Unregulated Biotechnology--
Terrorism's New Tool?

The Ottawa Citizen
October 27, 2001

The biotech nightmare: The technology that has been hailed for its unlimited
healing potential is mutating into the 'most chilling threat of the 21st
century.' Ian MacLeod reports.

By: Ian MacLeod

In his very first prime-time television address, U.S. President George W.
Bush talked about the "great promise" of biotechnology.

"I'm a strong supporter of science and technology, and believe they have
the potential for incredible good," he told his nation the night of Aug. 9, in
announcing limited federal funding for stem cell research.

On Sept. 11, he delivered his second prime-time address, about an act of
incredible evil. Ever since, the great promise of biotechnology has been
eclipsed by the looming peril of bioterrorism.

Many North Americans are realizing for the first time that a technology
capable of tremendous healing and hope can also be used for unthinkable
villainy. In the hands of a Dr. Frankenstein, we are learning, the life
sciences can actually kill us. Biotechnology already has its controversies.
There are concerns and even alarm about genetically engineered food crops,
gene patents, reproductive technologies and stem cell research, among
others.

While there are religious and ethical objections, those debates are largely
about the sensible use of biotechnology: how to govern it, limit mistakes
and miscalculations and make it safe to practise and for consumers to use.
But the anthrax deaths and threats in the United States have heightened
public awareness about an issue that government, military and scientific
people have worried about for years: Biotechnology is vulnerable to being
exploited for patently evil purposes, too.

Now the dark side of the biotech revolution appears to dawning, an age in
which all sorts of living organisms will be vulnerable to genetic
manipulation and conversion into silent offensive weapons. Lethal viruses
tailored to be as communicable as the measles, germs that can exchange or
combine pathogenic properties.

Indeed, turning new technologies into weapons is a very old story.
- - -
In the Stone Age, prehistoric men fixed stone heads to shafts and created
axes, and later developed spears and bows and arrows. The smelting of
iron led to iron-tipped plowshares as well as high-quality knives and sword
blades. The invention of the blast furnace led to the cast iron cannon.
Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel amassed a fortune selling his creation,
dynamite, to construction and mining companies and to the military.
The invention of metal alloys that can withstand high temperatures led to
the military use of the gas turbine engine, which led to the jet engine,
which led to the modern combat fighter jet.

The 1945 atomic bomb blast gave birth to the nuclear power industry and
fears of nuclear terrorism. Rocket science led to nuclear-tipped
intercontinental ballistic missiles, which led to the doctrine of mutually
assured destruction.

Yet there is one significant difference between bioweapons and spears,
swords and nuclear bombs. They can all injure and kill, but biotechnology
has the added malignant potential to modify and manipulate the essential
ingredients and processes of all life on the planet.

Most people have never really had to consider this dark side of the biotech
revolution. And it is easy to see why.

Advances in biotechnology, from medical therapies to the mapping of the
human genome, have become so common in recent years that even daily
newspapers haven't been able to keep up with the dizzying pace of "miracle"
discoveries.

Now, suddenly, the promise of science is being pushed aside by fears about
the misuse and exploitation of science, of terrorists in lab coats
unleashing horrible germs and of suspicious letters in mail boxes.
We're being reminded that a civilization rooted in scientific and
technological achievement is vulnerable to scientific corruption.

"This is an inescapably tragic feature of our humanity, that our science and
technology are the glory of our civilization but at the same time they're a
threat," says professor Arthur Schafer, director of the Centre for
Professional and Applied Ethics at the University of Manitoba.
"I don't think there's any way of getting away from this."

Some experts, such as Dr. Alan Bernstein, president of the Canadian
Institutes of Health and a specialist in molecular and medical genetics, are
"not sure that the public has yet made the connection between biotech and
the anthrax stuff, but certainly with biological agents."

An analysis in the respected journal Nature Genetics this week should remove
any doubt about the intimate relationship between biotechnology and
bioterrorism.

"The threat of biological warfare and terrorism, though limited today, is
real, and the genomics revolution has the potential to have major impacts on
this most chilling threat during the 21st century," warns the article by
U.S. geneticist Clair Fraser and Malcolm R. Dando, a British biologist and
scholar on international security issues.

They talk of "stealth" viruses, introduced covertly into the genomes of a
given population and triggered later by a terrorist's signal, and of
"designer" diseases, such as one that causes healthy cells to suddenly die.
"To ensure that the benign potential of genomics is realized," the authors
advise biologists "to overcome their reluctance to discuss the implications
of their work in the context of biowarfare and terrorist activities."

Aside from bioterrorism, there are also the unintended consequences of
legitimate and beneficial biotechnological innovation.

Earlier this year, for example, Australian researchers trying to find ways
to stop rodents from devouring a major part of the global grain harvest
accidentally created a deadly virus that may open the door to new and more
virulent forms of smallpox.

They did it by inserting an interleukin 4 (IL-4) gene into the mousepox
virus, in the belief that it would boost the rodents' antibodies and make
them infertile. Mousepox normally has only mild ill-effects on rodents. But
with the inserted gene it wiped out all the test animals in nine days.
The fear now is someone putting a human IL-4 gene into human smallpox,
creating a new vaccine-resistant form of the highly infectious virus.
There is also anxiety about the unforeseen repercussions of advances in
genome sequencing technology.

Genomics research in laboratories around the world will deliver the complete
sequence of more than 70 major bacterial, fungal and parasitic pathogens of
human, animals and plants in the next year or two, says the Nature Genetics'
article.

"The ever-expanding microbial genome databases now provide a parts-list of
all potential genes involved in pathogenicity and virulence ... immune
response evasion and antibiotic resistance from which to pick and chose the
most lethal combination."

There are concerns too about the increasingly large worldwide cadre of
technically capable individuals, some of whom bioterrorism experts fear
could turn to relatively small-scale acts of destruction.
And there is worry, as biotechnology expands around the globe, about the
broad transfer of biotech knowledge and equipment.

One recent report says many, if not most, of the key technologies required
for making biological weapons are now commercialized for food processing and
pharmaceutical purposes.

The same report, by the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies,
echoes many of the apprehensions and fears voiced in Nature Genetics.
The same technology that may someday extend the human life span can now be
used to improve and enhance the pathogens most feared in a bioterrorist
assault, the report says. The "improvements" include: safer handling and
deployment; easier distribution; and improved ability to target the host,
including the possible targeting of specific races or ethnic groups with
given genetic characteristics.

Other improvements might be pathogens with increased virulence, and greater
transmissivity and infectivity, including engineering a disease such as
Ebola to be as communicable as measles; germs resistant to antibiotics,
vaccines or therapeutics; and benign micro-organisms genetically altered to
produce a toxin or venom.

Though speculative, the report says scientists postulate the following new
types of biological weapons can be manufactured during the coming decade:

- Binary biological weapons that combine, for example, the Hepatitis D
virus, the rarest but most lethal form of the disease, with a bacterial
virulence such as E. coli. Or mixing the plague with anthrax or dysentery;

- Designer genes and life forms, including synthetic genes and viruses,
including far more lethal man-made versions of influenza;

* Gene therapy weapons, in which "Trojan horse" genes attack the body's
ability to fight infections and heal wounds;

- Stealth viruses, which could be used to blackmail a population; and
host-swapping diseases, in which viral parasites which co-exist in an animal
host, are transferred to humans, with lethal results and no available
treatment.

"I hope what (the current bio-terrorist scare) does is to cause people to
think of the long term and how to keep things from getting very dangerous,"
Dr. Matthew Meselson, co-director of the Harvard Sussex Program on Chemical
and Biological Warfare Armament and Arms Limitation, said in an interview
with the Citizen.

He and others are calling for an international law to hold not just states,
but individuals and particularly government officials, responsible for
making or using biological agents with hostile intent.

"There have to be penalties and one of the best is to hold individuals
responsible, so you couldn't say, 'I was just following orders.' We have to
get over this idea that states can do just anything they want.
"I'm afraid the United States is going to propose just such a treaty (at
November's review conference of the Biological and Toxins Weapons Convention
in Geneva), but they're going to narrow it to 'lethal intent' and that would
mean that hostile intent, so long as it isn't lethal, could go forward.
"I'm afraid there are still some people who dream that maybe we could have
non-lethal biological weapons. It's very dangerous because it blurs the line
very badly. The technology of learning how to do hostile things with biology
could go forward."

And the consequences, he believes, will be qualitatively very different from
those that have followed the hostile exploitation of earlier technologies.
It will, he says grimly, "take humanity down a particularly undesirable
path."