Hej guys!
Today I found something that will blow your mind! Believe me. We're still with Biological Warfare and all, but this time I'll get a little bit more into the dark and creepy stuff that's possible - or will be in the very near future. I will tell you something about personalised bioweapons.
I apologise in advance should anything be a little unclear - I tried my very best to understand the whole article, but it was really long (9 pages in font size 9) and I was only able to sum it up in a logical way by printing it out, making notes and highlighting things. Even though it's generally not that hard to understand it's complicated by its length and the fact that the author is kind of jumping around from explanation to argument back to explanation on to scenario etc. So, should anything remain senseless or illogical at the end, don't hesitate to ask me - unless you're willing to read the
article yourself. ;)
So, where do I begin? Right, maybe with a little background information - once again. As we all know technology is gradually becoming more and more sophisticated and cheaper. This phenomenon, originating from information technology, is called "
Moore's Law" and can be applied to numerous industries and technologies. The basic idea was that the transistors on an integrated circuit will double in 24 months thanks to the exponential growth rate at which technology is advancing.
For us, with regard to BW, this means that, even though many of the things I will mention below are still coulds and woulds today, they will soon be reality.
What makes specialists (and me, after reading this article) so sure about this? For one thing the fact that most of the technologies needed are already available and being used by numerous organisations, and they become cheaper and more powerful every day. In the field of cancer treatment scientists work with DNA manipulation. Because of genetics we know that each cancer is unique and thus needs personalised treatment - which paves the way for personalised medicine. Chemotherapy might no longer be necessary in the future when medicine has advanced enough to design individual treatment for specific cancer cells in a specific person. While todays chemotherapy always evokes collateral damage this targeted treatment would only focus on hazardous cells and would not attack the surrounding ones. In Finland, already 300 patients received personalised medicine similar to this one.
This is where dual-use enters the game. This new technology paves the way for better treatment and new cures, but it also paves the way for personalised bioweapons. From what I've learned so far I think I can say that, as a general rule, if something has a good use it can also be abused for malevolent intents. As it is possible to aim medicine to special cells or DNA, why should it not be possible to aim viruses at one specific person? They can already target a certain ethnic group (I will go into detail with this in my next post), so I don't think that the step to targeting a single person is too big.
Now that it's possible to decode DNA and genes the new goal is to find a way to write DNA. Scientists can easily decode the human genome that consists of the considerable amount of 3 billion base pairs today, and what used to cost them up to $300 million is now less than $1,000. In addition, they have managed to transform the four bases (Adenine, Cytosine, Guanine, Thymine) that make up our DNA sequences into binary code, so computers can help. Biology has become an information-based science, bioscience, and synthetic biology moved from the molecular to the digital. With the press of a button scientists can now manipulate genetic information, cut and paste chunks of it and once they are happy with their new DNA a DNA print shop turns their idea into biology. The required knowledge is easily available too, for example via online courses or how-to videos on the Internet.
In 2010 the first digital blueprint was inserted into a host bacterial cell (emptied of its own DNA). The attempt to create a living cell from scratch actually worked, the cell started to metabolise, grow and divide - only using the inserted DNA. This can be highly usable in medicine, as this technique can be used to generate all kinds of other cell types the body might need to recover from a severe illness. These procedures can, however, be applied to many more fields. By stitching together different genes scientists created a special form of yeast that manufactures a rare ingredient of an anti-malaria drug. They also work on a special form of algae that will turn carbon dioxide into biofuel and flu vaccinations that can be produced in a few hours instead of six months.
It could be possible, in the future, to create new organisms and species unknown yet. As they do not develop naturally they can be designed to be very robust and maybe we could even generate life forms that can live in outer space.
From all these maybe infinite possibilities emerge, once again, numerous problems and questions. How shall this be controlled? How can it be misused? What about ethics?
In 2011 US Secretary Clinton said that, "unfortunately the ability of terrorists and other non-state actors to develop and use these weapons is growing".
The simple fact that all this is now feasible implies risks over risks. What if an accidents happens? What if two normally harmless life forms cross with each other and become a real threat? What if terrorists use this new knowledge to create dangerous pathogens? Especially viruses are rather easy to engineer. Different states and terrorist groups have for a long time now dedicated money, time and effort to biological research of whatever kind.
To generate a personalised bioweapon the creator needs:
- Live cells from the target: they need to be collected and grown - easily feasibly with our technology.
- When there are enough cells a detailed molecular profile (blueprint) needs to be generated - yep, possible.
- Once this is done the creator can start to design, build and test a pathogen that targets the desired cells - more complicated, but still possible.
Neither is this easy, nor is the required equipment cheap or available in the shop next door. Still, if you buy the gadgets on eBay you can have them for $10,000 - and you can still outsource step one and two if you can't do it yourself. Step three could be a little difficult to outsource as people might ask questions.
You may think that even getting the DNA is rather hard, but honestly, it is not. A genetic blueprint can be generated from the information of one single cell - and we all spread millions of our dead cells literally everywhere on a daily basis. Whenever we touch something we give away a few cells in which the DNA is intact. As we learned above, this DNA can be implemented into a host cell and then be used for the creation of a personalised bioweapon. However, it's not only the DNA we loose daily that can be dangerous. DNA can survive millennia without being damaged at all, so every paper you touched in school e.g. still contains some of your cells.
So, now you'd might ask "Okay, it's possible, but what would I need this for?"
First of all, criminals are more likely to aim for a personal targeted weapon than a weapon of mass destruction - after all one murder puts less pressure on your conscience than mass slaughter and it's less likely to be caught if the attack appears a normal disease.
Secondly, bioweapons are usually tasteless, odourless, easily aerolized and thus almost impossible to detect. Literally anybody can be attacked and it's very likeable that the attack goes unrecognised because it might be taken as a natural disease or death. These new possibilities are not only interesting for terrorists or criminals. Big companies, CEOs, corrupt politicians - they all could use them for attaining their own aims.
Just imagine a few scenarios:
- It's easy to gain business advantage by inducing extreme paranoia in the CEO of any big company.
- The brain could be attacked in a way that's causing for example schizophrenia, paranoia, bipolar disorders or Alzheimer.
- Evidence for an affair a politician actually never had can be fabricated using his DNA.
- Evidence for an illness a person does not have can question his ability to lead a country or a company.
- In the future DNA could even be generated to sperm and then be used to fertilize eggs - which could be dangerous for politicians as people could question their integrity if there suddenly was an illegitimate child.
- Viruses could be generated to target for example retina cells and cause blindness, certain brain cells and cause loss of memory, or even worse, if they targeted cells of vital organs the attack would result in death.
Instead of targeting your virus only on cancer cells you could target it on all kinds of cells and induce all kinds of diseases. All these possibilities create a certain fear. Due to the fact that it's hardly possible to NOT spread our DNA, it is hardly possible to prevent these potential threats. In the future terrorists (or even governments) might hold DNA hostage and blackmail leaders and politicians into being puppets.
Now the big question is how to defend against something that does not yet exist? This problem is aggravated by the rather new idea of crowdsourcing. In case you don't know what that means, it's a practice of, when you're facing a problem and don't know how to solve it, publishing your problem and let other people (or groups) solve it. After all, 100 people know more than 10. This can (or could in the future) happen on the Internet, but there are already similar forms of crowdsourcing happening today - not with the the aim to solve a specific problem, but to support creativity and interest in science. The MIT, for instance, annually launches the
iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine competition) in which teams of high school students can build simple biological system from standardized, interchangeable chunks. What started as a nice challenge now pushes technical as well as creative barriers and many of the produced organisms have real-world applications.
Crowdsourcing embodies many advantages and helps to make progress in science even more rapid, but it also complicates the task of defending against these new - possibly dangerous - inventions.
There is no international organisation in charge yet. As everything is so new and unknown no one knows how to deal with the possible threats. Even though there is now, at least in the US, an organisation that evaluates research for its potential of dual-use. Personally, I think that almost every research can be misused in one or another way, therefore restricting all research with such potential does not seem the right way of surveillance.
As you can see, MUCH is feasible already today. Considering the rapid progress it's only a question of time until BW becomes more sophisticated, easier attainable, far cheaper and thus far more dangerous. The future of warfare is very likely to lie solely in Biological Warfare.
Tp illustrate the potential threat a possible scenario the author of this article describes proceeds as follows:
Companies see the potential of crowdsourcing and let the public design T-shirts, write encyclopedias (Wikipedia), then also develop self-driving cars and in the end even design biological agents. People could upload information about their particular disease and virologists (those dealing with viruses and diseases) design personalised cure for them. What started off with only cancer research went on to vaccination and all other kinds of medicine. Yet there was no international body to watch what was going on. One person then posts a challenge on a viral-design site, and nobody notices anything special. People got to work and within 12 hours one young man submitted the perfect solution. His design was passed on and turned into actual genetic material. Only three days later a young girl at a university receives a package with some party drug she ordered online - only that the package didn't contain her drug but viral pills. She used it and got a cold, but nothing seemed abnormal and the flu spreads over the campus. A few days later the president of the US holds a speech at this very university - and of course catches the flu as well. Only that it wasn't just normal flu. It was a highly developed virus that - when meeting the right DNA sequence triggers a dangerous and fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that results in memory loss and eventually death. Unfortunately the president of the US was the only person in the world with this particular DNA sequence.
Scenarios like this might be reality soon, and even if someone would realize that this was no normal death but an attack the culprit may never be taken because it's easy to stay anonymous on the Internet.
Just the thought that our future might look like this really frightens me. I'm coming to think that not all progress is a blessing because it's the very nature of humans to abuse it. In a few years a person who holds the DNA of the world leaders would rule the world. He could blackmail them into doing literally everything he wants. People will no longer be free in their decisions. I am very sure that this knowledge would not only be used by people aiming for much power but also on a much smaller scale so that in the end it's not only the "important" people who will be bullied but everyone else as well.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/hacking-the-presidents-dna/309147/?single_page=true
