Word: cowpox
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Essex studies the proteins which make up the virus and tries to determine which "structural parts of the virus are biologically significant." From his studies of HTLV-III relatives, "We hope to find a weakened form of the virus. The analogy is to smallpox and cowpox. Cowpox is harmless, but [exposure to it] is protective against smallpox," Essex says...
...virology laboratory of Bretonneau Hospital in Tours, "we must wait for more time to pass to be certain." Barin and Essex are hopeful that the new virus could serve as a natural vaccine, protecting those it infects against the more harmful AIDS virus, much as people infected with cowpox virus are protected against smallpox. Studies of old blood samples indicate that the virus has been present in Senegal for at least ten years. Significantly, no cases of AIDS have been reported in the country, though the disease is rampant in central Africa...
...starting point for the dramatic research is the oldest vaccine on earth: a smallpox prophylactic made from a live cowpox virus called vaccinia. It was developed two centuries ago by Edward Jenner, a British physician who had observed that milkmaids exposed to cowpox were immune to smallpox. Because vaccinia is an unusually large virus and because it has been familiar to scientists for so long, it was an ideal subject for genetic tinkering...
What Paoletti and his colleague, Virologist Dennis Panicali, set out to do was to alter the genetic material, or DNA, of cowpox virus by inserting a gene from another virus-herpes, hepatitis B or influenza (see diagram). The goal of these microscopic manipulations is to develop a vaccine that will fool the immune system and make it swing into action. A smallpox preventive that expresses a herpes trait, for instance, will provoke the body into creating antibodies against herpes. The person is then protectively armed against an actual attack of the disease...
...Despite the fact that British Physician Edward Jenner showed in 1796 that the disease could be prevented by inoculation with cowpox serum...