[IP] Biowar for Dummies
-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Biowar for Dummies
Date: Mon, 20 Feb 2006 20:22:40 -0800
From: Robert J. Berger <rberger@xxxxxxx>
To: Dave Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>, Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Biowar for Dummies —Paul Boutin
http://paulboutin.weblogger.com/stories/storyReader$1439
How hard is it to build your own weapon of mass destruction? We
take a crash course in supervirus engineering to find out.
Anthrax. Smallpox. Ebola. For thriller writers and policy
crusaders, biological warfare was a standard what-if scenario
long before anyone mailed anthrax to government and media
offices in 2001. Pentagon war games like Dark Winter, held just
before 9/11, and this year’s Atlantic Storm suggested that
terrorists could unleash germs with the killing power of a
nuclear weapon.
Scientists, though, have always been skeptical. Only massive,
state-sponsored programs—not terrorist cells or lone kooks—pose
a plausible threat, they say. As the head of the Federation of
American Scientists working group on bioweapons put it in a 2002
Los Angeles Times op-ed: “A significant bioterror attack today
would require the support of a national program to succeed.”
Or not. A few months ago, Roger Brent, a geneticist who runs a
California biotech firm, sent me an unpublished paper in which
he wrote that genetically engineered bioweapons developed by
small teams are a bigger threat than suitcase nukes.
Brent is one of a growing number of researchers who believe that
a bioterrorist wouldn’t need a team of virologists and state
funding. He says advances in DNA-hacking technology have reached
the point where an evil lab assistant with the right resources
could do the job.
Gene hackers could make artificial smallpox—or worse—from
standard lab supplies. I decided to call him on it. I hadn’t
set foot in a lab since high school. Could I learn to build a
bioweapon? What would I need? What would it cost? Could I set up
shop without raising suspicions? And, most important, would it
work?
To find out, I meet with Brent at the Molecular Sciences
Institute, his company in Berkeley. The 49-year-old researcher
has a few million dollars a year in government funding and a
staff of 25. He’s the co-author of the must-read lab manual
Current Protocols in Molecular Biology, and hardly seems like
someone in the grip of apocalyptic fervor. As he shows me around
the lab—a few quiet rooms of workbenches, pipette stands, pinky-
sized test tubes and the odd PowerBook— we plan our attack.
Experts used to think that distributing a killer germ would
require a few vats and a crop duster. Brent and I have a
different idea. We’ll infect a suicidal patient zero and hand
him a round-the-world plane ticket. But we need a dangerous
virus—smallpox, maybe. We won’t be able to steal a sample; we’ll
have to make our own.
Too dangerous, Brent says. He gives me a proxy mission: Modify
something mundane into something strange. In this case, rejigger
standard brewer’s yeast to manufacture a glowing cyan-colored
protein usually found in jellyfish.
Great. I wanted to make something as lethal as an A-bomb, and
instead I’m brewing ultraviolet beer. Brent smiles and shrugs
at my disappointment. “All life is one,” he says, and he’s not
just being Zen. All over the world, laboratories like Brent’s
splice genes—the techniques are as common as the Pyrex beaker,
and getting easier every day. Getting yeast to sport blue genes
takes the same skills and gear as adding the genes for something
toxic. DNA is just the stuff that tells cells what proteins to
make—the only real difference between being able to insert a
single gene and inserting all the genes that make a virus is
experience.
I start my to-do list: I have to acquire the right equipment. I
have to track down the genetic sequence I want, then learn how
to make the gene. Then I have to get it into the yeast. Brent
offers me lab space and staff advice, but insists that I do the
work myself. And not everyone has the knack, he says. “Some
people are natural-born labsters, some aren’t.” I know what he
means. I used to be a software engineer, and in that field,
procedures are well documented and the source code is readily
available, but some people just aren’t hackers.
It’s time to find out what kind of genetic engineer I am.
Making DNA turns out to be easy if you have the right
hardware. The critical piece of gear is a DNA synthesizer. Brent
already has one, a yellowing plastic machine the size of an
office printer, called an ABI 394. “So, what kind of
authorization do I need to buy this equipment?” I ask.
“I suggest you start by typing ‘used DNA synthesizer’ into
Google,” Brent says.
<snip>
The rush toward DIY genetics is reflected in so-called Carlson
curves, plotted by Rob Carlson, a physicist-turned-biologist
(and Brent’s former lab partner at MSI) who worked them out in
2003. “Within a decade,” Carlson wrote in the journal
Biosecurity and Bioterrorism, “a single person could sequence or
synthesize all the DNA describing all the people on the planet
many times over in an eight-hour day.”
Today, when he’s not tinkering with cellular-scale measurement
gadgets at the University of Washington, Carlson designs custom
organisms on a computer in his Seattle home. According to his
calculations, if the current pace of biotech proceeds for
another decade, cooking up a lethal bug will be as easy and
cheap as building a Web site. “You don’t need a national
program,” Carlson says. “The technology’s changing fast, and
there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Even if he’s wrong about the timeframe, if someone solves the
problem of synthesizing RNA (the single-stranded adjunct to
DNA), it would open the door to modifying retroviruses like
influenza and HIV—and in 1918 the flu managed to kill 20 million
people without any help from bioterrorists.
“If we do what we need to for biodefense ... We could, as a
planet, eliminate large lethal epidemics.”—Tara O'Toole, Center
for Biosecurity
Bolstered by what scientists like Carlson and Brent are saying,
bioweapon policy wonks are calling for an all-out biodefense
program. Worried about bacteria and viruses of mass destruction,
the federal government pushes nearly $6 billion a year toward
research. Tara O’Toole, director of the University of
Pittsburgh’s Center for Biosecurity, says after-the-fact
vaccines won’t stop a plague; they take months to develop and
deploy. She believes the only option is a general-purpose virus
detector and destroyer, which has yet to be invented. The cost
would be enormous, but don’t think of it as just an antiterror
tool. “If we do what we need to for biodefense, we’re going to
do an enormous amount of good for routine health care and global
disease,” says O’Toole. “We could, as a planet, eliminate large
lethal epidemics of infectious disease in our lifetime.”
Brent agrees. He’s been tinkering on a general virus detector as
a side project. “Of course I’d be thrilled to see a huge
expenditure on defense,” he says. “But the truth is, it’ll
probably take an attack to get us there.”
We might not have long to wait. Every hands-on gene hacker I
polled during my project estimated they could synthesize
smallpox in a month or two. I remember that game from my
engineering days, so I mentally scale their estimates using the
old software manager’s formula: Double the length, then move up
to the next increment of time. That gives us two to four
years—assuming no one has already started working.
––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––
Robert J. Berger - Internet Bandwidth Development, LLC.
Voice: 408-882-4755 eFax: +1-408-490-2868
http://www.ibd.com
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