Scientists Fear Miracle of Biotech Could Also Breed a Monster
Posted on 10/23/2001 12:05:50 PM PDT by Thud
Scientists Fear Miracle of Biotech Could Also Breed a Monster
PARIS -- The events of the past six weeks have led some biologists to fear that mankind's fast-growing store of genetic knowledge may be less of a treasure chest than a Pandora's box.
By tweaking bacterial and viral DNA, a gene terrorist could create an agent far more devastating than the bugs featuring in the post-September 11 anthrax attacks.
Among the nightmares: antibiotic-resistant strains of plague, tuberculosis and intestinal germs; a genetically-modified killer flu; and pathogen "cocktails," such as a mixture of smallpox and Ebola.
"In light of the September 11 tragedy, we can no longer afford to be complacent about the possibility of biological terrorism," warns a commentary published next month in the specialist journal Nature Genetics.
"The revolution in biology could be misused in offensive biological weapons programs, directed against human beings and their staple crops and livestock."
The 20th century saw seven countries by known count -- Britain, France, Germany, Iraq, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States -- embark on programs to identify, manufacture and weaponize killer agents.
But experts worry the next generation of these weapons will exploit knowledge about the genome, with calamitous effect.
A couple of years from now, there may be as many as 70 pathogens whose genetic code has been cracked. The genome of cholera, leprosy, the plague and tuberculosis are already in the public domain, as is a food-poisoning bug, Staphylococcus aureus, that is becoming resistant to antibiotics.
DNA sequencing aims to encourage research into new drugs that prevent, block or reverse those diseases -- potentially, the greatest leap forward in medical history.
But there is also fear that a bioterrorist with an advanced college degree, lots of money and a good laboratory could use this readily-available data, inserting or swapping genes in bacteria and viruses to create new, horrifyingly virulent agents.
These fears pre-date the current anthrax alert.
"Progress in biomedical science inevitably has a dark side, and potentiates the development of an entirely new class of weapons of mass destruction: genetically engineered pathogens," a US scientific thinktank, the JASON Group, warned in the late 1990s.
These arms pose "extraordinary challenges for detection, mitigation and remediation."
There is no known risk of any such attack at present.
But the potential for one certainly exists. Indeed, there are at least two documented cases in which biologists have accidentally created a doomsday bug.
One was a strain of the common intestinal bug Escherichia coli that was 32,000 times more resistant to the antibiotic cefotaxime than conventional strains.
The superbug's creator was Willem Stemmer, chief scientist with Maxygen, a California pharmaceutical research firm, who was exploring the function of resistance genes in bacteria.
He destroyed his invention in response to an appeal by the American Society for Microbiology.
In a case published last January, a pair of Australian scientists, Ron Jackson and Ian Ramshaw, unwitting created a vicious strain of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox, among laboratory mice.
They, too, destroyed the virus and then went public with their findings to draw attention to the potential abuse of biotechnology.
If a new infectious weapon were unleashed, little could be done other than identify new cases and isolate them, itself a huge task in today's open, mobile society.
Claire Fraser, who works at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) in Rockville, Maryland, and Malcolm Dando, a peace studies expert at Britain's Bradford University, say in the Nature Genetics commentary that the picture is not entirely gloomy.
"The same advances in microbial genomics that could be used to produce bioweapons can also be used to set up countermeasures against them," they say.
One early advance could be a DNA chip capable of spotting any biowarfare agents, even if they contained genes slotted in from other species, thus providing early warning of an attack.
And fast-growing knowledge about the genome and cell functions could help tailor new vaccines and antibiotics, although such drugs typically need several years of safety testing before being authorized for public use.
International cooperation and ethics training of civilian biologists are vital for strengthening the safeguards against bioterrorism, some say.
Efforts to build a tough verification protocol to the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BTWC) have been blocked for years -- ironically, by the United States, which said the secrets of its pharmaceutical industry could be at risk from intrusion. Negotiations resume in Geneva in November.
As for action by scientists themselves, some voices are calling for tougher vetting of research proposals and a greater effort to train students about potential dangers arising from civilian lab work.
"It's time for biologists to begin asking what means we have to keep the technology from being used in subverted ways," says Harvard University molecular biologist Matthew Meselson.
We face a worst case scenario with things which make smallpox seem harmless, perhaps no matter what we do. It may be that all we can do is postpone the date someone crazier than OBL uses something like this.
1)We become serious, and aboslutely merciless in waging this so-called war against state-sponsored terrorism.
2)The world's sufficiently weaponeered nations go thermonuclear and decidedly thin-out the global human population.
3)We all lie down, and just wait to be killed.
I can't really envision any other scenario.
There's nothing new here. Any powerful technology can be abused. The big danger is that fear of biotechnology might cause us to scale back research into biotechnology, which is the very thing we need to defend us against what others might do. The key to survival is to get smarter at a rate that is faster than that of our enemies. (I'm taking it as a given that we will continue to hunt down and kill those who would do us harm, before it ever comes to all-out biowar.)
The government's on-going mistakes about anthrax indicate that it won't learn how to to things right until we suffer the first mass epidemic. Which we might not survive as a country if it is a bioengineered hellbug.
Check out _The Strategy of Technology_ by Possony, Pournelle & Kane at:
http://www.jerrypournelle.com/slowchange/Strat.html
plus _In Defense of Naval Supremacy_ by Jon Sumida, available from Amazon.com, for examples of similar clueless and not-invented-here behavior. Governments have a long track record of screwing up in such things.
Scientists Fear Miracle of Biotech Could Also Breed a Monster
Yes, there is something new here, but it's tricky to see.
Let me digress a moment to make a point. SciFi writers know there can't be _real_ giant bugs for many reasons, but one such reason is usually called the "inverse-square" law. As a given material gets larger in size, it doesn't get proportionally stronger. So, while an "normal" size ant's legs would support it, a giant ant would crack under its own weight.
The point of that digression is that scale matters.
When people lived in dried grass huts, the hip technology was fire and fire could destroy the city. BUT people had the option of moving to a different veldt and starting again...
When people lived in castles, the hip technology included things like seige weapons and catalpults which could destroy a castle BUT, again, people had the option of moving to a different keep and starting again...
You get the idea. As the civilization technologies have grown, the "let's destroy civilization" technologies have kept pace. BUT there was always this kind of "escape" clause whereby people could just live somewhere else...
But biology-based weapons, mutated germs and such, genetically engineered germs and such, take away that escape clause. Weather will carry them everywhere. There will be nowhere else for survivors to go live.
As the size of the weapons have shrunk, the size of the "battlefield" has expanded. It now encompasses the entire Earth. As the scale of the "battle" has changed, the characteristics of the battle have changed radically. And since we don't have thriving colonies at the Lagrange points or anywhere else, when this battlefield is laid waste, it will be game over.
Mark W.
The answer does not lie in technology but in morality. Initiative belongs to the attacker.
It's Mothra, you heathen! :-)
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