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Biotech Government United States Science

Urgent Needs To Prepare For Manmade Virus Attacks, Says US Government Report (theguardian.com) 179

Posted by BeauHD from the synthetic-biology dept.
A major U.S. government report warns that advances in synthetic biology now allow scientists to have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body. The Guardian reports: In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, "enhances and expands" opportunities to create bioweapons. "As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinize where harms could come from," said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT's Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The report calls on the U.S. government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect novel bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defenses, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible. The Guardian references a case 20 years ago where geneticist Eckard Wimmer recreated the poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horse pox virus. "The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century," reports The Guardian. "Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesized."
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Urgent Needs To Prepare For Manmade Virus Attacks, Says US Government Report More

Urgent Needs To Prepare For Manmade Virus Attacks, Says US Government Report

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  • CRISPR makes it easier for ISIS to create a doomsday virus, but at the same time the tech makes it easier for us to respond to threats like this. If the No GMO activists force us to recuse from using CRISPR because of this potential use, all it does is prevent us from fighting back. Could this perhaps be their original motivation?

    • It DOES make it easier to create new solutions against it. What CRISPR does not do, is improve detection of such. A virus could be let lose in an area and allowed to infect a population. Imagine a simple rhino virus that renders a woman infertile. Then release it in 'enemy' territory. Within 10 years, the population is already showing a downturn. And nobody would be the wiser.
      Without ability to detect strains of virus, this will end up being used sooner, not later.
      • We have had the ability to detect strains of virus for a long long time.
        • No idiot. You have to be able to isolate them and then know what oyu are looking for. What we have the ability to do is titers for antibodies of KNOWN virus.
          Back in 1981 when I worked at CDC and we had NO IDEA what was causing AIDS, there was a HUGE dash to figure it out. It took over a decade. And the tech has not changed a whole lot. Why? Because you have to sample it, grow it, isolate it, and then fingerprint it. None of these are easy. Likewise, throw in Prions and your search space is even bigger.

  • Translation (Score:1, Troll)

    by Archtech ( 159117 )

    "A major U.S. government report warns that advances in synthetic biology now allow scientists to have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body".

    Translation:

    For many years the US government has been pursuing research into biological warfare, which it believes would help it to overcome adversaries (like Russia and China) that cannot be defeated by brute force. It is now

  • Limitations of deadly viruses / deadly bacteria (Score:5, Informative)

    by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @05:38AM (#56814864) Homepage

    and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body

    In the specific case of viruses, it's counter productive. As some hyper dangerous viruses have shown like Ebola, it you kill your host, you won't have a host into which to reproduce anymore.
    Viruses aren't full autonomous life forms, their just simple genetic code (recipes that need an actual host's cell with cellular machinery to interpret the code and produce more viruses).
    The "evolutionary target" that most viruses aspire to become (i.e.: the fittest mutant that are selected by natural selection) isn't ebola, it's the common cold : a virus that is relatively benign and doesn't harm the host too much, so it can safely keep replicating in a still-alive host, and can have the time to find other alive hosts to which to transmit (while leaving as much alive hosts as possible for a potential future new round of infection by a new variant)

    If some mad scientist create some lab monster that produces lots of lethal toxins, that synthetic virus is at a high risk of killing the host without having had any chance to spread.

    With bacteria, the problem is similar but in reverse : bacteria are autonomous life forms - cells that multiply on their own. They basically don't need us (beyond a few disease-inducing bacteria that rely on bodies for environment (relative warmth) and food).
    Whatever weird dangerous gene the mad scientist sticks into them, that poison isn't necessary to achieve what it basically wants (to multiply).
    So, unless these poison-producing genes are somewhat linked to some critical biochemistry needed by the bacteria, there will be no evolutionary pressure to keep producing the poison (quite the opposite : due to the way they replicate their genome (=single origin) bacteria tend to lose useless gene. Less bullshit genes = less times spent in replicating that bullshit)

    (also, if the bacteria needs some environment for potential victim (say, again warmth) the same logic as with virus applies (a dead host won't be producing any warmth anymore).
    The first infected victim with a synthetic bug will die, but over lots of generation, the bacteria will eventually lose the poison-producing gene because it will be able to replicate faster (and thus over take the slower replicating bacteria that have more bullshit gene) (*).

    So yeah, a few mad scientist could try to CRIPR their way in clandestine lab to build super-bugs with ultra-killing genes, but if these monsters kill too fast, they won't stand a long term chance.
    It will suck for the first few patients who get sick, but the bugs will have a hard time taking over the world.

    ---

    (*) - conversely, that's why antibiotic resistance started to become "a thing" only recently when antibiotics started to get used on large scale (by the agricultural industry, by over prescription, etc.). Before that large scale antibiotics use, there's any pressure to justifiy the bacteria keeping the extra genetic material coding for the resistance (e.g.: the plasmid carrying beta-lactamases).

    • Re:Limitations of deadly viruses / deadly bacteria (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @06:40AM (#56815048) Journal

      Appreciate your sane, well-reasoned argument.

      Natural phenomena and happenstance have been mutating viruses and bacteria for billions of years, selecting for favorable survival traits. Mammals have been evolving for +/- 160 million years, with some of that focus on disease-resistance.

      Despite many plagues prior to antibiotics, and the mass transit in use today that can spread a threat worldwide like no other time in history, humans have proved difficult to drive to extinction.

    • Re:Limitations of deadly viruses / deadly bacteria (Score:5, Insightful)

      by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @06:52AM (#56815080) Journal
      The obvious counter-argument is to create a virus that spreads easily, waits a few months, then kills people as quickly as ebola.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mjwx ( 966435 )

        The obvious counter-argument is to create a virus that spreads easily, waits a few months, then kills people as quickly as ebola.

        How do you propose to control the mutation? Anything with a life cycle as short as a virus will undergo mutations at a rapid rate.

        Also, Ebola does not kill quickly. Two to twenty one days for incubation, death six to sixteen days after symptoms appear, even then some strains of Ebola only have a 25% mortality rate. OK, that's fast for a virus, but incredibly slow in human terms.

        Anything remotely like Ebola needs to be extremely complex. Ebola requires direct contact with bodily fluids to be transmitte

        • So how would you propose to infect an entire city's worth of people with a complex virus without it being detected? In order to be infectious, you need noticeable symptoms

          Make it spread through the air.

          • Re:Limitations of deadly viruses / deadly bacteria (Score:5, Interesting)

            by mjwx ( 966435 ) on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @09:03AM (#56815688)

            So how would you propose to infect an entire city's worth of people with a complex virus without it being detected? In order to be infectious, you need noticeable symptoms

            Make it spread through the air.

            Have you ever wondered why Ebola has never become airborne.

            The reason I said "complex" is because a complex virus like Ebola is far to heavy to be airborne. To be airborne a virus needs to be light and there is an inverse relationship between complexity and lightness. Also to be airborne, the virus needs to grow on the inside of the lung or throat, which significantly decreases it's effectiveness as the lung is the most advanced particulate filter known to man.

            There's a reason few people die from the flu or common cold... and most of them die from complications exacerbated by the virus, not the virus itself.

            You also didn't mention how you'd control the mutation.

            • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • Why are you focusing on the viruses that make headlines, and not the ones that are actually dangerous? All we need is for somebody to take a historical plague for which we all have immunity and tweak it so our antibodies don't recognize it -- say, do a repeat of the Spanish Flu. That be enough of a disaster to slow civilization to a halt.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by mjwx ( 966435 )

            Why are you focusing on the viruses that make headlines, and not the ones that are actually dangerous? All we need is for somebody to take a historical plague for which we all have immunity and tweak it so our antibodies don't recognize it -- say, do a repeat of the Spanish Flu. That be enough of a disaster to slow civilization to a halt.

            Because these are the viruses that actually kill people and Ebola is the one that most mouth breathers may have heard of. Yellow Fever is one of my other favourite examples but a lot of people don't realise its a real disease, many people think it's just a white guy with a penchant for Asian ladies.

            Ebola and other hemorrhagic diseases tend to be the biggest killer, Ebola has a mortality rate of 25-90%, Yellow fever has a mortality rate of 20% if left untreated or 5% if treated... I believe, but have no e

        • First off, we shed MANY MANY virus that has absolutely NO symptoms. The only reason we go after diseases is because their symptom is a side effect of the virus that harms the host. So, going after say Ebola as your base model would be a foolish mistake.
          HiV can be used, but way to slow. Rhino Virus and/or flu are the correct ones to have. A smart disease would be to develop a rhino virus that either makes somebody infertile (slow way to destroy the enemy), OR you do a 2 part attack. Basically, create a rhin

      • We had that, it is called HIV. Thanks to modern medicine (which means since roughly 1995) it does not kill quickly anymore, or people can actually live long with it. It did not kill as rapidly as Ebola, though.

        Other viruses like SARS or chicken influenza spread really rapidly, can kill quickly, depending on strand, but have a relatively short incubation time.

      • Unless it's something like HIV which attacks the immune system directly, in a few months the host will have already killed the virus off and developed immunity to it. And if it's like HIV, people are going to notice its existence pretty fast.

        It seems to me that the biological expertise and knowledge required to make a planet- or country-devastating biological weapon isn't yet the sort of thing a small group of individuals could carry out successfully. Now, something developed by a country or organization

      • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • The way a virus spreads is to cause disease - our symptoms are the effects of the virus replicating itself so that it can spread.

        If it lays dormant for a while, it can't spread naturally until it becomes active.

    • The common cold have already been concentrated into a deadly form in labs but it is only used for research. At least currently. There are several ways you can weaponize it and we can in fact do that today. We have been able to for some years now. Oh and common cold should be considered a group name. There are hundreds of viruses that can cause a cold.

      One of the main issues is infecting one country, it can easily spread to your home country.
      Another issue is mutation risk. Biology is imperfect. The weapon cou

      • What's the difference (in terms of weapon development) between engineering a virus that kills people vs. engineering an super anti-viral? It seems like there are enough bugs in the world that a country that could develop a cheap (relatively speaking) and effective anti-viral to even something as innocuous as the flu/cold could gain a huge economic advantage over everyone else in the world. There are reasonable theories that many of the issues associated with economic development in Africa come down to the

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by GuB-42 ( 2483988 )

      This is a good argument for natural viruses/bacteria, not for bioweapons.
      An attacker probably doesn't want to destroy humanity, or create a stable life form. They want to weaken their enemy, and even a short lived virus can wreck havoc on the economy of a country, as well as create mass panic.

    • No need to wait for a mad scientist to recreate an animal virus in a lab, the semi mad ones have been doing it since the 1930s by using mouse brains and other animal tissues to grow or weaken the viruses used in vaccines. And in the process, transferring animal viruses into the human population causing various new diseases that our immune systems don't know how to handle.

      • chimera viruses (Score:4, Informative)

        by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Wednesday June 20, 2018 @08:38AM (#56815504) Homepage

        various new diseases that our immune systems don't know how to handle.

        By definition our immune systems doesn't know how to handle disease (be it new or not) with a few exceptions,
        because our immune systems relies on adaptive immunity (with a few exceptions where the innate immunity can wipe a couple of pathogens).

        Our body have evolved not to handle only *known* pathogen (which would have been a pretty stupid strategy : such animal would be only 1 mutation away by a known pathogen to evade the innate immunity and wipe out the innate-only animal. Such animal would have been unfit and would have gone extinct if they ever hapenned to exist).

        Our body have evolved to be able to handle any unknown pathogen as long as they can survive long enough for the adaptive immunity to kick in, actually adapt and come up with a solution to wipe out the attacker.
        Works pretty well most of the time (most of the time, you don't even get sick, a few of the time you get sick but manage to fight off the infection. Only a few pathogen that have evolved ways to fuck up the adaptive immunity - e.g.: HIV fucks up the lymphocyte - or hide away -e.g.: rabbies achieves evasion by burrowing into the hard-to-access nervous system)

        And vaccination is basically just giving a "practice target" to the adaptive system to practice its adaptivity against and come up with an efficien wiping-out solution, before an actual occurrence of a disease.
        Its leveraging the same natural adaptive process that your body does every day against any upcoming as of yet unknown disease it encounters (and on some bad days, while already having caught and being sick from said just-yer-encountered disease).
        Your white blood cells are literally encountering crazy amount of new compounds every days and inventing new anti-bodies against them. Vaccination is just adding yet another compound on the list, because one day, you might encounter a pathogen with said compound on its surface that could make you sick.

        the semi mad ones have been doing it since the 1930s by using mouse brains and other animal tissues to grow or weaken the viruses used in vaccines. And in the process, transferring animal viruses into the human population causing various new diseases

        There is very little scientific research showing actual problems caused by vaccination. (e.g.: the "autism caused by vaccine" paper was retracted due to being actually bullshit).
        There is huge amount of litterature showing the actual benefits of vaccination (you can spend days hunting for meta-analysis about vaccinations on search engines like PubMed).

        I'm not aware of serious peer-reviewed scientific article showing that vaccine are a vector of animal viruses jumping to human hosts (again, please concentrate on serious scientific journal, that will anounce retraction if an article turns out to be bonker. Not click-baity random websites).

        The documented jump-over-species barrier are usually caused by combination of environmental exposure (e.g.: people working knee-deep in animal excrement) and by chimerisation due to co-infection (e.g.: a pig on a farm with dubious hygiene managing to get infected both by some bird-exclusive influenza and a human-compatile influenza. There's quite some research into this. Again rely on scientific publication from reputable sources.)

        So at that point you have to admit that the "cancers are caused by all the weird mouse-brain-vaccine-hybrids" doesn't sound a very compelling theory.
        Or that absolutely the whole planet is in a conspiration to hide the fact from you personally.

        Vaccines are safe, they are among the most well studied modern medicine.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Actually a fast-burning virus like that is ideal for a bio-weapon. Disperse and infect the people exposed to it immediately, they die in a gruesome way to scare the shit out of the populous, then die out so it (hopefully*) doesn't spread out of control.

      *because "hope" will save us all! or something like that.

      • If your point is to directly strike and not count on the weapon's own built-in capability to spread.
        (I.e.: you count on spreading viruses that will kill the host immediately without much chance of spreading further)
        why waste resource making *bio* weapon in the first place?

        Chemical warfare has been a reliable way to kill in scary gruesome ways already known and put to large scale use at least one century ago (yperite in WW1).

        • Chemical weapons usually only work under perfect conditions.
          Of course against civilians they work much better than against prepared soldiers.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by 1ucius ( 697592 )

          Presumably, you go bio because it has a simpler delivery mechanism.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )
          It's easier to deploy, and it's more psychologically impactful. Chemical weapons have an immediate effect in a specific area. If you infect people in an area, those people won't immediately fall dead. They will move about and die slowly. People won't know if they are infected too. It would cause chaos. What you don't want is a bioweapon than can spread indefinitely. Those are the kinds of things that can get out of your control quickly and end up turning on your own forces.

          • If you infect people in an area, those people won't immediately fall dead. They will move about and die slowly. People won't know if they are infected too. It would cause chaos.

            So definitely *NOT* a fast-burning virus that infect{s} the people exposed to it immediately {killing them} in a gruesome way" as you proposed above.
            But something that spreads insidiously.

            What you don't want is a bioweapon than can spread indefinitely. Those are the kinds of things that can get out of your control quickly and end up turning on your own forces.

            Which brings us back to the main topic of discussion :

            - increasing the lethality of virus won't help doing that. If people start dying immediately, it won't move slowly, it will kill immediately a couple of people and then to move further due to absence of next victims in the immediate vicinity.
            Basically : you don't want t

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by mjwx ( 966435 )

      In the specific case of viruses, it's counter productive. As some hyper dangerous viruses have shown like Ebola, it you kill your host, you won't have a host into which to reproduce anymore. Viruses aren't full autonomous life forms, their just simple genetic code (recipes that need an actual host's cell with cellular machinery to interpret the code and produce more viruses).

      In addition to that excellent post, with viruses (as well as parasites and bacteria) there is an inverse relationship between comple

      • It needn't be complex, the virus co-opts host cell behavior anyway. Over-express a few select host cytokines in addition to the normal viral protein manufacture.

    • Some thing like this already happen in 1984 [wikipedia.org] in the U.S. Even though it was not very serious issue, it is shown the potential of seriousness...

    • If your goal was terrorism, you wouldn't care about creating a persistent threat, just a big splash of 'airborne ebola/HIV' or whatever that burns out quickly would be just fine. If you're a nationstate looking to wipe out enemies and then move in, it'd be even preferable. That the mutating population would regress to a less virulent form or wouldn't spread far beyond those initially exposed wouldn't matter. Unfortunately I'm not sure how you could propose countermeasures. Even for plenty of regular pat

    • It will suck for the first few patients who get sick, but the bugs will have a hard time taking over the world.
      Depends how infecting they are and how they get deployed, and then again we have this thing called air planes ...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by chill ( 34294 )

      The Atlantic has a good article [theatlantic.com] in their current issue that talks about this. However, their angle is not synthetic viruses, but rather just the natural terrors that have arisen from places like The Congo and how the world is horribly unprepared for a repeat of the 1918 Flu Epidemic.

      It is a very good read.

      • but rather just the natural terrors that have arisen from places like The Congo and how the world is horribly unprepared for a repeat of the 1918 Flu Epidemic.

        Indeed the flu is a good exemple (well save for the high mortality which was due to europe being post-war).

        All it takes is WHO and the vaccine manufacturer to mis-predict which emerging new virus strains are likely to show up in that year's seasonal flu and produce a vaccine that's thus useless.
        And by random chance that missed strain being sufficiently different from anything else, so very few people happen to still have good antibodies laying around.

        And as the flu isn't destructive, it won't immediately ki

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by eth1 ( 94901 )

      If some mad scientist create some lab monster that produces lots of lethal toxins, that synthetic virus is at a high risk of killing the host without having had any chance to spread.

      Wouldn't that kind of depend on the toxin? Take something lie acetaminophen: very safe until a threshold is passed, and then it suddenly becomes very deadly (a few hours to get an antidote, or you need a liver transplant to survive). The virus could have plenty of time with no symptoms to spread itself. Probably very hard to pull of something that specific, though, and not very likely to happen.

    • Just keep dropping a fresh batch into whatever area you are targeting..

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Right, so natural pathogens like influenza, polio, diptheria, tuberculosis and measles cold have never been a public health problem.

      There are a number of problems with your reasoning. First, it assumes the most simple minded genetic engineering target: make this pathogen kill everyone as immediately and spectacularly fatal as possible. You would engineer your pathogen for the maximum political and economic impact in the target population. For example you could engineer something like tuberculosis, whic

    • Any virus developed by a major nation for attacking any enemy, will likely be such that it will something like a rhino virus that makes men or women infertile. At the same time, you give a vaccine against it to your own ppl. IOW, rather than attack them directly, you instead go after the long shot.
      OTOH, somebody like ISIS or AQ, would simply make an avian flu strain merge with human flu, so that it can be easily spread amongst humans. Then release it in the enemy nations.
      • Someone would obviously notice if a country started mass vaccinating its entire population for an unknown mystery virus. It wouldn't be hard to get a sample and see whats going on. On the plus side though all the anti-vaxxers would be rendered infertile, so it's not all bad.

    • So yeah, a few mad scientist could try to CRIPR their way in clandestine lab to build super-bugs with ultra-killing genes, but if these monsters kill too fast, they won't stand a long term chance

      That's probably a perk.

      Let's say you're in your volcano lair in Elbonia, and you're wanting to harm, say, the US. The fact that your pathogen will likely burn itself out in the US and not get back to Elbonia is a good thing from your perspective.

  • The Sky Is Falling, and we must ... we must ... we must ... Honestly, We don't have the slightest idea what to do about this even at the conceptual level. Much less the practical level.

    If we are lucky, the threat will be ignored. If not, we'll do something stupid, absurd, and counterproductive that provides no actual security. Anti-viral theater.

    • Yeah unfortunately, even without regulatory hurdles, those exposed to an artificial plague would be long dead before you even figured out what it was or how it worked.

    • Yeah, basically the only way to deal with this is "Don't shut down the CDC".

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 1ucius ( 697592 )

      Presumably, they can stockpile antiviral meds, DARPA better antivirals, run quarantine drills, upgrade continuity of government plans, etc.

      Just having a plan to execute will save lives vs doing nothing.

  • It's really not a problem, just use OpenBSD, they're invulnerable to Spectre now, and the put security as a top priority (only two remote holes in the default install in a long time!), so you're probably safe.

    Oh, what? Like human viruses? What is the bs doing on Slashdot I'm going to write a nastly letter to Logan.

  • There's a comic called "Genocide man" about a world where open source extended to biology as well, which brought many changes, including deadly man made plagues. It is a rare known gem that I highly recommend.

    http://www.genocideman.com/?ca... [genocideman.com]

  • Shades of "Burning Chrome"

    Custom-tailored viruses. I should read that story again.

  • The US have been experimenting on these sort of things for quite some time. They recently apologised for injecting Guatemalan detainees with STDs including syphilis https://www.nytimes.com/2010/1... [nytimes.com] One can only assume that this science has continued, but in a more clandestine manner.
  • This is all totally FUD. Do you honestly think the left-wing nutjobs at the UN will let this through?

    As much as I support inflicting the most pain and suffering to the enemy (it's a fucking war, not a daycare center), I recognize this won't fly, since all bioweapons are banned already anyway.

  • This might explain Fermi's Paradox

  • Create it again and release it on an International airplane ride.

    Your immunization is up to date?

  • There really isn't any means to " prepare " for it.

    You won't know the signature for it until after it is released. We can combine a payload with any number of existing pathogens altered just enough so the body won't know what it is, until it's too late.

    You can't prepare for this any more than you can prepare for the next computer virus that has yet to be released.

  • We have a resovour of millions of people who can't afford to see a doctor. They won't go unless it is clear that whatever they have is life threatening. Many more who could just afford a doctor won't go because sick days are either unpaid or carry an unwritten penalty come review time.

    If a bioweapon is released in the right areas we could be swamped before we even notice.

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