. Or they could be using just a piece of virus as their antigen but for some reason they can only get it by purifying it from a complete virus (the Hep B vaccine is made that way). Making vaccines and making mutant virii are very different processes, so unless it's a ginormous and diverse lab you're thinking of it's not likely the two would be developed in the same group. That said, labs that are big and diverse enough to pull something like that off do exist. But if a 20+ member lab isn't your cup of tea, you could also have a couple diffferent labs that are next door to each other and meet regularly. There's a gang of labs in my department who do this; we call them the Trigroup. Don't worry though. They're not into bio-anything.
To develop a vaccine you need an antigen...so they'd either need the virus or they'd need bits of the viral protein coat. If the latter, they wouldn't necessarily need a stock of the virus in their lab, they'd just need an expression vector of some kind. I went to a seminar on Ebola a few weeks ago and the speaker made her Ebola virus proteins using a system that did not involve in actual Ebola virus. But if it's useful to your plot to have a pile of virus in a vaccine lab, they could be making the vaccine from a weakened live strain or dead viral particles (think polio vaccines), in which case they need someone to provide weaponized virus or they need to be keeping/making a stock themselves. Or they could be using just a piece of virus as their antigen but for some reason they can only get it by purifying it from a complete virus (the Hep B vaccine is made that way). Making vaccines and making mutant virii are very different processes, so unless it's a ginormous and diverse lab you're thinking of it's not likely the two would be developed in the same group. That said, labs that are big and diverse enough to pull something like that off do exist. But if a 20+ member lab isn't your cup of tea, you could also have a couple diffferent labs that are next door to each other and meet regularly. There's a gang of labs in my department who do this; we call them the Trigroup. Don't worry though. They're not into bio-anything.
When you can do nothing what can you do?
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axordil
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Update--I think I'm going with an attenuated live virus vaccine that's designed to revert to virulence on contact with...something or other. A hand wave will occur. That way I can keep it to one big lab (the story has an underground production facility the size of a hockey arena, so volume isn't an issue).
Cool. I was wondering where you were going with this.
How kind of you to consider physical space while expanding your lab. I hope your characters appreciate it - I've heard some horror stories of what happens when there're more people than desks and benches. The lab equivalent of hot-bunking doesn't really work. At least, it doesn't work in academia. People have to, like, go home.
How kind of you to consider physical space while expanding your lab. I hope your characters appreciate it - I've heard some horror stories of what happens when there're more people than desks and benches. The lab equivalent of hot-bunking doesn't really work. At least, it doesn't work in academia. People have to, like, go home.
When you can do nothing what can you do?
You'd be surprised at the #h*t that goes down in the real world. Some bosses, and some departments, really go out of their way to show you how much they don't care.axordil wrote:I take care of my fictional peons with Phds!
Fortunately for me, not only is my department famous for keeping people comfortable (we even get free cookies on Tuesdays and Thursdays), my boss somehow finagled up lots of space for us. Maybe more than is fair, considering how many people we have and how many people some other groups have, but we'll stay quiet about that. Of course, there're various things about our space that we like to complain about, but we don't have experiments stacked up on top of each other and everyone's got a desk.
When you can do nothing what can you do?
Cookies!! 
We have to work in shifts to accomodate the workload vs. the space available. Physicians aren't wholly pleased with this, since stool cultures, for instance, are only worked on night shift, and calling during the day for results doesn't help much. :|
On the other hand, if one of us tried to weaponize anthrax, for example, it would be pretty hard to hide our efforts.
I always wondered how whoever that was who mailed out those envelopes with anthrax spores after 9/11 could possibly have done all that so secretly...
We have to work in shifts to accomodate the workload vs. the space available. Physicians aren't wholly pleased with this, since stool cultures, for instance, are only worked on night shift, and calling during the day for results doesn't help much. :|
On the other hand, if one of us tried to weaponize anthrax, for example, it would be pretty hard to hide our efforts.
I always wondered how whoever that was who mailed out those envelopes with anthrax spores after 9/11 could possibly have done all that so secretly..."What do you fear, lady?" Aragorn asked.
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
"A cage," Éowyn said. "To stay behind bars, until use and old age accept them, and all chance of doing great deeds is gone beyond recall or desire.”
― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Return of the King
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Ghân-buri-Ghân
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