"Would it be possible to engineer a sterility virus?" Topic

Just watched Children of Men again, and I started wondering if it would be possible to artificially engineer a virus that didn't necesarily have any negative effects on the carriers, other than to make them sterile.

If it had symptoms similar to the common cold (or no symptoms at all), such a disease might be around for months before anyone even noticed that anything was wrong. It could travel the world before we knew how to do anything about it.

Just wondering.

Discuss!

OOps, didn't mean to crosspost to scenics, meant to crosspost to 'science'.

There are probably so many ways to do it, it's amazing we get any breeding done at all!
Since it is now a common sci fi plot to have viruses to alter DNA. How about simply making the egg cell wall tougher, or the spernm a little weaker?

In any event, I have read that even chicken pox virus can induce sterility. And, it's not the only disease.
It sould be a piece of cake for a Mad Scientist with a government grant.

A variety of ways you could do it

i) Kill all the males (converse females) – effective but hardly elegant

ii) Kill all the sperm – create a virus that sees a sperm marker as a neoantigen, get the person's immune system to do all the work for you

iii) Kill all the ova – same strategy, probably more difficult given better autoimmune avoidance in the female reproductive tract

iv) Knock off adhesion markers for implantation

I could go on and on

Further to John's comments, a number of viruses can cause sterility, most commonly mumps (no secret how – it causes inflammation of the testicles and orchitis)

It's the 100% infection rate and 100% effectiveness of causing sterility that will be difficult to engineer.

It is possible in theory because as scientists unravel more genes and understand how they work, the more possibility there is of making a virus that changes some crucial genes.

However if someone did it, someone else could make another virus that reversed the effect.

Wasn't the story behind the 'Off the Wall Armies' range from SJG that humanity and accidently killed itself off when the engineered virus designed to cure the common cold caused sterility as well.

But anyway, I imagine it would be possible (or at least soon will be possible), the 'problem' is as BooneC mentions, you'll have lots of people (might only be 1% of the world population, but that's still 6 million people!) that have oddball immune systems and don't get infected or don't go sterile.

-Will

It would be possible, there are viruses that cause sterility already. Hell their are viruses that cause cancer.

The difficulty as BooneC points out is the infection rate and transmission.

Something like 10% of the white population doesn't have a protein that will allow the AIDs virus to infect them no matter how much they are exposed to it. I don't know what the rate is for other races.

I thought cooking with plastic was a sterility conspiracy of The Finest Generation to go out with a bang.

Depends a bit on the point – if the goal is to provide available real estate (the so-called Screwfly Solution) a successful attack rate of 50 to 80% would probably do it, as the social disruption would probably do the rest – the Spanish flu nearly knocked off a much less infra-structure dependent world with a 35% attack rate

If the goal is total eradication, probably sterility is not the most efficient method

If it's an accident or natural experiment, as they say, anything goes

You might have better luck with a parasite than with a virus. I don't believe viruses are very specific about the cells they attack, while parasites can have extreamly specific and complex behaviors.

Can't we just engineer one that affect Chavs and ugly chicks?

Alex,

Am I gonna have to turn your name in for our list of people to watch? :)

That's okay, I get ideas like this all the time too.

Pictors pointed out that "there are viruses that cause sterility already."

This would be similar to using naturally-occurring small pox and re-engineering it for higher mortality, something that has been done to the extreme already (with small pox).

As Frederick points out, 100% sterility would not be necessary. Think landmine (one person down, but the rest are hampered by it), and you get the idea.

An attack launched initially on countries/regions that frown on voluntary sterilization and have a strong cultural/religious feeling about high reproduction rates, would throw them into chaos the moment they have their first verifiable drop.

They would risk total anhiliation if they felt that their religion/culture was being threated (real or perceived) with extinction within a single generation, making them prone to execute unpredictable tactics. Think of baby raids on nearby populations.

CC
PS. Now that I'm finally home, I'm going to unwrap my copy of Children of Men and watch it.

"I don't believe viruses are very specific about the cells they attack."

Viruses are very specific about the cells they attack.

Cells have proteins on the outside of them that are determine by the cells function or vice versa, depending on how you look at it. Viruses capsids need to attach to something like this to inject their genetic material into the cell. So viruses will only be able to attach to cells that have that protein or a protein like it.

Some have more tolerance than others and I can't give you specific limits.

But they are pretty specific in this account.

I'm with Iain… wipe out the Chavs job sorted!

You could probably engineer the mumps virus to be much more effective in causing sterility. By altering it the right way you could also avoid the fact that some would have immunity to it.

Pictors is right – most viral infections are pretty specific as they occur occur via cell surface receptors, e.g. for HIV the initial infection occurs via the CD4 receptor and a chemokine co-receptor; there are people, for example, with variation in the co-receptor who just can't get HIV infection – just not many of them

Thing is, viruses tend to target cells that are plentiful and easy to reach – after all, their raison d'etre is to preserve their genetic material

Actually I believe the Russians in WW II used viruses instead of antibiotics to fight infections. I keep waiting for somebody to whip them out for antibiotic resistant staph infections.

The only problem with using virus on bacterial infections is you have to have the right virus for the job. Give the wrong virus and it simply will not help.

bacteriophage is the word I was looking for, than goodness for Google. :-)

cellsalive.com/phage.htm

LLC aka Ron

Mumps causes sterility (or has a chance to) when contracted in adulthood.

"By altering it the right way you could also avoid the fact that some would have immunity to it."

However, then you'd simply have people that are immune to the changes you made, simply by random chance. Immune systems and genetics are funny things. But as others have mentioned, 99% effective would be just as good from a practical standpoint.

@Cacique Caribe- ooh, baby raids, interesting socological reaction. I like it!

-Will

"@Cacique Caribe- ooh, baby raids, interesting socological reaction. I like it!"

Didn't some native populations (US and elsewhere) resort to that when their tribes began to disappear?

CC

Not so much looking to pick up some cheap real estate – just feeling misanthropic today.

I hate crowds and long lines… and litter… and traffic… and screaming children running about in public.

Fairbanks, Alaska is becoming too crowded for my liking – nearly 80,000 people in the borough!

And the borough is something like 7,400 square miles…

I think that mass sterility (say even 30-50% of the population) would be a nice, non-violent way to reduce the human impact on this world. Give me some peace and quiet, too, I should hope.

How many would you really have to sterilize to have a dramatic effect on a society in the long term? Even 20 or 30% could force a society to treat the unaffected as breeders.

Hand in hand with sterility, and perhaps even easier from a scientific standpoint, would be birth defect inducing viruses or viruses that increase infant mortality or labor induced death.

For that matter why does it have to be a disease? Imagine if standard chemical X used in all disposable diapers turns out to leave the children sterile in fifteen or twenty years.

"Even 20 or 30% could force a society to treat the unaffected as breeders."

I thought that we were already at 15% in some "developed" countries.

CC

Cacique: And look at all the trouble that is causing!

There's a Frank Herbert novel, called "The White Plague" IIRC, which was about this very idea. The sterility inflicted was reversible, by only by a very labor-intensive process which absolutely mandated the voluntary, committed efforts of two human beings, one being the pregnant woman, to accomplish. The idea was that it was now only possible to have a child if you really, really wanted one.

As to the title, a historical parallel: the Black Plague in history was responsible for wiping out about half the extant human population at the time. Among other things, some claim that the Black Plague was one of the forces which destroyed the feudal system and created an opening for a middle class.

Many problems facing our world, such as environmental damage, increasing scarcity of resources, starvation, the spreadof disease, water shortages, housing shortages, the devaluation of labor, etc., could be solved by reducing our population. However, the right to reproduce is possibly one of the most intrinsic rights of simply being a living organism. One stands on very treacherous moral grounds when advocating the elimination or sharp reduction of reproductive rights.

"Nature will always find a way."

One thing that has to be mentioned here is that science has brought us to the point where viruses can be created by hobbyists. A few years ago, a couple of guys created a Polio virus from off the shelf materials they had handy.

CC said: "Didn't some native populations (US and elsewhere) resort to that when their tribes began to disappear?"

Now that you mention it, I believe you are right. Hmmm, I'll have to do some reading.

-Will

"Nature will always find a way."

That is true- if we introduce mutated viruses to induce sterility we might find human genes mutating to find a way around it. Interesting question.

-Will

"Nature will always find a way."

Tell that to the 99.99% of all species that have already died out.

Ralph

That is true- if we introduce mutated viruses to induce sterility we might find human genes mutating to find a way around it. Interesting question.

Assuming the initial virus doesn't get everyone, the survivors are either immune or somehow weren't exposed. Immunity based on genetic factors would be passed along to some percentage of their children, and as long as it was passed along in enough people to avoid other concerns like inbreeding, the population would eventually be immune, and those few throwbacks would, if the virus stuck around, just contribute to the "background" infant death statistic.

No mutation necessary.

Dammit, but I want a healing factor and optic blasts!

"Tell that to the 99.99% of all species that have already died out."

The fact that the remaining .01% is still here means yes, nature always does find a way. ;)

-Will

Hmmm…come to think of it, we ARE trying to have another baby, and my mate is suspiciously NOT pregnant…coincidence? I THINK NOT!

Damon.

It could also be possible to create bio-genic weapons that only attack specific trace proteins only found in certain populations, i.e. a particular race or ethnicity. I recall an episode of Stargate that had this premise--a kind of "humane" genocide.

"One thing that has to be mentioned here is that science has brought us to the point where viruses can be created by hobbyists. A few years ago, a couple of guys created a Polio virus from off the shelf materials they had handy."

We do this all the time now. I made a reverse transcriptase rhino virus with some dried soap scum, spit out grape seeds and a box of nails.

We even managed to make a mouse one time. That was easy, you take a box of cereal and leave it in the garage. After a week or even a couple of days the cereal can turn into a mouse.

There was an issue of Captain America where the villianous geneticist Arnim Zola created a virus that attacked people with melanin in their skin cells – the darker your skin, the worse the symptoms.

Black people died from it, most Native American/Hispanic/Pacific islander folks were crippled from it, and white people weren't (for the most part) effective.

One chilling side-effect of the disease was that by the time you died from it, your skin was melanin-free. Zola said that he was doing the mongrel races a favor, by letting them die like white men.

That issue seriously creeped me out – sounded like an almost-plausible engineered disease, and a very plausible motive.

*brrr*

-Alex

you can sterilize an entire population buy introducing certain chemicles (will not name them) into thier inviorment this will keep it from spreading beyond the target population but will also increase the cancer rates considerably

There's a Frank Herbert novel, called "The White Plague" IIRC, which was about this very idea. The sterility inflicted was reversible, by only by a very labor-intensive process which absolutely mandated the voluntary, committed efforts of two human beings, one being the pregnant woman, to accomplish. The idea was that it was now only possible to have a child if you really, really wanted one.

Sounds like the situation today.

BooneC: And we've got four of them

About 90% of this has already been done – There is a treatment that causes the body to attack its own gametes, but it only lasts for a few years before a 'retreatment' is needed. It was developed from 'gene therapy' research into treating the symptoms of diseases like cystic fybrosis (sp?). It has already been used, at least experimentally, in vetinary medicine.

If we want to improve ourselves rather than wipe ourselves
out,why not aim for a treatment that delays puberty?

It wouldn't show up right away,wouldn't get people instantly
up in arms when it did and would postpone a lot of the problems that occur when the gonads mature before the brain
does.

Think of females not having periods until eighteen or older
with males having a similar delay.

Sure,there'd be less call for Clearasil and fad diets if
folks already had an education and jobs before their hormones kicked in…

Another idea:

Get rid of the himbos and Barbie-esque types instead of the
ugly folk.

Only the really intelligent folk will reproduce with people
who don't look airbrushed so the lumpen and airhead aristos
will die out.

The smart people can actually think of things to do for
their recreation and occupations other than sex so that'll
decrease the birthrate further.

That could result in families where the members even knew
each others' names.

Fewer people-and a higher percentage of gamers.

;)

P.S.

Terrain_Sherlock's asked about a SF story set in Ireland(?).

One man,a tank driver for the British Army,remains fertile.

He insists on droit de seigneur if the women have any hopes
of having children.

What is this story?

Found it..

Edward P. Hughes, Masters of the Fist (1989)
[Eleven stories] "all set in the invented village of Barley Cross, in Ireland after a holocaust which has rendered almost all men infertile."

Not much on the "how" it happened.. but very interesting sociology about "what do we do now..?"

Enjoy if you can find it..

There's work being done on an engineered bacteria that will trick pest animal's immune systems into attacking sex cells. Basically the bacteria have a similar protein to the cells to be targeted, so the immune system attacks both.

Imagine if that bacteria decided to jump species . . .

CC

I think the idea is you'd still need to "prime" the bacteria with some human proteins… but yes.