remains much scientists don’t yet understand about smallpox. In recent years, scientists have started to
decipher the strategies smallpox uses to fight the immune system. They have discovered an arsenal of
weapons the virus deploys. Smallpox proteins can jam the signals the immune cells pass to each other
to mobilize an attack, for example. Scientists have yet to figure out why smallpox is so deadly. Some
researchers argue that the virus causes the immune system to attack a victim’s own body, rather than
the virus. But that’s just a hypothesis still to be tested. Solving mysteries like these could conceivably
lead to better vaccines, and even to antiviral drugs that might be effective against smallpox infections
or other dangerous viruses that are equally deadly to humans.
In 2010, the WHO reopened the debate over whether to finally destroy the two remaining officially
declared stocks smallpox in Russia and the United States. But now the debate has taken a twist that
previous generations of smallpox fighters could never have dreamed of. Today scientists know the
full genetic sequence of the smallpox virus. And they have the technology necessary to synthesize the
smallpox genome from scratch. Synthesizing viruses is not the stuff of science fiction; scientists have
already manufactured the genetic material of other viruses, like polio and the deadly 1918 influenza,
and have used it to generate full-blown viruses.
There’s no evidence that anyone has tried to resurrect smallpox in the same way, but, then again,
there’s no evidence that it would be impossible to do so. After thirty-five hundred years of suffering
and puzzling over smallpox, we have finally figured it out. And yet, by understanding smallpox, we
have ensured that it can never be utterly eradicated as a threat to humans. Our knowledge gives the
virus its own kind of immortality.