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Comment by nolok | Hacker News Reader

Don't need to wonder, the US and Russian (Soviet at the time) have made it public that they keep samples of smallpox.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_virus_retention_debat...

Ostensibly this serves a purpose beyond the MAD incentive, having stocks of the virus on hand makes manufacturing the old style smallpox vaccine easier should the need ever arise in the future. As we saw with monkeypox last year there is much more limited capacity for more modern pox vaccines due to the more advanced manufacturing process and limited demand.

Someday soon we’ll just be able to sequence its genome and reconstruct it without needing to keep samples alive (and no longer have the risk with all the maintenance and security protocols that will entail).

Of course however we store that genomic code had better be on physical media in a sealed vault that isn’t even within spitting distance of anything with an internet connection.

https://thebulletin.org/2020/02/a-biotech-firm-made-a-smallp...

Yeah, as you allude to in your parting sentence, I'm not sure if this idea makes me more or less secure. Chance for accidental infection at the storage facility goes way down, but should the sequence ever leak to the internet chance for accidental infection from some stupid amateur biohacker goes way up in my opinion, and that's before we get to purposeful infection.

If it's going to be preserved, I think I'm happier with it not being digital and stored in highly secured areas by professionals, but perhaps the threat model in my head isn't accurate enough.

> Someday soon we’ll just be able to sequence its genome and reconstruct it without needing to keep samples alive

That's already been done, I think.

Some guy did a chimeric horsepox by ordering stuff off GeneArt and IDT.

Oh, we already sequenced it awhile back. As for physical media, that's not exactly what happened... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/NC_001611.1?report=fast...

I kinda doubt there's not some critical "mutation" in there that'll prevent it from replicating.

Is that really true? Don't epigenetics play a factor here?

The alternative is what we've seen with COVID-19, where they had to take samples and spent months devising a vaccine. That said, that one advanced vaccine technology by a lot, and I think it was a record speed for developing a vaccine.

That is, if smallpox or another new disease shows up, I hope that vaccine development will be quicker and quicker.

I’m old enough to have a smallpox vaccination scar on my arm.

I never got one since the doctor didn't like the look of a birthmark on my arm. I don't have that puffy scar. My sister got one though.

Damn I just though I could have been a left arm bicep model.

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