Russian researchers are hoping to identify the ice age viruses, also named paleo viruses or zombie viruses, and revive them. The project is being carried out by Vector or Russia’s State Research Centre of Virology and Biotechnology and according to Daily Mail, it aims to extract cellular material that contains viruses that killed the giant beasts and perform experiments on them in a lab.
Source- WION
However, experts have raised concerns over the research, describing it as risky and confessing to a lack of confidence in the research facility. International experts, including Jean-Michel Claverie, are worried about the impact of the new experiments. Vector currently hosts 59 maximum security biolabs around the world.
There is concern that given the fact that the human bodies of today are strangers to these prehistoric ‘paleo viruses’ and if they were to jump the species barrier, the coronavirus pandemic may end up looking like the less deadly outbreak.
Jean-Michel Claverie, a professor of microbiology at the University of Aix-Marseille in France said that the Russian research “is terrible. I’m totally against it”. He added that it “is very, very risky. Our immune systems have never encountered these types of viruses. Some of them could be 200,000 or even 400,000 years old. But ancient viruses that infected animals or humans could still be infectious.”
During the Soviet era in 1979, one of Vector’s military research facilities accidentally released spores of anthrax bacteria in the city of Sverdlovsk. The deadly outbreak killed at least 66 people, although Soviet authorities denied for years that such an incident had taken place and blamed the deaths on the consumption of tainted meat.
