I am very skeptical about the pronouncement this week that a group of scientists plan to engineer cells to resist virus infection.
The initiative is called Genome-Project-write (GP-write) and is composed of an international group of collaborators with the broader goal of designing and assembling a synthetic human genome. The first goal of this consortium, reported in Science (“Genome writing project aims to rally scientists around virus-proofing cellsâ€), Time (“Scientists announce plan to create virus-proof cellsâ€) and many other news sources, is to create human cells that cannot be infected with all known viruses.
Could such virus-proof cells be made, and what would they be used for?