THE DREADFUL prospect of bioterrorism is so alarming some virologists that they are calling for an urgent international effort to catalogue all known human viruses and develop antivirals quickly.

Dr Norman Anderson, the founder of the non-profit organisation Viral Defence Foundation, believes that viruses as weapons could attract mass killers because there are no broad-spectrum antivirals available.

He argues in The Scientist that a single federal agency should take over responsibility for biodefence, which is currently being handled by 12 American organisations. The effort would be modelled on the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons.

Its objectives would be: to produce the human “virome”, a complete list of all human viruses; to identify new viruses within days; to produce and test vaccines continually against every known vaccine; and to produce large amounts of vaccines quickly.

Such a project, Anderson says, “could provide the only defence available in a true pandemic or viroterrorist attack, reducing the detection and response times to weeks, instead of years”.

• ANY HOPE of understanding the twisted logic that motivates murder in the name of religious or political beliefs has not apparently been helped by the theories of David Buss, the author of The Murderer Next Door, billed as the ultimate explanation of why people kill. Buss, the Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas, has already attracted a hurricane of criticism for his assertion that men are hard-wired to kill.

  He maintains that evolution favoured those with “killing” genes because they would be more likely to dispatch rival suitors and enhance their status with a potential mate. Today’s crimes of passions, he says, are evidence that this dormant homicidal circuit can be triggered when mating opportunities are threatened.

  Buss insists that evolutionary explanations for murder are not equivalent to excusing it. Still, his theories have been dismissed as “bullshit” (by the investigative psychologist David Canter, at Liverpool University) and “tiresome” (Steven Rose, the director of the brain and behaviour group at the Open University).

  It is hard to see the room left in Buss’s theory for female murderers, who make up a sizeable minority of this ghastly elite. It is also a challenge to understand how wife-killing could be viewed as a winning reproductive strategy, since a dead ex may deter future partners.

• CALLING ALL red-blooded men: do you prefer real or fake?

No, I’m not talking about those. I am, of course, referring to the crimson fluid flowing through your veins. The European Union is funding a project to develop blood substitutes that would ultimately do away with the need for donated human blood in transfusions.

Donated blood suffers from several obvious drawbacks: contaminated blood can transmit HIV, hepatitis viruses and, rarely, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease (CJD). It has a shelf life of little over a month, leading to both wastage and shortages. Screening and refrigerated storage is expensive, rendering it an unaffordable luxury for poor countries. It must be matched to the recipient — a transfusion of the wrong blood type can be fatal. People with rare blood groups are hard to treat.

Scientists have long sought to manufacture artificial blood, or, at least, the bits in it most needed in medicine. Haemoglobin, the molecule that does the oxygenating, is the prime target, although the iron, coagulants and antibodies found in whole blood are also separated out and used.

Because haemoglobin is ferried around in red blood cells there is no point isolating it and injecting it directly; it would exit immediately via the kidneys without circulating.

The European project, led by Dr Kenneth Lowe at Nottingham University, aims to attach a genetically altered form of haemoglobin to large artificial molecules. The liquid would not only circulate around the body delivering oxygen, but also fill emptied blood vessels to prevent them collapsing.

If such a liquid could be mass-produced cheaply and stored without refrigeration it would be invaluable on the battlefield or in disaster areas, where it could be used for the treatment of casualties.

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