Designing DNA Specific Bio-Weapons 227
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Atlantic reports that experts in genetics and microbiology are convinced we may be only a few years away from the development of advanced, genetic bio-weapons able to target a single human being based on their DNA. The authors paint a scenario of the development of a virus that causes only mild flu in the general population but when the virus crosses paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, the sequence would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that would trigger a fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that produces memory loss and, eventually, death. The requisite equipment including gene sequencers, micro-array scanners, and mass spectrometers now cost over $1 million but on eBay, it can be had for as little as $10,000. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President's Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. However no amount of Secret Service vigilance can ever fully secure the president's DNA, because an entire genetic blueprint can now be produced from the information within just a single cell. How to protect the President? The authors propose open-sourcing the president's genetic information to a select group of security-cleared researchers who could follow in the footsteps of the computer sciences, where 'red-team exercises,' are extremely common practices so a similar testing environment could be developed for biological war games. 'Advances in biotechnology are radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology,' write the authors. 'In light of this coming synbio revolution, a wider-ranging relationship between scientists and security organizations—one defined by open exchange, continual collaboration, and crowd-sourced defenses—may prove the only way to protect the president.'"
Frank Herbert's The White Plague (Score:5, Informative)
Just throwing that out there... Basic scenario; brilliant biochemist does exactly this to wreck revenge on Ireland and England for the conflict that took his family. Mild flu in males, deadly to females. Some of his best work outside Dune, btw...
Re:Frank Herbert's The White Plague (Score:4, Insightful)
Iran must be quite worried. Struxnet was nothing.
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Are you an idiot? Who has the resources to put something like this together? Does PayPal even allow sign-ups from Iran?
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I think that you're missing something. This thing is going to be CHEAP to pull together. The first one may be expensive, but the second is just going to be a few thousand dollars. (If I read correctly, the equipment would be around 400 thousand at today's prices, and the price of the equipment is dropping rapidly.)
Targeting a particular small group might be difficult. The smaller the group targeted, the harder it would be to build. E.g., it's much easier to target "humans with blood type O" than John J
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So much for gingers.
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Yea, that's the biggest fear I have with this. Some of what you would call human ethnicities are determined by minor genetic factors.
It's not hard to imagine a kkk member with the knowledge making one that attacks people with the genetic code that is for dark skin and curly black hair.
Or a neo nazi that makes one that targets the minor protein mutation that is found to originate in the area of the middle east that includes Israel.(I remember reading a article on this but I can't find it now)
Or one of any nu
That could prove self destructive. (Score:3)
Most the white Americans who can lay claim to long bloodlines on this side of the Atlantic share genes from all of North America's representative races. That is to say few southern whites with roots that predate the Civil War can be sure that they don't have some African or Native American blood. This, because in days gone by, if somebody could pass for white they mostly chose to do so -- hiding their ancestry. In the early 1970s I heard the great anthropologist Margaret Meade deliver lecture on this topic.
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Of course it would, I never did state they were rational now did I?
My second biggest fear is random mutation. Only the first generation of such a targeted virus or bacteria is certain to attack the intended target. Natural selection takes over afterwards, it might mutate to get at everyone. Or it might become harmless.
I hate it (Score:2, Insightful)
This is just cruel. A bullet would be more humane than to cause an eventual death by progressively shutting down their body.
Re:I hate it (Score:5, Funny)
A bullet would be more humane than to cause an eventual death by progressively shutting down their body.
You've just described old age. You do know that Logan's Run is not a documentary right?
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The first drug is supposed to put you out, so you are not aware of the rest of it.
This is done because the drug that stops your heart is painful (your blood vessels supposedly feel like fire)
You can disagree with the idea of a death penalty, it's not my place to argue against you there. However, lethal injection is at least a damn good attempt at making it humane.
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To the contrary, putting some crook in confinement for sixty years instead of letting him go quickly is quite cruel, and forcing all honest citizens to pay for that crook is theft. I'm proud that my country, Poland, did not ratify this part of the EU Charter, and sad that despite overwhelming public support, we do not actually use it.
You might say there's a risk of court errors. There's an easy solution: a criminal would be eligible for capital punishment only if there are no doubts he actually intentiona
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I'd agree with you, as I have no problem with the death sentence on the surface of it. I do, however, have zero tolerance for fuck-ups when the stakes are that high.
As it turned out, a few people with death sentences in my state were falsely convicted and later cleared. I'm still not sure it's better that they were imprisoned for many decades instead... but that's not for me to say.
What a great thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
For every interest group when they figure out that they can target "unwanted" groups of people. And imagine what the Nazis of Germany could have done during WWII - a virus designed to kill off everyone that wasn't pure Arian.
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Really? Too bad, if I had black skin and lived in the USA, I would worry even today.
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I don't think we have to be afraid of race-based targeting. Ethnic groups aren't homogenous enough for that to be possible. Would the Nazis have invented a Jew-killing virus, Hitler would've been the first of its victims.
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You're assuming whoever is planning genocide with a bio-weapon cares about a little collateral damage. I imagine with fuzzy matching you can get a pretty good match, if you have X or more genetic markers typically found in that population.then activate.
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I don't think we have to be afraid of race-based targeting. Ethnic groups aren't homogenous enough for that to be possible. Would the Nazis have invented a Jew-killing virus, Hitler would've been the first of its victims.
It can still target families. Families do have the same genes.
But I think the main thing is, if it can be made to target just one individual thats probably as dangerous as a weapon can be.
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If it could dependably be targeted to just one individual, it wouldn't cause me any worry at all. Less than a pistol or a knife. Very few individuals have enemies that determined, and the ones who do generally deserve it.
But it's not that reliable. Look at it's means of spreading. Every time it reporduces there's the likelihood of at least one minor mutation. (You probably have about 40-50 in your germ-line cells, and viruses have less error-correcting machinery, albeit their genetic information is sho
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Can we start with you?
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In my comic Genocide Man:
The Palestines and Jews designed viruses to wipe out each other.
Someone in Asia created a plague to kill everyone with red hair.
China was largely devastated when their population fell victim to a targeted airborne rabies.
The global police force used a targeted viral outbreak to crush and occupy Korea.
Oslo, Seattle, Mexico City, and Hong Kong were sites of accidental viral releases that killed hundreds of thousands of people.
...and I think I'm underestimating the actual technology.
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And imagine what the Nazis of Germany could have done during WWII - a virus designed to kill off everyone that wasn't pure Aryan.
Most likely, we'd all be dead, because not even the Germans, and certainly not Hitler, would have qualified as pure Aryans. This problem is actually the plot of an early Babylon 5 episode, in which an alien race had created a living weapon that only took orders from "pure" members of their own race, and the weapon killed everyone living on the planet because nobody actually qualified as "pure".
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I've actually been thinking about this every now and then the last few years. That in a not-too-distant future someone will be able to whip up a virus that can kill only those its creators want to kill.
Like you what I thought wasn't targeting individuals so much as ethnic groups, some white supremacist in the US targeting genetic traits mostly found in black Africans (and their recent descendants), European right-wing extremists going after Arabs, certain groups in the Arab world going after ethnic groups w
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For every interest group when they figure out that they can target "unwanted" groups of people. And imagine what the Nazis of Germany could have done during WWII - a virus designed to kill off everyone that wasn't pure Arian.
Imagine Churchill's face when Hitler drops dead after the vial is uncorked.
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Of course you probably know this, but the problem is that these sort of eugenic fantasies rarely actually play out as 'black and white' (ahem) as their proponents suppose.
Tending to be relatively ignorant of the subtleties of genetics, they rarely realize that what we see as obvious differences in skin color are actually rather difficult to tease out of the DNA...and rarely are they expressed as simply as "aha! here's the gene that makes you a "black" person".
Of course, like poison gas you'd have a very dif
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a virus designed to kill off everyone that wasn't pure Arian.
Ironically, Nazis persecuted Jehovah's Witnesses, these Arians of the modern era, with the same vehemence they persecuted Jews. So if you ever take a visit to Nazi Germany in your time machine and want to survive it, make sure that your "I'm an Aryan" statements have the right vowels in them!
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Aber nicht in Deutsch. Arisch!
Where the "y" came from is a mystery.
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Aber nicht in Deutsch. Arisch!
Where the "y" came from is a mystery.
Blavasky and 19th century occultism along with the swastika. Realize that the Aryans were the latest a "root race" descended from the last inhabitants of Atlantis. As far as "race" goes, even to the Nazis, race meant something much different than the genetic meaning we assume and involved proper spiritual traits as well as genetics. That's why they liked the Japanese but not others.
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The correct spelling is Untermensch, you Üntermensch :P
FTFY. Ja, I'm an Überspeller!
I had to cringe (Score:5, Insightful)
We haven't yet found a cure for cancer, or other horrible and debilitating diseases, but we've found time to research something like this?
Idiots (Score:2, Insightful)
We've found cures for many cancers. "cancer" isn't a disease, it's a family of diseases, and killing is a whole lot easier when you're less selective. By the way, this isn't research, this is spouting notions. The two are only conflated in think tanks and idiots. but I repeat myself.
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It hasn't been researched or developed. It's been noticed that such a thing is possible with current technology, so they're taking precautionary measures.
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Uhm... you have no idea what the U.S. government or any of its allies or protagonists have that has not yet seen the light of day. The U.S. in particular has a next-generation arsenal they are sitting on which has never yet been used in a conflict.
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Yes, but this actually COULD be a treatment for some caused by mutations(a fair percentage, I'm lead to believe). Sequence the tumors and the native cells. Make a virus that kills only cancer cells.
Besides, we've had nuclear weapons and mutated smallpox for years, ready to go. This is basically a NICER choice for genocide.
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Actually research into this is targeted at fighting cancer. If you can kill cells with defective DNA you can cure cancer.
It has been obviously for a long time that such techniques could target particular races or individuals as well. These researchers are just pointing out that the cost of the technology needed to create such a weapon is rapidly falling, and that the equipment is freely available on eBay.
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We haven't yet found a cure for cancer, or other horrible and debilitating diseases, but we've found time to research something like this?
Simple: Destroying is always much easier than constructing.
I'm a little confused... (Score:3)
Collecting DNA (Score:5, Interesting)
If I was a foreign power wanting to build a genetic weapon to specifically target the President, I would haver been collecting the DNA of all the top echelon politicians well before they came close to running their presidential campaigns. If I can think of this in 10 seconds of reading TFS (not even TFA) then I'm sure that the bad guys have already thought of it - unless you subscribe to the theory that the bad guys are always dumb.
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Re:Collecting DNA (Score:5, Funny)
Considering how dumb our bad guys are, I wouldn't be sure of anything. :)
Can't we have any discussion without mentioning the current Presidential election?!?!?!?
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Considering how dumb our bad guys are, I wouldn't be sure of anything
*groan* If the bad guys are dumb, the cops must be mentally retarded, since 90% of all crime goes unsolved. But I have a hard time believing that the cops are that dumb, so I have an even harder time believing the criminals are dumb, too.
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Two things:
1) Solving crimes is a lot more difficult than committing them.
2) You're assuming that solving crimes is their priority. Their priority is maintaining order. Solving crimes is just a means to that end, and not the most important one.
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If I was a foreign power wanting to specifically target the President, I wouldn't be concerned about the collateral damage of the rest of the people wherever he was. You could argue they might be interested in remaining undiscovered, but that's just an application of military secrecy to whatever you plan anyway.
And the president has a publicly announced schedule for a lot of things, an easily-discovered schedule for the majority of what remains, and will be in secure military facilities for whatever is lef
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As a terror plot, it's not really very interesting, and the complexities involved go slightly beyond lumping a few scientists in a room with some kit from eBay. The effort-payoff ratio just isn't worth it, like almost all "potential" terror scenarios, but it makes a nice headline, like almost all "potential" terror scenarios.
I agree it s unlikely given the current state of technology, but I can see why an assassination technique that doesn't look like assassination is attractive.
To give an analogy consider a discussion I had years ago about the merits of Judo/Jiu-jitsu vs Tae Kwon Do with my Judo Sensei if you are caught up in an altercation in a bar. Both forms are equally effective in incapacitating your opponent and leaving them lying on the ground. But using a Tae Kwon Do crescent kick to your opponent's head will
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Agreed, and I do mention that in my post (albeit discretely).
But the fact remains that the pay-off won't be there. The cover-up element is only a part of the story, though. The difference, though, is that it's also much easier to fake such "indicators" if they are public - getting a gunman who aligns to your enemy and thinks he's working for them to do the dirty work and you immediately implicate them (falsely). You can't do that with a "stealth" assassination.
Hell, there are still countries technically
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The only thing wrong with your analysis is the statement "ENORMOUS expense". The second time this is done it will probably be cheaper than hiring a gunman who believes he's working for someone else. (I'll grant you that the first time it's done a lot of expensive research will be involved, but most of that will have been done for other reasons.)
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Reminds me of the book Alas, Babylon where everybody in the line of succession is killed by Russian nuclear weapons.. Down to the Secretary of Education, if I recall.
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That was "Battlestar Galactica" and the bad guys were called "cylons" not "Russians".
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"Now you see that evil will always triumph because good is dumb."
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If I can think of this in 10 seconds of reading TFS (not even TFA) then I'm sure that the bad guys have already thought of it - unless you subscribe to the theory that the bad guys are always dumb.
I wouldn't worry too much.. The bad guys can't shoot straight either!
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I wouldn't worry too much.. The bad guys can't shoot straight either!
That's a bad thing. About 20 years ago when my kids were little, we were eating dinner and heard what sounded like a string of firecrackers... but I thought it sounded like gunfire. We went outside to see what was going on, like everyone else in the neighborhood. As we stood watching, a cop car came down the street so fast his car became airborne going over the railroad tracks.
There was a gang war down the street, dozens of shots were fire
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Considering how ham-fisted most so-called "terrorists" actually are, I'd say we give the bad guys way too much credit. Goldfinger-style plots only happen in movies.
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If I was a foreign power wanting to build a genetic weapon to specifically target the President, I would haver been collecting the DNA of all the top echelon politicians well before they came close to running their presidential campaigns. If I can think of this in 10 seconds of reading TFS (not even TFA) then I'm sure that the bad guys have already thought of it - unless you subscribe to the theory that the bad guys are always dumb.
That doesn't work in the case of the current president; he went from junior state senator to junior federal senator to president so fast no one with such a program would have considered him 'top echelon' in time.
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Actually it has gotten harder to do.
Just think how easy it would have been to get Bill Clinton's DNA.
That's what she said!
Produces memory loss? (Score:5, Funny)
Not worth the effort (Score:2)
Maybe, but only maybe the article is right and it would be possible to design a protein, which binds specifically to a DNA sequence motif of a single human being killing the host. Currently this is a lot of work even for a few (as in 18) bases and not solvable by standard means. The design of a protein binding specifically to any random DNA sequence ( think huuuuuugee Zinc-Finger Nucleases : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_finger_nuclease [wikipedia.org] ) is in my opinion still nobel prize material.
If that was actually
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If that was actually possible, people would use it to do good (Gene therapy etc).
We're working on gene therapy, but so far it has killed test subjects. But if the goal is killing people... Phage therapy is a thing, and it works, so I suspect it's possible.
what could POSSIBLY go wrong? (Score:5, Interesting)
We're already very aware of how viruses constantly mutate. So, how long before this one mutates such that the "switch" is always in the "ON" position, and then proceeds to wipe out most of the human population?
BRILLIANT idea. brilliant. It's these sorts of mad scientists that truly scare me.
Add to that, there's no "kill switch" if you have a problem. Anyone caught making a virus weapon needs to die by fire. Along with the ones that funded and assisted them. The whole world needs to be completely clear about this, because it's a serious danger to every living soul.
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In fact, I'd call for a treaty on the level of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. Perhaps stronger.
Bioengineering is still in its infancy, but it could be a hell of a lot more lethal than nukes. It's definitely a lot harder to track.
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Anyone caught making a virus weapon needs to die by fire. Along with the ones that funded and assisted them. The whole world needs to be completely clear about this, because it's a serious danger to every living soul.
Does that include the US Government?
By treaty, we do not have any offensive biological or chemical warfare programs.
In reality, offensive bio-chem research was rolled into our defensive programs, and the scientists have been happily developing and weaponizing ever since.
Just to be clear: the type of research the CDC regularly does is nothing like the type of research the DoD is up to.
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This, and it's close cousins ("grey goo", nuclear apocolapse, etc.) are, indeed, one answer to the Fremi Paradox. (It's famously one of the factors in the Drake equation, i.e., the expected lifetime of a technological civilization.)
There are others. Try Dogbert's answer "I can predict the future by assuming that technology is driven by money and male hormones. When virtual reality becomes cheaper than dating, society is doomed." (That's a paraphrase.) I find this another reasonable answer. There are o
Why the focus on one person? (Score:2)
The summary is all about defending POTUS against this, but would either political party be very inconvenienced over losing their nominal figurehead? It would probably cause a temporary drop in worldwide market values but political agendas would be unchanged and it would probably provide an opportune moment to implicate an unwanted faction and clamp down further on individual freedoms.
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Highly specific (Score:3)
Or at least it's highly specific as long as the virus replicates itself perfectly, even for nonessential DNA.
It's a good thing that viruses never mutate, isn't it?
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Theoretically you can put in a generation limit; a mutation that appears only after a number of generations that kills the virus and makes it untenable. That's easier to do with bacteria, but it might still be possible with virus agents. Then even if the infectious agent mutates, it will still die out after X number of replications, limiting your plague to a small region.
FOXDIE (Score:2)
Whew, reassured. (Score:3)
I feel relieved that, knowing that moderate funds and a scientific background are now sufficient to create a disease that could kill billions, or target entire ethnicities for genocide, at least the president is safe.
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Oh, that's been possible for at least a decade and is easier than this. You just transfer one nasty gene (there are several choices) into a flu virus and let it go. It's the targeting specific people that's new. But still, what could go wrong? The fact that people actually think they could con
"Genocide" (Score:3)
DNA-tailored bio-weapons would give a whole new meaning to the word "genocide". Sure they'd make for a good assassination tool, but wouldn't the same DNA watermarking technques apply when dealing with groups of genetically related individuals? While current genetic theories rule out race-specific weapons of mass destruction that don't suffer from huge collateral damage, they could be used effectively to settle scores between Mafia-style crime families.
Too soon! (Score:2, Interesting)
Damnit, this technology is the entire conceit behind my comic Genocide Man [genocideman.com], but it's not supposed to exist until the year 2030 or so. The 21st century is consistently being more lethal than even I predicted.
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I've made three posts in response to this article, and only mentioned the comic in two of them. If I can't mention my comic in response to an article which is precisely relevant, when can I?
Thanks for your review of my faces; you must be looking only at the current post, with the two male main characters. My female faces and a few other males in the comic have less blocky features. But I know my limitations as an artist -- I'm a writer first and foremost. Hope you read a few more pages and enjoy the sto
Swine flu and SARS vs Mexicans and Arabs (Score:2)
President (Score:2)
Americans sure are obsessed with their president.
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Yup. It doesn't help that the US system of government gives the President far more powers than any one person has in most democracies.
Typically the head of state in a democracy is a prime minister, who really is just a representative of the parliament. If they died parliament would just pick somebody else who would enact the exact same policies. They aren't directly elected.
In the US people go nuts over who is president precisely because they do have so much power, and they are directly elected. In fact
Anybody remember that SCIFI story The Trigger? (Score:2)
They create something that disables guns, eventually being able to create the device which can disable "DNA". thus creating the perfect assassination machine.
Its quite amazing how science fiction is becoming true.
Sanitized or destroyed (Score:2)
Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched-they are later sanitized or destroyed-in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material.
Was this policy introduced towards the end of the Clinton Administration..?
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This sounds like a GREAT idea. (Score:2)
Bah... (Score:4, Funny)
"Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material."
All it takes is one ML-1 Monica surveillance drone!
DNA Bio Weapon on a Political Candidate? (Score:2)
Old idea, MASSIVE PROBLEM (Score:3)
Second, and far more important, only a complete F-N moron would even try to release such a thing.
The reason is very simple, it's called MUTATION. Yes, viruses mutate, even the engineered ones. That targeting mechanism is either going to cease to function, get bypassed, or widen it's range of targets, and there is no way to predict which it will do or when it will happen.
Here's another thing to think about. Without including a massive amount of targeting info in the virus, you won't be able to discern between related targets or just random individuals with similar dna. Because of that, you will be unintentionally targeting unwanted subjects. If that's not bad enough, if you really do put in enough info for the virus to target 1 individual in the human populace, that huge amount of info is going to be a drain on the resources of the virus. You know what many microbes like to do with massive useless genes like that? They throw them away. Yes, that's right, it might not even take one replication in release before they chuck all your precious targeting info. And then what happens? Do they no longer have their deadly payload, or do they use it on everyone?
So leave this stuff to sci-fi writers, because reality is that viruses make HORRIBLE targeted weapons, though they aren't bad for indiscriminant killing and terror, even if they are a lot slower than bombs, guns, knives, poisons, and all other weapons in existence.
It's the age of Cybernetic Warfare (Score:2)
The kind of warfare we traditionally think about when we think about war is rendered ineffective by the current and emerging technology. If you think DNA-Specific Bio Weapons are a problem that is just race-based medicine which has been discussed on here previously. Cybernetic Warfare is about the creation of a cyborg army to use against the enemy which also creates a cyborg army. In this scenario cyborgs don't have rights, robots don't have rights, humans don't have rights either, and the soldiers are part
The red team gave us weaponized anthrax (Score:2)
"Red team" biowarfare exercises, where we create biological weapons to figure out ways to "defend" against them, is the dumbest idea since sharing needles.
Our brilliant military scientists were doing red team exercises in Fort Detrick when they developed weaponized anthrax. Brilliant! Now we've demonstrated to every biology grad student in the world that it's possible to turn anthrax into a cheap, effective biological weapon, and how to do it.
Now any terrorist with a budget of $100,000 and basic bacteriolog
Not too bright... (Score:2)
Prior art (Score:2)
Dr. Noah (Woody Allan) in Casino Royale [imdb.com] made a bomb that would kill off all men over 4' 10" tall.
Very OLD news! (Score:2)
Infowars.com and prisonplanet.com have been writing articles about this VERY thing for years folks. Took the stupid mainstream media outlets long enough to admit it!! Why do you think police departments are moving to take your DNA at every turn, why do you think the push for sending in your DNA for genetic testing, for Genetic genealogy etc.... Of course they are gathering up as much DNA as they can - then they can create DNA specific bio weapons to "kill you".
"I'm achmed the terrorist, I'll kill you!!!"
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I thought this was troll, too, but as pointed out here [slashdot.org] it's very much relevant.
FOXDIE is an engineered retrovirus developed by the DIA for the Pentagon. It is programmed to kill specific people by identifying the person's DNA and their nanomachines then causing cardiac arrest. The only known host for FOXDIE was Solid Snake.
A good reason to develop space habitats (Score:2)
As I suggested a dozen years ago: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/fears.htm [kurtz-fernhout.com] ..."
"The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:
* Autonomous military robots out of control
* Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
* Ethnically targeted virus
See also though the root cause misperception: http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militaris [pdfernhout.net]
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But in fact the particular warm body currently occupying the office of President is not a single point of failure. He is an easily replaceable politician whose life is of no more value than yours or mine. It amazed me, the turn the story took into this silly business of protecting His Highness.
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It's time to occupy Wall Street cell by cell!
Gesundheit Mr. Blankfein!