All of this means that our interactions with biology, already complicated, are about to get a whole lot worse. Intentionally or accidentally, mixing code from multiple species together or creating entirely novel organisms could easily have unintended consequences. Even in labs with high standards for safety, accidents happen. If those accidents involve breaches in containment procedures, a harmless bacterium could become an ecological catastrophe. A 2010 synthetic biology report by the US Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues said as much: “Unmanaged release could, in theory, lead to undesired cross-breeding with other organisms, uncontrolled proliferation, crowding out of existing species and threats to biodiversity.”
Just as worrisome as bioerror is the threat of bioterror. While the organism Venter created is harmless, the same techniques can be used to construct a known pathogen or, worse, engineer a much deadlier, optimized version. Viruses are particularly easy to manufacture, a fact made apparent in 2002, when Dr. Eckard Wimmer, a Stony Brook University virologist, created the polio genome out of mail-order DNA. At the time, the 7,500-nucleotide synthesis cost him about $500,000 and took several years to complete. Today, a similar effort would take about a week and cost about $1,500. By 2020, if trends continue, it will take a few minutes and cost roughly $3. Governments the world over have spent billions trying to eradicate polio; imagine the damage terrorists could do with a $3 pathogen.
6.
During the 1990s, the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo, most infamous for its deadly 1995 Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway, maintained an active and extremely well-funded bioweapons program. When police raided the cult’s facilities, they found ebola, anthrax, cyanide, and proof of a decadelong research effort costing at least $10 million — demonstrating, among other things, the clear value terrorists see in pursuing bioweapons. While Aum did manage to cause considerable harm, its attempts to unleash mass destruction, thankfully, never came to fruition. “Aum’s failure suggests that it may, in fact, be far more difficult to carry out a deadly bioterrorism attack than has sometimes been portrayed by government officials and the press,” wrote William Rosenau, a Rand Corporation analyst, in a 2001 article for Studies in Conflict and Terrorism. “Despite its significant financial resources, dedicated personnel, motivation, and freedom from the scrutiny of the Japanese authorities, Aum was unable to achieve its objectives.”
That was then.
Now, two trends have changed the game. The first emerged in 2004, when the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition was founded at MIT. iGem’s goal is for teams of high school and college students to build simple biological systems from standardized, interchangeable parts. These standardized parts, known as BioBricks, are chunks of DNA code with clearly defined structures and functions, allowing them to be easily linked together in new combinations, a little like a set of genetic LEGO bricks. These designs are collected in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, an open-source database accessible to anyone who is curious.
Over the years, iGEM teams have not only pushed technical barriers but creative ones as well, turning bacterial cells into everything from photographic films to hemoglobin-producing blood cells to miniature hard drives, complete with data encryption. By 2008, students were designing organisms with real-world applications; the contest that year was won by a team from Slovenia for their designer vaccine against Helicobacter pylori, the bacteria responsible for most ulcers. The 2011 grand prize winner, a team from the University of Washington, completed three separate projects, each one rivaling the outputs of world-class academics and the biopharmaceutical industry.
As the sophistication of iGEM research rose, so did the level of participation. In 2004, 5 iGEM teams submitted 50 potential BioBricks to the Registry. Two years later, it was 32 teams submitting 724 parts. By 2010, iGEM mushroomed to 130 teams submitting 1,863 parts — and the Registry database was over 5,000 components strong. As the New York Times pointed out: “iGEM has been grooming an entire generation of the world’s brightest scientific minds to embrace synthetic biology’s vision — without anyone really noticing, before the public debates and regulations that typically place checks on such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have even started.”
The second trend to consider is the progress terrorist and criminal organizations have made with just about every other information technology. Since the birth of the digital revolution, all sorts of rogue actors have been early adopters and cunning exploiters. Phone phreakers like John Draper (aka Captain Crunch) discovered back in the 1970s that AT&T’s telephone network could be fooled into making free calls with the help of a plastic whistle given away in cereal boxes (thus Draper’s moniker). In the 1980s, early desktop computers were subverted by a sophisticated array of computer viruses for malicious fun — then, in the 1990s, for information theft and financial gain. The 2000s saw purportedly uncrackable credit card cryptographic algorithms reverse engineered and mobile smartphones repeatedly infected with malware. On a larger scale, denial-of-service attacks have grown increasingly destructive, crippling everything from individual websites to massive financial networks. In 2000, “Mafiaboy,” a lone fifteen-year old Canadian high school student, managed to shut down the websites of Yahoo, eBay, CNN, Amazon, and Dell.
In 2007, Russian hackers swamped Estonian websites, disrupting financial institutions, broadcasting networks, and government ministries (including the Estonian Parliament). A year later, before the invasion by Russian military, the state of Georgia saw a massive cyberattack paralyze their banking system and disrupt cell-phone networks. Iraqi insurgents subsequently repurposed Skygrabber — Russian software developed to steal satellite television and available for $29.95 — to intercept the video feeds of US predator drones, giving them the information needed to monitor and evade American military operations.
Lately, organized crime has even taken up crowdsourcing, outsourcing areas of their illegal operations — printing up fake credit cards, money laundering, even murder — to those with greater expertise. With the anonymous nature of the online crowd, this development makes it all but impossible for law-enforcement to track these efforts.
Added together, the historical data is clear: Whenever novel technologies enter the market, illegitimate uses quickly follow legitimate ones. A black market is soon to appear. Thus, just as criminals and terrorists have exploited all other forms of technology, they will undoubtedly soon be turning their attention to synthetic biology, the latest digital frontier.
7.
In 2005, as a way to begin preparing for the point when terrorists do turn their attention to synthetic biology, the FBI hired former University of Southern California, Keck School of Medicine gene therapist turned Amgen cancer researcher Edward You. Special Agent You, now a supervisory special agent in the Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate, knew that biotechnology had been expanding too quickly for the FBI to keep pace and decided the only way to stay ahead of the curve was to outsource the problem to those at the leading edge. “When I got involved,” You says, “it was pretty clear the FBI wasn’t about to start playing Big Brother to the life sciences. It’s not our mandate and it’s not possible. All the expertise lies in the scientific community. Our job has to be outreach education. We need to create a culture of security in the synbio community, of responsible science, so the researchers themselves understand that they are the guardians of the future.”
Toward that end, the FBI started hosting free biosecurity conferences, stationed WMD outreach coordinators in fifty-six field offices to network with the synbio community, and even became a major iGEM sponsor. In 2006, after reporters at the Guardian successfully mail-ordered a crippled fragment of the smallpox virus genome, suppliers of genetic materials decided to develop self-policing guidelines. According to You, the FBI sees the fact that these guidelines emerged organically as proof that their approach is working. Others are not so sure, pointing out that these new rules don’t do much more than ensure a da
ngerous pathogen isn’t sent to a PO Box.
And much more is necessary. An October 2011 report by the WMD Center, a bipartisan nonprofit organization chaired by former senators Bob Graham (D) and Jim Talent (R), warned that a biological attack within the United States was deemed probable, and specifically highlighted the dangers of synthetic biology: “As DNA synthesis technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, it will soon become feasible to synthesize nearly any virus whose DNA sequence has been decoded . . . as well as artificial microbes that do not exist in nature. This growing ability to engineer life at the molecular level carries with it the risk of facilitating the development of new and more deadly biological weapons.”
Terrorists are not the only danger America needs to consider. Thirty-six nations now have dedicated synthetic biology research programs, China foremost among them. The Beijing Genomics Institute, known as BGI, was founded in 1999. It has since grown into the largest genomic research organization in the world, and is slated to receive $1.5 billion in additional funding over the next decade. Currently, BGI is the world’s largest producer of genetic code, sequencing the equivalent of over 15,000 human genomes a year. (In a recent interview with the journal Science, BGI claimed to have more sequencing capacity than all the labs in the United States, put together.) A few years ago, during the German E. coli outbreak, BGI sequenced the culprit in just three days (versus, say, the thirteen years it took researchers to sequence the HIV virus). And BGI now appears poised to move beyond DNA sequencing and become one of the world’s foremost DNA synthesizers as well.
Many feel that whomever controls synbio will control a significant chunk of the global economy over the next fifty years, but even beyond such broad fiscal ramifications, there are security concerns as well. BGI hires thousands of bright young researchers each year. The training is great, but the wages low. This means that a steady stream of talented synthetic biologists are likely searching for better pay and greener pastures. Some of those jobs will appear in countries not yet on the synbio radar (even more economic competition for the US). Some in places we don’t want them to. Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan will most definitely be hiring.
8.
In his 2009 book, In the President’s Secret Service, Ronald Kessler points out that threats against President Obama have risen 400 percent compared to President Bush. Each must be thoroughly investigated. In January 2008, for example, when intelligence emerged that the Somalia-based Islamist group al-Shabaab might try to disrupt Mr. Obama’s inauguration, the Secret Service coordinated 40,000 agents and officers from some 94 police, military, and security agencies. Detailed security checks were run on employees and hotel guests in nearby buildings, bomb-sniffing dogs and chemical-sensing technologies were deployed throughout the area, and more than a dozen countersniper teams were stationed along the parade route. This is a considerable response capability, but soon it won’t be enough. Currently, nothing in the Secret Service’s considerable arsenal can defend against the weapons that synthetic biology makes possible.
Part of the problem is that the range of threat vectors the Secret Service has to guard against already extends far beyond firearms or explosive devices. Both chemical and radiological attacks have been made against prominent government officials in recent years. In 2004, an assassination attempt on the life of Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko used TCCD, an extremely toxic dioxin compound. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former officer of the Russian Security Service, was poisoned with the radioisotope polonium 210. And the use of bioweapons themselves is hardly unknown; the American anthrax attacks nearly reached members of Congress.
The Kremlin, of course, has been poisoning its enemies for decades, and anthrax has been around for a while, yet genetic technologies open the door for an entirely new kind of threat vector, in which the president’s own genome can be used against him or her. This is a particularly difficult threat to defend against. No amount of Secret Service vigilance can ever fully secure POTUS’s DNA, because the president’s entire genetic blueprint can now be produced from the information contained within just a single cell. Each of us sheds billions of cells every day. These can be collected from any number of sources — a drinking glass, say, or a toothbrush. Physical contact will also do the trick. Every time the president shakes hands with a constituent, cabinet member, or foreign leader, he’s leaving an exploitable trail. Whenever he gives away a pen at a bill signing ceremony, a few cells are left behind. These cells are dead, but the DNA is intact, and just a few cells are enough for genetic testing.
For the real work of building a bioweapon, living cells would be the true target (although dead cells may suffice within as little as a decade). These are more difficult to recover, but a sample gathered from fresh blood or saliva or even a sneeze, caught in a discarded tissue, could suffice. Once recovered, these living cells can be cultured, providing those with nefarious intentions a continuous supply of research material.
Even if Secret Service agents were able to sweep up all the president’s shed cells, they couldn’t eliminate the possibility of DNA being recovered from the past. DNA is a very stable molecule, often lasting for millennia. Genetic material remains on old clothes, high school tests, or any of the myriad of objects handled and discarded by a commander-in-chief long before his candidacy was announced. How much attention was dedicated to protecting Obama’s DNA when he was a senator? A neighborhood organizer in Chicago? A student at Harvard law? In preschool? Even if presidential DNA was somehow fully locked down, a good approximation of the code could be made from cells of his children, parents, and siblings, living or not.
Presidential DNA could be used in a variety of politically sensitive ways, perhaps to fabricate evidence of an affair, fuel speculation about birthplace and heritage, or identify genetic markers for a bevy of diseases that could cast doubt on leadership ability and mental acuity. How much does it take to unseat a president? The first signs of President Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s emerged during his second term. While doctors now believe it was then too mild to affect his ability to govern, if information about his condition had been made public while he was still in office, would the American people have demanded his resignation? Could Congress be forced to impeach?
For the Secret Service, this opens the door for attack scenarios worthy of a Hollywood thriller. Advances in stem cell research make it possible for any living cell to be transformed into any other cell type, including neurons or heart cells or even in vitro–derived (IVD) sperm. Any live cells recovered from a dirty glass or an old napkin or such could, in theory, be used to manufacture synthetic sperm cells. And so, out of the blue, a president could be outed by a “former lover” coming forward with DNA “evidence” of a sexual encounter, like the proverbial semen stain on the dress. Sophisticated testing could distinguish fake IVD sperm from the real thing — they are not identical — but the results might never convince the lay public. IVD sperm may also someday prove capable of fertilizing eggs, allowing for surreptitious love children to be born using standard in vitro fertilization technologies.
As mentioned, even modern cancer therapies can be harnessed for malicious ends. Personalized therapies designed to attack a single patient’s cancer cells are already moving out of the laboratory and into clinical trials. Synthetic biology is poised to rapidly expand and accelerate this process by making individualized viral therapies inexpensive. Such “magic bullets” can target cancer cells with extreme precision. But what if these bullets were trained against healthy cells instead? Trained against retinal cells, the result would be blindness. Against the hypothalamus, a memory wipe is possible. And the liver? Death would come in a matter of months.
The delivery of this sort of biological agent would be very difficult to detect. Viruses are tasteless and odorless and easily aerosolized. Hidden in a perfume bottle, a quick dab on the wrists in the general proximity of the target is all an assassination attempt would require. If the pathogen had been designed to zero in specifically
on the president’s DNA, then nobody else present would even get sick.
Pernicious agents could be crafted to do their damage months or even years after exposure, depending on the goals of the designer. Several viruses are already known to spark cancers. New ones could eventually be designed to infect the brain with, say, synthetic schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or early-onset Alzheimer’s. Stranger possibilities exist as well. A disease engineered to amplify the production of cortisol and dopamine could induce extreme paranoia, turning, say, a presidential dove into a warmongering hawk. Or a virus that boosts the production of oxytocin, the chemical responsible for feelings of trust, could play hell with a leader’s negotiating abilities, leaving the country open to an array of biodiplomatic assaults. Some of these ideas aren’t even new. The US Air Force’s Wright laboratory in Ohio theorized about chemical-based pheromone bombs as far back as 1994.
Of course, heads of state are not the only ones vulnerable to this coming wave of synbio threats. Al Qaeda flew planes into buildings to cripple Wall Street, but imagine the damage an attack targeting the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies could do to the world economy. Forget kidnapping rich foreign nationals as a means of profit, soon merely kidnapping their DNA might be enough. Celebrities will face an entirely new kind of stalker. As homebrew biology matures, these technologies could end up being used to “settle” all sorts of disputes, even those of the domestic variety.
Without question, it’s a brave new world.
9.
Despite the rapid acceleration of exploitable biotechnology, the Secret Service is not powerless to protect the president. Steps can be taken. Establishing a crack scientific task force to continually monitor, forecast, and evaluate new risks is the obvious place to start. Deploying sensing technologies is another. Already, biodetectors have been built that can identify known pathogens in less than three minutes. These can get better — a lot better — but, even so, they might not be enough. Synthetic biology opens the door to finely targeted, entirely new biothreats — how can we detect that which we’ve never seen before?
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