Was the motivation behind this work the threat of the smallpox virus as a bioweapon?
About five, six years ago, after 9/11, the US government and NIH decided they wanted to investigate certain specific pathogens that were particularly worrisome for biodefense purposes. They wanted to build up our understanding of some key pathogens, [including] smallpox and monkeypox viruses. The reason for that is smallpox is probably one of the most feared pathogens in history, yet we understand almost nothing about what it does or how it causes disease. And we have no drugs to treat it. NIH made the decision to fund a number of rather large projects to different bidders … and the one I was involved in was a project that was given to … Myriad Genetics. … The reason they got a project to study a number of different pathogens, including smallpox, was they had a large army of robots that could do … yeast two-hybrid screening. The project I was involved in and that this paper came from was a study that Myriad did looking at proteins that are made by smallpox virus and asking which of tho
