Slashdot Mirror
Designing DNA Specific Bio-Weapons
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Atlantic reports that experts in genetics and microbiology are convinced we may be only a few years away from the development of advanced, genetic bio-weapons able to target a single human being based on their DNA. The authors paint a scenario of the development of a virus that causes only mild flu in the general population but when the virus crosses paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, the sequence would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that would trigger a fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that produces memory loss and, eventually, death. The requisite equipment including gene sequencers, micro-array scanners, and mass spectrometers now cost over $1 million but on eBay, it can be had for as little as $10,000. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President's Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. However no amount of Secret Service vigilance can ever fully secure the president's DNA, because an entire genetic blueprint can now be produced from the information within just a single cell. How to protect the President? The authors propose open-sourcing the president's genetic information to a select group of security-cleared researchers who could follow in the footsteps of the computer sciences, where 'red-team exercises,' are extremely common practices so a similar testing environment could be developed for biological war games. 'Advances in biotechnology are radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology,' write the authors. 'In light of this coming synbio revolution, a wider-ranging relationship between scientists and security organizations—one defined by open exchange, continual collaboration, and crowd-sourced defenses—may prove the only way to protect the president.'"
Just throwing that out there... Basic scenario; brilliant biochemist does exactly this to wreck revenge on Ireland and England for the conflict that took his family. Mild flu in males, deadly to females. Some of his best work outside Dune, btw...
IAIFARSIJDPOOTV - I Am In Fact A Reality Star; I Just Don't Play One On TV
This is just cruel. A bullet would be more humane than to cause an eventual death by progressively shutting down their body.
For every interest group when they figure out that they can target "unwanted" groups of people. And imagine what the Nazis of Germany could have done during WWII - a virus designed to kill off everyone that wasn't pure Arian.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
We haven't yet found a cure for cancer, or other horrible and debilitating diseases, but we've found time to research something like this?
I'm on bluesnews, right? This is an announcement for another Resident Evil game?
If I was a foreign power wanting to build a genetic weapon to specifically target the President, I would haver been collecting the DNA of all the top echelon politicians well before they came close to running their presidential campaigns. If I can think of this in 10 seconds of reading TFS (not even TFA) then I'm sure that the bad guys have already thought of it - unless you subscribe to the theory that the bad guys are always dumb.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
It seems that they are already attacking our politicians with this method, since they never seem to be able to remember anything they said before they were elected.
Maybe, but only maybe the article is right and it would be possible to design a protein, which binds specifically to a DNA sequence motif of a single human being killing the host. Currently this is a lot of work even for a few (as in 18) bases and not solvable by standard means. The design of a protein binding specifically to any random DNA sequence ( think huuuuuugee Zinc-Finger Nucleases : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zinc_finger_nuclease ) is in my opinion still nobel prize material.
If that was actually possible, people would use it to do good (Gene therapy etc). To knock out cancerous genes, while retaining the good ones. To bind specifically to Virus RNA or to just identifiy gene segments, which are connected somehow to genetical disorders (minus the killing of course in this case).
My point is: I don't think there is enough motivation in the scientific community to develop this just to kill a political target. There are definitely less costly ways, which leave less traces.
We've found cures for many cancers. "cancer" isn't a disease, it's a family of diseases, and killing is a whole lot easier when you're less selective. By the way, this isn't research, this is spouting notions. The two are only conflated in think tanks and idiots. but I repeat myself.
We're already very aware of how viruses constantly mutate. So, how long before this one mutates such that the "switch" is always in the "ON" position, and then proceeds to wipe out most of the human population?
BRILLIANT idea. brilliant. It's these sorts of mad scientists that truly scare me.
Add to that, there's no "kill switch" if you have a problem. Anyone caught making a virus weapon needs to die by fire. Along with the ones that funded and assisted them. The whole world needs to be completely clear about this, because it's a serious danger to every living soul.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Or at least it's highly specific as long as the virus replicates itself perfectly, even for nonessential DNA.
It's a good thing that viruses never mutate, isn't it?
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Reminds me of the FOXDIE virus from the original Metal Gear Solid game.
I feel relieved that, knowing that moderate funds and a scientific background are now sufficient to create a disease that could kill billions, or target entire ethnicities for genocide, at least the president is safe.
DNA-tailored bio-weapons would give a whole new meaning to the word "genocide". Sure they'd make for a good assassination tool, but wouldn't the same DNA watermarking technques apply when dealing with groups of genetically related individuals? While current genetic theories rule out race-specific weapons of mass destruction that don't suffer from huge collateral damage, they could be used effectively to settle scores between Mafia-style crime families.
"Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would-be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material."
All it takes is one ML-1 Monica surveillance drone!
Ezekiel 23:20
Sci-fi has been talking about this exact type of thing for at least 20 years, so it's not a new idea.
Second, and far more important, only a complete F-N moron would even try to release such a thing.
The reason is very simple, it's called MUTATION. Yes, viruses mutate, even the engineered ones. That targeting mechanism is either going to cease to function, get bypassed, or widen it's range of targets, and there is no way to predict which it will do or when it will happen.
Here's another thing to think about. Without including a massive amount of targeting info in the virus, you won't be able to discern between related targets or just random individuals with similar dna. Because of that, you will be unintentionally targeting unwanted subjects. If that's not bad enough, if you really do put in enough info for the virus to target 1 individual in the human populace, that huge amount of info is going to be a drain on the resources of the virus. You know what many microbes like to do with massive useless genes like that? They throw them away. Yes, that's right, it might not even take one replication in release before they chuck all your precious targeting info. And then what happens? Do they no longer have their deadly payload, or do they use it on everyone?
So leave this stuff to sci-fi writers, because reality is that viruses make HORRIBLE targeted weapons, though they aren't bad for indiscriminant killing and terror, even if they are a lot slower than bombs, guns, knives, poisons, and all other weapons in existence.
Most the white Americans who can lay claim to long bloodlines on this side of the Atlantic share genes from all of North America's representative races. That is to say few southern whites with roots that predate the Civil War can be sure that they don't have some African or Native American blood. This, because in days gone by, if somebody could pass for white they mostly chose to do so -- hiding their ancestry. In the early 1970s I heard the great anthropologist Margaret Meade deliver lecture on this topic. The argument as I recall was statistical, and pretty incontrovertible, involving the statistical clines of the various traits.
Famously, the Vanderbilt family is descended from Anthony Janszoon van Salee who was also proudly claimed as a progenitor by Jaquiline Bouvier Kennnedy on her mother's side. Other open examples of this sort are not hard to find.
Race itself is a problematic concept for many physical anthropologists. And is arguably a very inexact classification when done with simple phenotype. But it does prove useful for forensic analysis.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy