Viruses rewritten

New method could find vaccinations by creating wimpy versions of real viruses

A gene by any other name is not quite the same, and scientists could exploit that fact to develop new vaccines for viral diseases, research suggests.

By “misspelling” the genetic code of the virus that causes polio so that the virus still reproduced but did so a thousand times slower than normal, researchers created a weakened version of the virus that trained mice’s immune systems to fight off the real one.