Imagine this: an American
student receives a couple of pills in the mail. She assumes they are
drugs she picked up from an online pharmacy. She takes them and develops
a cold. Soon, she's shedding millions of virus particles and infecting a
number of people in her college. The next week, the president of the US
is scheduled to speak on campus. Most of those attending have a cold.
When the president arrives, the virus particles descend on him. But in
him, they don't cause a cold. They react with a specific DNA sequence in
his cells, and cause a fastacting neural disease that causes memory
loss and then death.
This may sound like the plot of a future
Mission Impossible movie, but Andrew Hessel , an expert on genetics and
microbiology, and Mark Goodman, a global security specialist , argue in
The Atlantic that such a scenario will soon be possible. Advances in
genetic engineering and biotechnology have come to the stage where
viruses targeting select individuals with specific sequences in their
DNA can be deployed as tools of assassination. In fact, governments are
already preparing for this. In 2009, Ronald Kessler, an award-winning
investigative journalist, revealed that Navy stewards gather everything
that the US president has touched - be it toothbrushes or towels — and
sanitize and destroy them in an effort to keep potential enemies from
obtaining his genetic material. The same year, US secret cable
09STATE37561 asked State Department personnel posted in Africa to
collect "data ... include(ing) ... fingerprints, facial images , DNA,
and iris scans" of leaders of Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo.
Moore's law - "every 12 months (it is
now 24 months), the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will
double" - applies equally to the field of genetic engineering, Goodman
and Hessel claim. They quote Bill Gates as saying that if he were a kid
today he wouldn't be hacking computers, he'd be hacking biology. The
costs of genetic engineering have dropped dramatically. The science of
synthetic biology makes DNA design and synthesis much easier.
Geneticists have already begun tweaking existing designs and creating
new ones. Independent
Craig Ventner, the American
scientist responsible for sequencing the human genome - describing the
complete set of human genetic information - was also the first to create
an artificial cell. The costs of building personally targeted
bioweapons have also come down. What cost Craig Ventner $300 million in
2007 can now be done at a fraction of that cost and with far less skill.
The four building blocks of DNA - Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and
Thymine - translate easily into computer symbols. The power of computer
processing makes creating drugs that will affect only a person with a
specific DNA sequence so easy that it can soon be outsourced to biology
students, claim Hessel and Goodman. Right now, DNA hacking is targeted
at finding cures for specific cancer mutations, but according to Jimmy
Lin, a genomics researcher who works on designing treatments for rare
childhood diseases based on individual genetic analysis, "when you're
familiar with the research, it's really feasible that a well-funded
group could pull this (genebased kill) off."
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