Profile of Eckard Wimmer

Abstract

The finding caused an uproar. Researchers at Stony Brook University in New York had engineered poliovirus in a test tube (1). The discovery, led by Eckard Wimmer, elected in 2012 to the National Academy of Sciences, dispelled the belief that viruses require a live host to grow and spread. Eckard Wimmer. The thought of synthetic viruses terrified an American public still reeling from 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks. What if the technology to engineer viruses wound up in the hands of bioterrorists? However, today, just a decade later, it is widely accepted that the ability to engineer viruses also allows researchers to develop viruses that work as synthetic vaccines, to carry genetic material into a cell for use in gene therapies, or to preferentially attack cancer cells (2). Wimmer says his motivations for engineering polio were strictly scientific. Wimmer had solved the code—or genome sequence—for polio in 1981, but his goal, he says, was “to boot the synthesized genome for it to become a virus.” The boot worked. Few realized that Wimmer had done something extraordinary for science and society. Viruses, Wimmer and others have long believed, hold a unique place in biology: Outside the body, they behave like chemicals, but, once inside, they propagate in true Darwinian fashion. “Viruses are chemicals with a life cycle,” Wimmer says. “Once they get into living cells, they begin to replicate, following the laws of heredity and genetic variation.” Put another way, viruses hover on the boundary between life and nonlife. Wimmer’s Inaugural Article brings him one step closer to pinning down the inner workings of poliovirus (3). In this case, Song et al. looked for the parts of the polio genome that make it so deadly—that is, the parts of the code that allow the virus to replicate and kill …