by Stefano Vaj
Traditional biological weapons consist basically in viruses, microbes, fungi, protozoa and toxins, that as such have until now never been used on a larger scale. The historical reasons for the limited utilisation of these tools are to be found among other things in the cost and perils involved in treating and stocking large amounts of pathogens and in the difficulty to control their spread, but also in the relatively easy traceability of biological attack and the probability that the advantage gained will be eclipsed by the inevitable enemy retaliation.
Today this situation appears to have been radically altered. In a report from May 1986, presented to the Committee of Appropriation, House of Representative, the US Department of Defence stressed how biotechnology is about to make many types of biological warfare realistic and profitable.[334]
In this report one reads among other things: “[Advances in Biotechnology] permit the elaboration of a wide variety of “novel” warfare materials […] The novel agents represent the newly found ability to modify, improve, or produce large amounts of natural materials or organisms previously considered to be militarily insignificant due to problems such as availability, stability, infectivity, and producibility.”
The report goes on to say:
Potent toxins which until now were available only in minute quantities, and only upon isolation from immense amounts of biological materials, can now be prepared in industrial quantities after a relatively short developmental period. This process consists of identifying genes, encoding for the desired molecule, and transferring the sequence to a receptive microorganism which then becomes capable of producing the substance. The recombinant organisms may then be cultured and grown at any desired scale […]. Large quantities of compounds, previously available only in minute amounts, thus become available at relatively low costs. [With recombinant DNA it is now possible to develop] a nearly infinite variety of what might be termed “designer agents.” [The new developments in genetic engineering technology make possible] the rapid exploitation of nature’s resources for warfare purposes in ways not even imagines ten or fifteen years ago.
Just a few months later, in August of the same year Douglas J. Feith, then Deputy Secretary of Defence, declared to the US parliamentary committee on intelligence agencies: “Today it is possible to synthesize biowarfare agents tailored to military specifications. The technology that makes possible the so-called ‘designer drugs’ also makes possible designer biowarfare. […] It is becoming a simple matter to produce new agents but a problem to develop antidotes. New agents can be produced in hours; antidotes may take years.”[335]
Actually, the biotechnological techniques can be used for a variety of military goals, from State terrorism to operations of counter insurgency, to large scale campaigns to destroy the economies of enemy countries or their civil population, and require the allocation of industrial capacity and investment that are way smaller that what is required by conventional or nuclear warfare. A trivial use of available tools is for instance the deliberate creation of a batch of bacteria altered in such a way as to render them more virulent, easier to stock and resistant to antibiotics.
A more sophisticated approach is to introduce lethal genes in naturally innocuous microorganisms that do not generate any immune response in the animal or human targets. Genetic engineering can also be specifically used to destroy specific species or stocks of cultivated plants and animals, and even used to exploit various genetically programmed sensitivities to a specific disease inside human ethnic groups.
There is no need to point out that it is even easier to conceive of genetic “Trojan horses,” particularly in the agricultural field, that is, of cultivable varieties, genetically altered and destined to replace the native varieties, of which they activate the self-destruction. Moreover, it is possible to produce and liberate modified animal or plant species able to disrupt the ecological balance of the enemy land, but with incorporated control mechanisms used to avoid interference with one’s own cultivations.
Naturally, what is made clear from this kind of research is that it always concerns the “defence” against biological warfare. As one study by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute remarks, however, “some common methods of producing vaccines are technically very near to the production of agents used as biological weapons, giving therefore an easy opportunity to convert and cover up.”[336]
In particular, as Richard Goldstein, professor of microbiology at Harvard, admits, the US Department of Defence [DOD]
can justify working with the super pathogens of the world – producing altered and more virulent strains, producing vaccines for protection of their troops against such agents...and likewise for the development of dispersal systems since DOD must be able to defend against any such dispersal system. Under this guise, what DOD ends up with is a new biological weapons system – a virulent organism, a vaccine against it and a dispersal system. As you can gather from this, there is but a very thin line – if any – between such a defensive system (allowed by the conventions) and any prohibited offensive system.[337]
Such programmes are supported by a widespread and ongoing propaganda. Already during the first Gulf War, American sources attributed to Iraq the availability of what the “mad dictator,” also known as President Saddam Hussein, allegedly defined as the “great leveller,” that is, an arsenal of 25 SCUD missile warheads for a combined 5 tons of biological agents, among which the Botulinum toxin and Anthrax germs, and another 15 tons ready to be included in devices designed for aerial bombardment.
A study by the Technology Assessment Office from 1993 subsequently made known that the liberation of a mere hundred kilos of anthrax spores over the town of Washington could have killed over three million people.[338] The apocalypse was not triggered, we learn, only because the Secretary of State James Baker discretely suggested to Saddam Hussein, “in polite but firm terms,” that the actual use of the weapons allegedly available to defend Iraqi sovereignty, at the very moment when it was [positively] the object of a Western attack, would be met with “extreme measures,” meaning the launch of nuclear devices on Baghdad.[339]
This kind of politico-fictional fabulation, obviously “unofficial,” but given credence by mainstream press, does not explain how it was possible that an effective deterrent in the hands of a “madman” had no effect whatsoever on American military adventurism in the region, or how the madman in question could be intimidated by a threat…against the very civilians that the selfsame dictator was blamed for despising and tyrannising.
Similar legends have nonetheless been useful for over twenty years to create a useful atmosphere of paranoia (see the relentless propaganda on “weapons of mass destruction,” to which the United States and other nations have had undisturbed access since at least the 1950s,) an atmosphere that in turn justifies huge financial investments to prepare for biological warfare.[340]
Already in a 1995 study the CIA alleged that seventeen countries were carrying out programs of military biotechnology, namely Iraq, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Taiwan, Israel, Egypt, Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Bulgaria, India, South Korea, South Africa, as well as obviously China and Russia.[341]
On the other hand, according to a report published in 2002 by the American National Academy of Science,
just a few individuals with specialised scientific skills and access to a laboratory could inexpensively and easily produce a panoply of lethal biological weapons that might seriously threaten the U.S. population. Moreover, they could manufacture such biological agents with commercially available equipment – that is, equipment that could also be used to make chemicals, pharmaceuticals, foods, or beer – and therefore remain inconspicuous. […] The deciphering of the human genome sequence and the complete elucidation of numerous pathogen genomes, our rapidly increasing understanding of the molecular mechanisms of pathogenesis and of immune responses, and new strategies for designing drugs and vaccines all offer unprecedented opportunities to counter bioterrorist threats. But these same develo
pments also allow science to be misused to create new agents of mass destruction.[342]
If there is no doubt about the activism of the US military-industrial complex in this field, Western alarmism about the spread of applications of this kind is evidently not founded only on invented facts.[343] And since in this field the ability to attack, the ability to defend, and deterrence simply represent different aspects of the availability of the same technologies, it is clear what their unavailability means for the real sovereignty of any given country.
The capacity for defence and for attack is moreover decisive, not only in scenarios of open military aggression, but also in the event of subtler forms of low-intensity economic warfare, or even in the case of accidental and unintended release of pathological agents. The theory that the AIDS virus could have originated inside American military laboratories,[344] although probably just an urban legend, demonstrates by its own very diffusion the increasing plausibility of this kind of hypothesis, to which the only response resides in the capacity to develop and select immune stocks, and when necessary to program such immunity in human, plant and animal populations.[345]
Biological warfare is however only one aspect of technological, economical and demographical struggles of a more general nature, within the framework of the general, epochal “paradigm shift” in question.
We have already discussed the projects and applications concerning the vegetal realm and the industrial use of modified microorganisms or insects, but current research programmes include much wider and more and technically complex applications than those involving seed and protozoa, are aimed at directly affecting higher animals and human beings.
Says Rifkin:
At the University of Adelaide in Australia, scientists have developed a novel breed of genetically engineered pigs that are 30% more efficient and brought to the market seven weeks earlier than normal pigs. The Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Organisation has produced genetically engineered sheep that grow 30% faster than normal ones and are currently transplanting genes into sheep to make their wool grow faster. At the university of Wisconsin, scientists genetically altered brooding turkey hens to increase their productivity. Brooding hens lay one-quarter to one-third fewer eggs than non-brooding hens. As brooding hens make up nearly 20% of an average flock, researchers were anxious to curtail the “brooding instinct” because “broodiness disrupts production and costs producers a lot of money.” By blocking the gene that produces the prolactin hormone, biologists were able to limit the natural brooding instinct in hens. The new breed of genetically engineered hens no longer exhibits the mothering instinct. They do, however, produce more eggs.[346]
One of the oddest biotechnological projects is that of Canadian Nexia, that works on the hypothesis that it can produce massive quantities of spider web in goats in which have been inserted the spider gene. We have already mentioned the peculiar properties of this fibre. Now, it so happens that the milk of transgenic goats contains vastly superior quantities of the wanted protein than what would be obtained from a “spider farm” – that in any case could not be put into practice because these are cannibal spiders. “Get together a group and what you end up with is one single, fat and happy spider,” remarks Jeffrey Turner, the chief molecular biologist at Nexia.[347]
In the meantime, a Texas company, Yorktown Technologies, has begun to sell an aquarium fish called Glofish, that is shiny red in daylight and turns fluorescent in ultraviolet light,[348] based on the “decorative” graft from genes provided by the sea anemone on a tropical fish, the zebra fish, black and silver in nature. On its own, the news would only be interesting from a legal point of view, because no one knows to which American public agency pertains the competence with respect to the release of such genetically modified fish: the Food and Drug Administration insists that it has no authority on this matter because this is neither a food item, like transgenic salmon, nor a drug or any other substance destined for human consumption; the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Agriculture do similarly maintain that ornamental fish do not belong to their area of specialisation.
Yet the Glofish is nothing other than the “Americanised” fruit of a technology developed at the end of 1999 by a scientist at the University of Singapore, who discovered that fish modified with various groups of genes taken from medusas are able to “light up” in a given colour only in the presence of heavy metals, oestrogen or toxins, becoming therefore “biological detectors” that can be used in any kind of water, and that are capable to take a particular colour according to the kind of pollution present, like a litmus paper.
In any event, apart from peculiar cases such as the one just mentioned, most research on animals not destined to the food industry focuses on the medical and pharmaceutical sector. Its purpose is mainly – and this revives the tradition, today almost outdated in favour of synthetic products, of using animals to produce serums, obtain vaccines or extract hormones – to transform part of the traditional livestock into a bioindustry capable of producing drugs.
In April 1996, Genzyme Transgenic announced for example the birth of Grace, a transgenic goat with a gene that codes for BR-96, a monoclonal antibody developed by Bristol-Myers Squibb as an anti-tumour drug. The same company is also creating a goat capable of producing anti-thrombin, an anticoagulant, and projects the launch of new products and to halve the fabrication cost of synthetic products using transgenic animals, reckoning for example with the drug used to treat Gaucher’s Syndrome and a flock of only twelve goats to reach the same level of productivity as that of the $10 million plant still in operation at the time or our writing.[349]
Similarly, a Virginia-based company, the PPL Therapeutics, in 1997 created Rosie, a transgenic cow whose milk contains alpha-lactalbumine, an essential nutrient for premature babies who cannot be normally breastfed, while in Colourado Somatogen developed a pig that produces human haemoglobin.[350]
Moreover, the current applications of genetic engineering extend as we have seen to marine biology. There have for instance been successful transplants of a gene that prevents the formation of ice crystals in the blood, from an arctic fish to the trout and the sea bass, allowing these fish to live in much colder water. On the other hand, the transplantation of the gene that regulates the production of the mammal growth hormone has produced fish that develop more rapidly and grow to a bigger size. Other research has produced sterile salmon, deprived of the suicidal instinct of stopping to feed and swimming upstream to lay their eggs. Here too, by analogy with last century’s “green revolution,” some have spoken of this century as of the “blue revolution,” in which, thanks to cloning and genetic engineering, the product of “aquaculture” will surpass that of fishing, like agriculture has for thousands of years surpassed the harvesting of nature’s wild products, or how terrestrial livestock has surpassed the contribution (derisory today) of hunting in the satisfaction of human nutritional needs.[351]
Such prospects may please or not, but while some neoprimitivists or traditionalists may still be vegetarians, and for this reason not feel overly concerned by alternatives to hunting and livestock breeding, few among them would suggest that we abandon agriculture altogether – a tradition to which they attribute every virtue, in spite of its essentially “technical” and “artificial” nature since its beginnings in the Neolithic – in favour of a mere picking of “nature’s” spontaneous fruit. Hence, the question spontaneously arises why fishing could not be restricted (and maybe deliberately continued) within limits analogous to those applicable to hunting, something which would allow for, inter alia, a better protection of marine ecology.
Furthermore, millions of people have since the nineties been taking drugs produced by biotechnologies, instead of chemically synthesised medicines, for the treatment of heart conditions, tumours and AIDS. Insulin produced by genetic engineering has virtually eliminated the use of “natural” insulin extracted from a large number of cows and pigs. With similar methods, Amgen prod
uces erythropoietin, Genentech produces the tissue activator of plasminogen, other companies obtain the interferon used for the treatment of tumours and multiple sclerosis, etc.[352]
We have already discussed research on pathogens. In this field, interesting work is done on altering vectors. Mosquitoes have been developed that are able to crossbreed with the wild type and transmit a dominant gene for modified salivary glands, that render them incapable of transmitting malaria when stinging a victim. At Yale University, a group of scientists have introduced genetically modified bacteria into the intestines of a South American insect called “the kissing bug,” which transmits a parasite responsible for the lethal Chagas’ disease (American Trypanosomiasis). Such bacteria secrete an antibiotic which kills the parasite directly inside the bug’s intestine.[353]
Lastly, in environmental terms, the development of ever more refined models of describing the ecosystem, and the computing resources made increasingly available by massive parallelism and Moore’s Law, allow us to speculate that in the future it may be possible to perform interventions that go beyond blind hit-or-miss action on a single characteristic, organism or species, and instead systematically integrate entire ecologies.
Since it is unthinkable to repeat delicate genetic-engineering interventions on every single animal concerned, a piece long missing has recently been added to the puzzle: the prospect of intensive farming of higher animals with stable characteristics, equivalent to what has been done in agriculture for centuries, opens up with Dolly, the first cloned sheep, born on February 22nd, 1997, as the result of the work of a Scottish embryologist.[354] The adopted technology did for the first time demonstrate the possibility of producing a large number of genetically identical copies, thereby marking a fundamental milestone on the path to human cloning.[355]