Humankind witnesses dawn of biological warfare

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON: The contrast was familiar but instructive. In California recently, J. Craig Venter, co-founder of a genetic research company called Celera Genomics Corp., told the American Association for the Advancement of Science that cracking the genetic code of every bacteria and virus that could be used in germ warfare "would act as a deterrent" against attacks on the United States by 'extremists'.

'Extremists', presumably, are people who do not have the resources to attack the U.S. with nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.

(The other sort of people are called 'governments'.) And just as the fantasy of a 'Star Wars' anti-missile defense refuses to go away in the U.S. despite 20 years of wasted effort, so too the promise of a defense against bio-terrorism falls on fertile ground.

In the same week, the British Medical Association published its own report on the subject: 'Biotechnology, Weapons, and Humanity'. It is a grim document, warning that growing knowledge of the human genetic code opens the door for 'tailored' versions of lethal diseases that only attack members of a given ethnic group.

"We have a window of opportunity before weapons can be realistically manufactured," said Vivienne Nathanson, the head of health policy research at the BMA. But the report warned medical professionals that their research "may contribute, willingly or unwittingly, to the development of new, potent weapons...which may become a major threat to the existence of Homo sapiens."

The British report did not suggest that just a few truck-loads of money, given to the right high-tech companies, would solve the problem. It worried about the problem but offered no solution, only admonitions of caution. It was, in short, a striking demonstration that Britain and the United States are indeed "two countries divided by a common language" (as Churchill put it).

The difference goes deeper than the style of the language. It is the difference between people who believe that most technological problems can be solved by more technology, and those who take a more 'tragic' view of how the world works. They are both about half-right, of course, but their attitudes are so divergent that they can barely hear one another.

The threat is real. As scientists contributing to the vast international collaboration known as the Human Genome Project near their goal of mapping out, or 'sequencing', every gene in the human body, they are identifying the particular genes that distinguish the different ethnic groups of the human species. In the hands of a biological weapons-maker, that is very dangerous knowledge.

The drawback that made biological weapons almost useless in warfare was that they were indiscriminate. Infect the enemy's population with some virulent disease, and your own people will probably get it too. Besides, if it's mass destruction you're after, nuclear weapons are faster and chemical weapons are cheaper.

Soon, however, it will be possible for a 'bomb' carrying anthrax or the plague to be tailored so that it will only affect one ethnic group. The virus will enter everyone it encounters, but will only be activated in those with a certain set of genes that are typical of the target ethnic group.

That would be a highly usable weapon -- and it could be delivered in a cheap suitcase, not an expensive ICBM. Nobody could prove where it came from -- and at first nobody would even know if it was an attack, or just a very bad natural outbreak of disease.

"To sit there trying to manage an infectious outbreak, not knowing if it is man-made or natural, is terrible," said American scientist Dr. Frank Young, who was working at the Office of Emergency Preparedness in 1995 when hantavirus, a then unknown virus, started killing people in the U.S. south-west. It took five days for Young and his colleagues to decide that it was a natural virus, and even longer to figure out what it was.

So Young backs Venter's call for a 'bioterrorism genome project' to decipher the genetic code for every virus and bacteria with weapon potential. In theory, that would mean rapid detection of an attack, the ability to determine which bits of code have been altered to target a particular ethnic group, and rapid production of the right vaccines. It makes sense to spend some money on this, and the U.S. government has asked for US$206 million this year.

But that's only one-half of a strategy. It will certainly not 'deter' terrorists (who would be quite happy to kill the first 10,000 victims, before your counter-measures stop their germs), and it won't stop rogue governments from doing the research to tailor the pathogens to particular populations either.

This is no longer a theoretical matter. The apartheid regime in South Africa did a lot of work on bacteria that would attack only blacks, and Dr. Wouter Basson of the Roodeplat laboratory had much contact with U.S., Israeli, Taiwanese and German biological weapons experts. Iraq has a big germ warfare program, and there are signs that the former Soviet Union was even trying to 'weaponise' the lethal smallpox virus.

The other half of a strategy is to strengthen greatly the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, which bans germ weapons but, unlike the Chemical Weapons Convention or the Nuclear Test- Ban Treaty, makes no provision for inspections.

That was left out mainly due to the concern of pharmaceutical companies in the United States that inspection might reveal their commercial secrets about profitable new drugs to their competitors.

That would still be a problem today, but it's one that will have to be solved another way. Now that biological weapons are becoming usable, we cannot afford not to have an inspection regime.

There is an effort underway at the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva to strengthen the 1972 treaty, but it will not succeed if the United States (the likeliest target for a bio-terrorist attack) blocks inspections. Drug company profits are politically important -- but so, one would think, are American lives.