From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@www.aeiveos.com)
Date: Wed Oct 06 1999 - 16:23:25 MDT
On Wed, 6 Oct 1999, David Lubkin wrote:
>
> What scares me is biological warfare. The scenario in Clancy's _Rainbow
> Six_. Find or engineer a biological agent that has a very high mortality
> rate and a fairly long incubation period. Spread it through airports or
> (inter)national events. Better still, develop and release several
> different agents, or different versions of the same agent (perhaps with
> different transmission vectors) -- making it more difficult for society to
> cope with.
>
> For all we know such a scenario has already occurred, and we are still in
> the incubation period.
Yep, but pretty doubtful.
> Please, Bob, convince me that this can't happen....
If are asking me, I generally go by Robert (no apology required),
I'll try to comment.
The general anti-biowarfare argument is that it is difficult to keep
the plague from infecting the source. Even if you solve that problem,
in the scenario you outline there is a good chance the collapse of
world services would be so great that you would drive even the country
that had planned for it back to the bronze-age. We are extremely
interconnected in ways we don't see unless we think about it really hard.
[Where did the arsenic that was used to dope the silicon in the chip
that sits in your computer actually come from? etc.] If you weren't
*very* careful about it (making a bioweapon expire after a certain time
period) it wouldn't be safe for you to go anywhere on the planet.
It would be very very difficult to engineer a bioweapon that had
specificity for people you considered your "enemies" (it would have
to essentially sequence their DNA or have to respond in a highly
specific way to a protein found in those individuals). Slightly,
but *only* slightly, easier would be "time-delay" bioweapons.
You have to have something that multiplies very slowly (which gives
your immune system time to detect it and develop defenses against it)
or something that hides very effectively (Mycoplasma like those causing
TB can do this) or something that goes through rapid transformations
(e.g. the malaria parasite) or something that mutates very rapidly
(like HIV). Then you have to have a some switch that causes it to go
from "stealth" mode to "kill" mode (there are bacterial viruses
(phage) that do this and to a lesser degree herpes viruses).
Then you really have to have arial transmission if you want
it to spread effectively. I believe that the Nobel prize
winner Joshua Lederberg is on record of being quite afraid
that HIV might develop the ability to spread by air. However
I'm pretty sure that HIV is an enveloped virus (stealing your
cell membranes on leaving a cell) and so it is rather fragile
and probably difficult to transmit by air. If you are dealing
with viruses then you probably want to use a non-enveloped
virus that already infects the respiratory tract. The problem
is that those viruses have pretty small genomes and so your
ability to engineer them for long incubation times and
letality may be quite limited. Engineering something like
a bigger viral capsid so you can have a bigger genome
(more control elements and effectors) is way beyond
our current abilities.
So while we have examples of some of the functionality required,
I very much doubt the knowledge and resources currently exist
to engineer the type of "bug" required. You could begin to
think about this maybe in 5 years or so when the technology
gets much better and much more knowledge has accumulated.
You *still* however have to solve the specificity problem
and the expiration problem. You might be able to get around
these by vaccinating yourself or engineering your own cells
to produce a "suppressor". But you may be on a slippery
slope because you have to remember that anything based on
Nature's self-replicating machines is designed to eventually
mutate!
Also, you have to consider that as our technology & knowledge
increases, so does our ability to respond quickly. We have
the sequencing capacity, X-ray machines, molecular modeling
programs, etc. that now allow *very* rapid dissassembly
of "new" bugs. Unless you make your bug kill everyone
at the same time we stand to have very good chances of
finding and disassembling the "bomb" and developing some
kind of response to it. And once we solve that problem
you can be pretty sure that we are going to be pretty upset.
I've discussed this problem regarding SIs going to "war"
with each other. The problem with using WoMD in environments
where nanotech exists is that you have to make damn sure
that you wipe out every last speck of intelligent machines
with the ability to self-assemble. Similarly with bioweapons
you had better make sure that you get every last individual
of whomever you are targeting. Because if someone is alive
to return the favor, your life is going to be at risk forever.
This is why the "Mutually Assured Destruction" solution
to the nuclear weapons problem has worked. Its hell to
live in that environment but so far it seems to have worked.
So, I think these are tough nuts to crack using "dumb"
bacteria or even dumber viruses. Now, using "intelligent"
nanotech however they become easier. The problem
would then be that your body isn't exactly a wonderful
environment in which nanobots built from hard nanotech
could replicate themselves. So then you either have to
infect everyone individually or develop micro-sized
nanobot factories that can be assembled by a nanobot
in-vivo. Those things are a long way off.
In the long run however these developments are things we do need
to think about (if you look at moves by the U.S. government
they suggest they are aware of your scenario to some degree but
aren't talking about it). It would be interesting to know whether
we have a biolab with P4 containment hidden under a mountain
or in a submarine someplace where the people have agreed to
lock themselves in "forever". And one can certainly wonder
what genomes *have* been sequenced by the military that aren't
in the public databases.
Ultimately I suspect we will get to the point where we have
to have nanobot immune systems. It will be interesting to
see if and how Robert F. handles this in future volumes of
Nanomedicine.
I think the reason we have a bunch of "plague" books out
is that the general population doesn't know enough to find
the holes in them. To stumble over something like Ebola
that is fatal to us (while presumably living quite comfortably
in its natural host) is simply one of the risks of populating
the entire planet. To engineer something with the qualities
required for a good bioweapon seems quite beyond our capabilities
and knowledge at this time.
Robert
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