It was just a matter of time.

The polio virus has been constructed from scratch in the laboratory, using instructions off the Internet. There's no reason that the same couldn't be done with smallpox. Fortunately, the people who would want to do so are probably still incompetent to, but we can't count on this to be true forever.

This is also a step on the way to building true artificial lifeforms.

Actually, Rand, there are a couple of reasons why it is MUCH harder to do w/ something like smallpox. I should blog this, but briefly, smallpox has a much bigger genome, and is therefore harder (but certainly not impossible) to synthesize. It is also physically bigger, which means that protein and lipid constituents, which also need to be made, are more difficult. This can be gotten around by injecting the DNA itself into a host cell, but that has a much lower frequency of success (to be technical, that is transfection, rather than transduction). Anyway, the details are not that relevant, and the point that this proves in principle that biowarfare virions could be made from scratch is still entirely valid, and frightening. I just wanted to reassure you that Smallpox is a very significant challenge compared to Polio.
Incidentally, although this is a recent scientific accomplishment, the idea is not new, and microbiologists in particular have been worrying about it for some time. It does require roughly the same level of biological sophistication, technology and skill as "conventional" biowarfare programs, so it is not really a different problem, just one additional technique to be aware of.

I didn't intend to imply that smallpox was a piece of cake--just that there's now an existence proof of virus design and construction, so that the ability to do smallpox will come along sometime. Despite the fact that we knew that we could do it in theory, there's a psychological effect of actually doing it.

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