This is kind of like Jurassic Park, only with virii instead of dinosaurs. There are definitely some "What if?" questions circulating around my head right now. For instance, even though this virus may be 1,000 times less infectious than HIV, how infectious would this virus be if it got out of the labs? Certainly, it was infectious enough to have left traces of itself in our genome — despite being "extinct" for thousands of years.
The ancestral virus was able to copy itself and manufacture new virus particles, they found. And these particles could infect fresh cells and copy and paste its genes into these cells' genome.
The study suggests that cells acquired numerous copies of this ancestral retrovirus by the same cyclical process: the retrovirus manufactured new particles that escaped one cell and infected eggs and sperm again and again. This may have still been happening just a few hundred thousand years ago.
Yet there is an obvious benefit towards resurrecting this virus. It may shed light on cancer and how to treat it. If we can understand how the DNA this virus contributed to our genome contributes to cancer, some forms of cancer may soon become treatable. Seeing how one out of every seven people die from cancer, this could be a boon to medical science.
Still, what a bet to make. Create the possibility an obsolete virus could be released out of the lab. Or refuse to research a cancer-causing factor due to the chance the virus could expose itself to the public. For now, I think I'll take the first option.
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