FUTURE: ASAF View of 2025

From: Roderick A. Carder-Russell (rodc@shore.net)
Date: Tue Jan 07 1997 - 18:07:56 MST


        The following is the article from Wired, version 4.11 (I was a
month off) regarding the future of warfare etc... by Ed Regis.
Also available at www.wired.com/wired/4.11/biowar

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E L E C T R O S P H E R E | Issue 4.11 - November 1996

 BioWar

     Wake-up call! Some of the world's farthest-out, cutting-edge, and
     high-technodazzle biotech thinking is now being done not by
     scientists and academics, but by the military.

     By Ed Regis

     On May 9 1996, by email, I received an invitation to attend a
     biotechnology workshop at the Army War College. The combination
     did not add up - not immediately. The biotech industry, after all,
     was engaged mainly in making new drugs or making old ones by new
     methods: you fiddled with the genes of certain microorganisms and
     tricked them into producing insulin, human growth hormone, or
     whatever. Clever, but still rather prosaic - nothing that the army
     would be holding a conference about.

     Then again, some of biotech's more wild-eyed dreamers had imagined
     lots of semi-science fictional biotechnology applications, like
     altering an organism's genes to such an extent that you created an
     entirely new animal, a special-purpose "designer" organism,
     anything from a new species of lab rat to a human being
     reverse-engineered for desired traits. Most of this was pretty
     far-out: people with gills for staying underwater, people with
     genuine body armor - Mr. Armadillo - hard-shell skins that bullets
     would bounce off, a human physique that included new-wave
     musculature, night vision, computer-chip-assisted memory, faster,
     bigger, and better brains.

     But that was Hollywood: that was Robocop, The Terminator, the Six
     Billion Dollar Bionic Wonder Woman. The army, I thought, couldn't
     be interested in that, either.

     And anyway, why me? True, I was the author of a book about
     nanotechnology, a science in which tiny molecular robots would be
     able to assemble any object, substance, or structure permitted by
     the laws of nature. These robots, I'd written, "could be
     programmed by some enemy power - or worse, a terrorist group - to
     slip over the border on a gust of wind, enter your body, and turn
     your bones to slime."

     Aha. A concept of military interest.

     And in an earlier work I'd talked about converting ordinary
     everyday humans into "transhumans," fabulous turbocharged
     specimens who sailed across the universe, learned its secrets,
     became omnipotent, and lived forever. Both of these books argued
     that all of this stuff, insane as it was, could really happen.
     None of it violated natural law.

     And then, suddenly, I could see the whole picture: the conference,
     titled Biotechnology Workshop 2020, would focus on battles to be
     fought in the future. These battles would not be limited to the
     hand grenades, assault rifles, and land mines of the 20th century
     - they would feature entirely new categories of weapons, munitions
     based on the biotech advances that would occur in the interim. The
     army, I concluded, was looking to produce fleets of attack
     microbes - maybe even a race of supersoldiers - by tinkering with
     DNA, the molecular basis of all life. And they wanted my
     far-seeing, penetrating, and all-knowing advice and counsel.

     So of course I said yes.

     The Army War College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, at the crossroads
     of the Pennsylvania Turnpike and Interstate 81, was a scene of
     vast amounts of truckage and muckage, engine noise and diesel
     fumes. The campus is ordinary: red brick classroom buildings,
     athletic fields, health clinic, chapel, a bunch of little white
     clapboard houses where the officers live. From the looks of it, it
     could be a college campus anywhere in the country.

     Except for Collins Hall, site of the workshop and home of the
     army's Center for Strategic Leadership. At the time of the
     conference, the place had just been constructed, and it looked as
     if it had been built to stage an opera about a rocket launch. It
     was bristling with architectural setbacks and galleries, balconies
     and turretlike structures. Entrance to the building was highly
     restricted: you checked in with a guard, got an electronic access
     key, and were admitted through a turnstile. You exited the same
     way. "If you walk out the wrong door, you'll be shot," joked one
     of the officers.

     The workshop was to take place in the Normandy Conference Room,
     the army's version of NASA Mission Control Headquarters - a tall,
     square, hushed chamber done in soft grays and greens. A large
     white screen at the front was flanked by digital clocks and
     electronic signboards that said, in red lettering: "Unclassified"
     and "Not Recording." Underneath the signs were large panes of
     one-way glass, as if we'd be under observation by a bank of
     psychiatrists. On the walls farther back were oil paintings the
     size of murals, of battle scenes - the Normandy invasion, one
     supposed - scenes of explosions, fires, and hot gases, of smoke
     rising and structures collapsing, walls turning into rubble, jeeps
     capsizing, cannons firing, soldiers running, falling, calling
     out....

     The focal point of the room was an enormous U-shaped conference
     table on which stood 20 or so computer terminals and, facing them,
     an equal number of plush, green, high-backed chairs. One of the
     participants, sitting down, did not like the view: "All you can
     see is the whites of the backs of their computers," he complained.
     He was hot for "eye contact." He would not get much of it.

     The two dozen experts now settling in were about half military and
     half civilian. The latter were in fields such as virology,
     evolutionary theory, and commercial biotechnology and hailed from
     such places as UCLA, Rockefeller University, the National
     Institutes of Health, the Institute for Biological Detection
     Systems, the Center for Human Performance and Complex Systems, and
     from firms called Nanotronics Inc. (a nanotechnology R&D firm) and
     Orion Enterprises Inc. (a consulting firm with military clients).
     The army people, some in uniform and some not, were from Fort
     Knox, the Pentagon, the Aberdeen Proving Ground, and so on, and
     were attached to places with names like Future Battle Directorate,
     Battlefield Environments Directorate, and US Army Chem/Bio Defense
     Command - whatever that was.

     This was the setup: We'd be given a series of expert briefings on
     biotechnology, on biotechnology and the army, on recent work in
     "human performance enhancements," and the like. Then we'd be given
     three alternate versions of the general world situation circa
     2020, along with a specific conflict situation in each case. Our
     job was to somehow take these three hypothetical scenarios, gaze
     into a crystal ball, and divine the future of biotech weaponry.
     The army would then be guided by our mystic visions when funding
     time came.

     There was a slightly Through the Looking-Glass feel to it all, as
     if this roomful of people would be any better at soothsaying than
     a bunch of chimpanzees. As if to underscore the point, Lieutenant
     Colonel Joe Pecoraro, then chief of the Army Research Laboratory's
     Future Technologies Institute, the agency sponsoring the workshop,
     explained that the whole proceeding would be conducted on
     nonattribution rules, meaning that who said exactly what could
     never be reported to anyone else.

     Finally, a word from Major George Hluck, the facility's smiling
     and cheery "knowledge engineer." Our computer terminals, he said,
     as the display screens came to life, were for the use of the
     "Topic Commenter," the army's implementation of a real-time chat
     function. The chat feature would enable each of us to share our
     private thoughts with the others. This was the high tech
     equivalent of passing notes back and forth under the desk, and
     having it at our disposal here was almost too good to be true.

     We were not dissuaded from using the chat function; in fact we
     were encouraged, almost pressured, to do so. Please use it at any
     time! Pass along those notes! Just type in your comments about
     anything at all - but especially about the briefing in progress -
     then press the Send key and Bingo! your words will magically
     appear, anonymously and unsigned, on everyone else's computer
     screen.

     And so a minute later, clickata-clickata-clickata, anonymous
     comments were bubbling up on our displays, trenchant observations
     on the order of:

     It is ethically questionable to solicit anonymous comments.Darn,
     what a SUPER briefing that was!!!

     July 2020, and Turkey is at war with Iran and Syria. The latter
     two countries, sick of their constant water shortages, have
     invaded Turkey and taken control of a major dam and reservoir.
     Turkey, after mobilizing its troops, calls upon the United States
     for assistance.

     The US sends a total of 300,000 troops, plus navy and air force
     backup units, into the area. Together, the combined US forces are
     supposed to (1) throw the invaders out of Turkey, (2) advance into
     Iran and Syria to incapacitate the main forces of those countries,
     and (3) "locate and neutralize Iranian and Syrian nuclear,
     biological, and chemical weapons, their means of delivery, and
     their production facilities."

     That was "Defense Planning Scenario 1."

     Scenario 2 was not much different, except for the fact that Iran
     and Syria were now threatening to drop a nuclear bomb on a major
     Turkish population center. The US, in response, sends in eight
     army assault units plus special operations forces, to (1) attack
     enemy headquarters, (2) destroy their command, control, and
     logistics sites, and (3) wipe out their weapons facilities.

     In July 2020, however, this is no problem. First of all, our foot
     soldiers are protected by biocamouflage, clothing that changes
     color automatically, allowing the troops to visually merge with
     the background. Their outer garments sense the ambient temperature
     and harmonize with it, rendering the wearer imperceptible to
     temperature-sensing devices, heat-seeking weapons, or infrared
     detectors. The troops become as invisible as chameleons, for the
     same reasons, and by essentially the same biological mechanisms.

     The enemy, however, is not invisible - not to the army's newly
     developed artificial smart noses. The Americans ferret out their
     adversaries by means of biosensors, biologically based olfactory
     sensing units that discover the presence, location, and strength
     of opposing troop concentrations by detecting - believe it or not
     - their odors, the characteristic airborne molecules or
     "downstream effluents" they discharge.

     Having pinpointed the enemy battalions, the US troops now advance
     toward them and deploy a full range of nonlethal, nonhuman
     bioweapons - antimaterial microbes, for example. These genetically
     engineered organisms have been programmed to eat the rubber from
     enemy vehicles, decimating their tires, engine gaskets, coolant
     hoses, and fuel lines. Other antimaterial microorganisms
     infiltrate fuel tanks and turn their stores of gas and diesel oil
     to masses of incombustible jelly. Still others selectively target
     and destroy the adversary's silicon devices: they eat the insides
     of their computers, command and control systems, navigational
     instruments, and anything else containing a silicon chip. These
     spreading, hungry bioagents immobilize enemy forces by turning
     their hardware into blobs of goo.

     In latter-day military parlance, this is "soft kill" - disabling
     the enemy's infrastructure. "Hard kill" - physically maiming or
     killing the adversary - has not gone out of style in 2020, but
     there are now some distinctly improved methods of doing it. Enemy
     leaders, for example, can be knocked off by means of genetically
     engineered superpathogens that are so selective in their behavior
     they're capable of targeting specific individuals, verifying their
     identities by means of their DNA sequences. They'd have been able
     to erase Adolf Hitler from the face of the earth while leaving
     everyone else whole and unharmed.

     Out on the battlefield, meanwhile, complex tactical decisions are
     made by biocomputers the size of sugar cubes. Stored in the
     computer's biomemory are summaries of the most successful battle
     strategies in history, from the ancient Greeks to the present,
     plus local terrain maps, dictionaries of the native languages,
     guides to local flora and fauna, maybe even a list of Turkey's
     best restaurants, complete with menus, prices, and ordering
     information.

     The American troops, however, instantly "grow" their food and
     drink, their fuels and supplies - including bullets and explosives
     - by manufacturing them on-site, molecule by molecule, out of the
     biofeedstock molecules that they carry along with them. Such
     on-the-spot "bioprocessing" technologies have revolutionized troop
     supply and logistics, doing away with the long and vulnerable
     provisions caravans of yore.

     These well-fed and continually replenished soldiers are kept
     healthy and disease-free by means of DNA vaccinations that have
     made them immune to all known pathogens. Old-style vaccinations
     worked by introducing mild viruses into humans with the object of
     provoking an immune response. These new vaccines avoid the risks
     of injecting people with deadly agents; they work, instead,
     directly at the DNA level. Patients are injected with specially
     tailored strands of DNA that cause their immune systems to
     generate the entire array of needed antibodies. In consequence,
     the subjects become immune to every pathogen they might encounter,
     everything from yellow fever, malaria, and hepatitis to cholera,
     Ebola, and HIV - plus whatever new-wave viruses have freshly
     emerged.

     If and when they finally go into battle, the troops are
     safeguarded by microbe-grown body enclosures that hold back not
     only poison gases and biological and chemical agents but also the
     otherwise deadly projectile. The bodysuit, in addition, increases
     the wearer's overall strength by means of precisely placed
     artificial musculature that boosts the power of arms, legs,
     fingers, and toes. The soldier's protective helmet is equipped
     with bio-based, high-resolution night-vision devices that
     effectively turn darkness into daylight.

     Any injuries sustained in spite of all this camouflage,
     nourishment, biological immunity, and physical protection are
     cured with accelerated healing technologies. In the field, wounds
     are speed-healed by the application of enzymatic growth factors
     and are then patched over by intelligent bioadhesives instead of
     dumb bandages. Those more seriously hurt are put into suspended
     animation before being medevac'd out to hospitals, where
     artificial blood, bones, tissues, and ligaments - even whole
     organs - are bioproduced and implanted into the injured as needed.

     And then, when it's all over, the troops clean up as they go by
     the use of sophisticated "bioremediation" systems. Fleets of
     programmed microbes decontaminate and detoxify the entire area,
     leaving it in a condition as good as, if not better than, it was
     in the first place.

     By the time the soldiers leave, it's as if the war had never
     happened.

     We at the army's biotechnology workshop, unfortunately, had not
     come up with any of this. More bizarre than some of the crazed
     ideas themselves was the fact that all of our thinking had been
     done for us, well in advance, by the army, and by the workshop's
     organizers, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC)
     of McLean, Virginia. SAIC, whose gaming division runs war games
     for all branches of the military, had been hired by the army to
     research, plan, and moderate the whole two-day extravaganza.

     Steven Kenney, of SAIC's Strategic Assessment Center, had FedExed
     all of us a little read-ahead package, 200 pages of technical,
     semitechnical, and popular writings about the latest biotech
     advances and their potential application to warfare. Included,
     among other things, were several chapters from biotechnology
     textbooks, an article from Scientific American about directed
     molecular evolution, and two pieces from Wired: "Neurobotics," by
     Michael Gruber (Wired 2.10, page 110), about using rat-brain
     tissue to solve chemical-engineering problems; and "Gene Genie,"
     by Thomas Bass (Wired 3.08, page 114), about the DNA computer.
     Also included were excerpts from the army's own in-house STAR 21
     report, compiled by the National Research Council. Subtitled
     "Strategic Technologies for the Army of the Twenty-First Century,"
     it sketched out a representative sampling of biotech weaponry.
     Capping the read-ahead were two SAIC-produced white papers titled
     "Biotechnology - Projections," and "Biotechnology - Military
     Applications." Collectively, these documents laid out everything
     for us, chapter and verse, in great and exhaustive detail. Our
     function, it seemed increasingly evident, was merely to cough back
     up their sum and substance. The participants themselves soon
     noticed as much:

     This is, in many respects, a repeat of the read-ahead.The workshop
     seems to be a rehash of already extant laundry lists of
     technologies to me. Our contribution may be the addition of the
     preface "bio-" to all other nouns relating to warfare.

     The question arose, then, as to why the workshop had been held -
     especially in view of its roughly US$100,000 price tag.

     "Three reasons," Joe Pecoraro, the Future Technologies Institute
     chief, said a couple of months later. "One, there was the hope
     that someone would say something unique. Did that happen? I'm not
     sure.

     "Another reason was that I wanted to get a notion from the
     military themselves as to which applications would be of most use
     to them. Just because something's got a use to the civilian sector
     doesn't mean it's got any use to the military.

     "And I wanted to get a line on costs. How feasible is any of this,
     in terms of cost and development time?"

     Some months prior to the workshop, Kenney, coauthor of SAIC's
     white paper on the military applications of biotechnology,
     actually had given Pecoraro at least some of what he was looking
     for. Kenney had contacted representatives of eight military
     organizations - the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth
     and the Army Armor Center at Fort Knox, among others -
     specifically to get their views concerning biotech's military
     potential, and he had then incorporated a summary of their
     opinions into the white paper.

     As for the workshop, it did not yield the ranking of biotech
     applications that Pecoraro was after. At the end, participants
     were asked to list the several military applications in order of
     their probable usefulness in warfare. But when they did that, the
     SAIC-designed algorithm for this - a formal mass-voting procedure
     conducted with the aid of comically misnamed "meeting facilitation
     software" - underwent a meltdown in a huge bonfire of the
     technologies. No two participants could agree on what, if
     anything, the required numerical scores meant, or on what basis
     they should be assigned. As one of the participants remembered it
     later: "We rated items against undefined criteria, using a
     numerical rating scheme in which the numbers assigned had meaning
     only to the individual scorer. Then, we averaged these scores to
     obtain a totally meaningless number. God forbid that someone
     actually use the results for something!"

     In view of the manner in which they were obtained, that was an
     unlikely prospect.

     James Valdes, who gave us the Army and Biotechnology briefing, is
     the army's scientific adviser for biotechnology. He works at what
     in the old days was the Edgewood Arsenal, part of the Aberdeen
     Proving Ground, in Maryland. In these times of nomenclature
     inflation, it has become the Edgewood Research, Development, and
     Engineering Center, and Valdes works at the US Army Chemical and
     Biological Defense Command.

     Physically, the place hasn't changed much over the years. It's a
     flat spit of pine barrens that juts out into Chesapeake Bay. Deer
     graze calmly along the roadsides, beside chain-link fences topped
     with alternating coils of barbed wire and razor wire. Inside the
     first fence is a no-man's-land, then another identical fence.
     Watchful TV cameras point up and down the no-man's-land, and
     rusted signs nearby read: "Warning," "Danger," "Restricted Area,"
     and (the biggie) "Use of Deadly Force Authorized."

     Jay Valdes, who runs Edgewood's biotech program, did postdoctoral
     work at Johns Hopkins in neurotoxicology. He's a precise,
     personable, and friendly type, a nautical chap who keeps a 20-foot
     sailboat out on the Chesapeake and can rattle off the differences
     between schooner, bark, sloop, ketch, and yawl as easily as he can
     enumerate the several varieties of nerve gas.

     The army's "contaminant degrading" organisms are nothing new to
     him. There are tons of them at Edgewood, and they aren't even
     genetically engineered. They're just plain microbes, just
     standard, run-of-the-mill soil bacteria, albeit ones with
     specialized eating abilities and acquired tastes. Some of them eat
     petroleum products, a proficiency they've acquired all by
     themselves.

     "If you have a site that's been contaminated with petroleum
     products," Valdes explains, "then just by natural selection, the
     microbes that live in the soil will have evolved mechanisms to
     enable them to degrade petroleum products. The microbes that eat
     them survive; the ones that don't die. Thus, they select
     themselves out."

     So if you want to get rid of, degrade, or otherwise
     "dematerialize" a patch of petroleum, you merely go out to a
     contaminated site and collect samples of the indigenous soil
     bacteria. You bring them back to the lab, separate out those that
     eat the noxious pollutants, and then culture up big vats of them.
     Later, you go back out into the field and deposit the cultured
     petroleum eaters wherever they're needed. Not long afterward, the
     microbes have converted the noxious pollutants into harmless, or
     maybe even helpful, by-products.

     Formally, this is known as in situ biodegradation; the process
     works so well against a wide range of contaminants that several
     private cleanup companies now ply the trade commercially. The
     army's biodegradation needs are somewhat specialized, however,
     there being large stockpiles of chemical agents - mustard gas, for
     example, left over from the good old days - that by law must be
     destroyed and turned into innocuous waste. Biotechnology can play
     a role here, because if you can identify the specific enzyme that
     a microbe uses to degrade a given chemical, then you can
     manufacture the enzyme itself and apply it to the chemical
     directly.

     "And if you can identify the gene that codes for the particular
     enzyme that breaks down your pollutant," Valdes explains, "then
     you can clone that gene and produce that enzyme in large
     quantities."

     At the Process Engineering Facility, a new $15 million building at
     Edgewood, the needed enzymes are produced in fermentation tanks
     and then tested for effectiveness on 20-foot-tall columns of
     contaminated soil. If the process works in the lab, it ought to
     work just as well in the field; the hope is that these experiments
     will yield an environmentally friendly way of turning poisonous
     agents into benign substances.

     The hot-ticket item in military biotech circles these days,
     however, is the biosensor, an electromechanical device that
     detects airborne molecules in extremely small amounts. Valdes and
     his colleagues are now developing biosensors. The simplest consist
     of a computer chip topped with a layer of biological molecules
     that selectively bond with molecules of a known compound. When
     such a "recognition event" occurs, the computer chip sends a
     signal, informing the human observer that there are molecules of
     the substance floating about: a toxic gas, perhaps, or an
     explosive. If and when they become effective at sniffing out a
     wide range of deadly agents, biosensors promise an enormous
     payoff, both within the military and in civilian environments,
     such as airport luggage security checkpoints.

     Other biotech marvels are in their earliest developmental stages,
     both in the army and in private industry. Researchers at an army
     R&D center at Natick, Massachusetts, are working on biocamouflage
     materials. Koors, an Israeli food company, is experimenting with
     an algae that produces glycerol, a key ingredient in many
     strategically important compounds. And at the laboratories in West
     Point, Pennsylvania, researchers at Merck & Co., a pharmaceutical
     firm, are in early clinical trials of a DNA vaccine against
     tuberculosis and another one against influenza. Also targeted are
     hepatitis, malaria, and HIV.

     Those applications are probably doable in the relatively near
     term. Farther out, in the stargazing realm, are the more gee-whiz
     notions like food-producing machinery in the battlefield,
     microbe-grown bodysuits, suspended animation, and
     performance-enhanced supersoldiers. Although conference members
     agreed that such things were in principle possible in the sense
     that they violated no known laws of nature, they could not agree
     on when, if, or by whom any of them might be converted to
     practical realities.

     "Who can judge that?" asked one of the military scientists after
     the workshop. "The future applications of biotechnology are
     dependent upon scientific advancements and economics, much more so
     than the needs as perceived by the likes of us."

     "I think there is a reasonable chance (50-50) of success in most
     of these areas," said another attendee.

     "I think we'll see some of the biocamouflage material by 2020,"
     said a third. "Perhaps limited bioproduction of alcohol as a
     fuel."

     "The bulk of the applications, in my opinion, are realistic in the
     sense of being performable tasks," said still another. "This,
     provided that adequate resources are forthcoming."

     And provided that the research is allowed by law. Today, because
     of international treaty conventions against all forms of offensive
     biological weapons research, the United States is prohibited from
     developing any such fancy gimmicks as DNA-targeted superpathogens.

     As for the prospect of nonlethal bioweapons ever completely
     replacing bombs and bullets, this, say the experts, probably will
     not happen: "There will always be a need, in warfare, for
     violence," said Joe Pecoraro. "We will never find a technological
     solution that removes violence from warfare. The implements that
     we use to conduct the violence I can't predict, but it will be
     there."

     Scenario 3. July, 2020: Brazil invades Venezuela seeking to
     acquire its newly discovered oil reserves. Venezuela appeals to
     the United States for help, and we respond by sending in the
     biotroops.

     This time, according to the scenario, we've got technology to
     burn: biotechnology, nanotechnology, artificial intelligence,
     robotics - all of it has been developed and has succeeded beyond
     our wildest expectations. Wars, therefore, are now conducted
     long-range and by remote control. Robotic combat and remote
     telepresence have replaced traditional ground warfare. On this
     battlefield of the future, intelligent robots outnumber humans.

     Maybe. Or at least so we thought. As to what would really happen
     in the warfare situations of the future.... Well, who knew?

     We have to realize that what we are doing is scripting a major
     Hollywood movie about fighting an imaginary war with weapons that
     don't exist yet, with technologies that are still largely on the
     drawing boards and whose development and time frame is unknown. Is
     this anything more than military science fiction?

     Military science fiction or not, the workshop held two surprises
     for me. One was that in 2020, a generation away, the United
     States, according to all three scenarios, would still be sending
     troops winging off across the oceans like passenger pigeons, at
     the slightest provocation.

     The second, bigger surprise was my realization that some of the
     world's farthest-out, cutting-edge, and high-technodazzle biotech
     thinking was now being done not by scientists or academics but by
     the military, and not just the army. The air force's scientific
     advisory board has done a study, known as "New World Vistas," that
     looks 20 to 30 years into the future and foresees many of the same
     biotech devices and gadgetry.

     There is a reason for the military's farsightedness. The main
     elements of the biotech revolution are now available to pretty
     much anyone, meaning, like it or not, that the nation's enemies -
     even just a handful of terrorists, perhaps - might already be
     developing offensive bioweapons. Biotechnology is, after all,
     "small science," the province of desktop machinery and lab
     glassware as opposed to particle accelerators or nuclear reactors;
     you don't need a Manhattan Project or an Apollo Program to pursue
     it.

     "Some potential adversaries may be ahead of us in this
     technological area," says the army's STAR 21 report. "The United
     States did not keep the secrets of atomic warfare for long, even
     in the secretive atmosphere of the 1940s and 1950s. In the
     communicative, mobile, commercial world of the next 30 years, the
     data for both defensive and offensive biotechnological
     breakthroughs will be uncontainable and, essentially, public
     information. Almost any country will be able to possess the data."

     With which those countries could create some spectacularly
     damaging stealth microbes.

     "They could destabilize economies," says Jay Valdes at Edgewood.
     "They could selectively wipe out crops and livestock, and they
     could do it with plausible deniability. 'Oh, your rice crop got
     rice rust! Oh, so sorry!'

     "I don't want to give anybody any ideas about how to do this," he
     adds, "but I think it would be fairly straightforward."

     So, the biowars may be out there in the dim distance along with
     biomaterials, biomimetics, bioproduction, biocoupling,
     bioremediation, biocomputers, biochips, biosensors, biofeedstocks,
     biogenetics, and all the other assorted bios.

     By the end of the bioworkshop, anyway, we were up to our bioears
     in biothoughts:

     After bio-bombing by Bio-52s, bio-gones will be bio-gones.

     Bio all means.

     I'm going home, bio-bio.

     Abios amigos.

     Ed Regis (edregis@aol.com) is the author of Virus Ground Zero
     (Pocket Books, 1996), Nano (Little Brown, 1995), and Great Mambo
     Chicken and the Transhuman Condition (Addison-Wesley, 1990).

     Copyright © 1993-96 Wired Magazine Group, Inc.
     Compilation copyright © 1994-96 HotWired, Inc.

     All rights reserved.

______________________________________________________________________________
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                         Roderick A. Carder-Russell
                     Transhumanist/Immortalist/Cryonicist
                     Suspension Member - Alcor Foundation
                     specializing in man-machine symbiosis
      
       e-mail: rodc@shore.net WWW: http://www.shore.net/~rodc/home.html
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