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 A few months ago, Roger Brent, a geneticist who runs a California biotech firm, sent me an unpublished paper in which he wrote that genetically engineered bioweapons developed by small teams are a bigger threat than suitcase nukes.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