Smith and his colleagues accordingly inoculated some rabbits with the recombinant and measured the amount of antibody the animals produced.
This proved to be far in excess of the minimum required for immunity, and although the researchers cannot be certain of directly comparable results in man and the prospects seem reasonably good.
The hope cherished by the NIH team is that recombinant vaccinia viruses may be used to combat hepatitis B virus in Africa and Asia according to exactly the same strategy that succeeded so brilliantly with smallpox. But there are two snags.
First, vaccinia itself is not without its dangers: vaccination against smallpox carries a risk of encephalitis serious enough to have prohibited its use in countries where smallpox was not endemic well before the success of the eradication campaign.
That means the recombinant virus would never be used in Europe and North America.
In Asia and Africa however, Smith argues and the benefits would far outweigh the risks ” as they did with smallpox.
The other snag, ironically, arises from the very success of the smallpox vaccination campaign ” because, as a result, most of the population of the Third World is already immune to vaccinia and wouldn’t allow it to flourish long enough to produce the hepatitis antigen. TECHNOLOGY
Happy days for software pirates
OVER the past two months, an electronic device called the 810 enhancement has been arriving in Britain from the US.
The American company that makes the 810, Happy Computing of California, calls it the “Happy Chip”.
But the name raises no smiles among computer manufacturers and software houses: Happy Chip is a tool for copying programs for Atari home computers.
Although it has innocent uses, devices like Happy Chip enable pirates to steal programs worth millions of pounds. Software companies are reluctant to say how much piracy costs them.
Psion Software, which produces material for Sinclair home computers, puts the figure at £29 million a year ” 30 per cent of its turnover. The pirates are even less keen to say how much they make.
The authorities have uncovered large-scale illicit operations in the US (a software company called Micro-Pro International won $250000 damages from one pirate) but no one has yet been prosecuted in Britain.
This is partly because piracy in Britain is more a game for enthusiasts than a serious business.
Operations centre around computer clubs and groups of enthusiasts who cannot resist the challenge of copying something designed to be uncopiable (see Box).
The pirates play an intricate and expensive cat-and-mouse game with computer firms.
As the pirates crack the latest “protection programming”, or copyguarding and the software writers devise new methods that are harder to crack. In Britain and the hobby is growing.
Most groups of pirate enthusiasts number around 10, but New Scientist has heard of a group of 60 people swopping bootleg software.
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