Researchers at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., began the first open-air test of a genetically engineered virus in July. They sprayed the virus, one of a family of insect parasites called baculoviruses, on a cabbage field at Cornell’s experimental station in Geneva, N.Y., in an attempt to protect the plants from the cabbage looper caterpillar.
The researchers hope eventually to make a more potent form of the virus that will kill the caterpillars quickly, but they fear that such a potent virus could be harmful to the environment. As a first step, therefore, molecular biologist H. Alan Wood and colleagues removed from the virus a gene responsible for producing a protein that prevents the virus from being damaged by sunlight and weather. In the absence of the gene, Wood said, the virus would die out over a period of about two years. If the baculovirus does, in fact, die out, scientists will then assume that they can safely engineer it to make it more potent.
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