Slashdot Mirror
Putting Biotech Threats In Context
Lasrick writes "This article starts with an interesting anecdote: 'In 1998, President Bill Clinton read a novel about biological warfare that deeply disturbed him. In fact, the story reportedly kept him up all night. It’s one of the reasons that Clinton became personally invested in protecting the United States from bioterrorism threats. The book was The Cobra Event (Preston, 1998), a sci-fi thriller by journalist and novelist Richard Preston that told of a mad scientist who brewed a lethal, genetically engineered virus in his New York City apartment. Preston’s tale highlighted the potential ease with which individuals or small groups with access to advanced bioweapons capabilities could launch attacks on major US cities.1 After reading The Cobra Event, Clinton called several advisory meetings and ordered classified assessments and simulation exercises to examine the threat depicted in the story. As a result of these deliberations, by the end of his administration Clinton had increased funding for biodefense preparedness efforts fourfold, to more than $400 million per year.' The article goes on to describe the two trajectories of bioweapons threats, and puts them both in perspective. It may or may not calm everyone who's ever spent a sleepless night after reading one of the many bioterrorism novels"
I remember seeing a used PCM multiplier online for $10k, and thinking what a powerful piece of machinery that was, especially given this was done in 5 mutations. It makes it sort of scary to think that all that steps in the way of Armageddon, is a disgruntled scientist and about $20k worth of lab equipment and supplies.
When AQ is on the ropes, they will no doubt attack with a bio-weapon. Why? Because it is SO easy and cheap to make. In addition, it will be difficult to trace back to them. And if done right, they can provide immunity for themselves FIRST. My bet is that they will do avian flu. Trivial to come up thanks to all of the chicken growers in Asia. And then to 'weaponize' is very easy (i.e. make it easy to target humans).
And the reason why I saw nothing to worry about is that this will be coming. Not much that you can do except have vaccines and update your medical staff.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Related: Richard Preston also wrote the non-fiction book The Hot Zone, where he discusses Ebola, Marburg, and other hot viruses in detail (and it's perhaps the first mass media coverage they received), as well as how the CDC operates to identify, contain, and otherwise deal with hot viruses.
The Cobra Event was OKi for fiction, but rather meh compared to works by Follett or Crichton (RIP), that may be shakier on the science but way more entertaining. However, in my opinion, Preston's non-fiction, documentary accounts in The Hot Zone and in The Demon in the Freezer are way, way, way scarier. Highly recommended.
Trivia: Richard Preston is the only civilian, non-physician/doctor of any kind, who's been recognized for his work by the Centers of Disease Control.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Hot-Zone-Terrifying-Story/dp/0385495226/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_z/177-7970503-1396814
http://www.amazon.com/The-Demon-Freezer-True-Story/dp/0345466632/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y/177-7970503-1396814
Cheers!
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
There has already been real-life testing of biological attacks. The ones we know about took place in the 50s and 60s. The US Navy released bacteria in a cloud off the coast of San Francisco to see what would happen. The bacteria they released was "mostly harmless" but killed some people with compromised immune systems. Some other government scientists spread bacteria around the NY subway system to see what would happen. Was hushed up for 20 years and sounds like trooferism but it really happened: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/general-article/weapon-secret-testing/
Maybe sleeplessness is exponentially related to the number of enemies you have ..
It may be bioweapons, or it may just be a natrual event, but I believe we'll have a pandemic that kills billions within my lifetime. I see SARS, avian flu, AIDS, etc popping up, and they all seem like nature's dress rehersals for something bigger. It seems like only a matter of time until we get something that is both highly communicable (air) and highly fatal.
It bounces to a Burmese site filled with crapware
Even better, make the virus then sell the vaccine. Repeat ad infinum!
We'll never make it.......oh! we made it! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWf3iJjqYCM&list=FL7kKrE4eTs17mQl7eyvJIOg
Since we're not asking for stuff that's physically impossible, like time travel bacteria or something, we can be certain that humanity will develop techniques to do pretty much anything in biotech. It's just a matter of getting the right tools and the right knowledge.
Any horror story scenario WILL become possible, but we don't know when, and that is important. It may be that we're a solid 50 years away from weaponised pandemic viruses in garage labs, in which case the world may have changed very substantially and the threat is no longer relevant. Or it may be sooner.
The article only edges around this point. It spends a lot of time waffling about how biotech is hard, but we know that. The point is: at what rate is it getting easier?
We also know there are plenty of low hanging fruit in terms of bioweapons, because nature has done a lot of the hard work for us in many cases. Is it really fair to compare tweaking natural diseases with drug research? In the case of drug research, all the low hanging fruit have been picked long ago.
Another good novel (written when genetic engineering was fairly new) is The White Plague , written by Frank Herbert of Dune fame. Basic premise (not really spoilers, since as I recall this is on the book's back cover): an expert molecular biologist, otherwise sane and benevolent, cracks when his wife and daughter are killed in a terrorist attack. He creates a highly contagious virus that is lethal to women but harmless to men, and lets it loose in the countries he considers responsible, so that the men there will share his loss. Then he threatens to do so elsewhere if the rest of the world doesn't send all immigrants from those countries back home and let the plague run its course.
Don't know how plausible it is scientifically, but it's a good read, like all of Herbert's stuff. Well, like all of his stuff before God Emperor of Dune...
"The Greens lynched a hacker in Chicago. Last month, but I think the body's still hanging from the old Water Tower."
And his threats of EMP attack, at least this one is slightly more realistic and possible.
For those who seek perfection there can be no rest on this side of the grave.
so im supposed to believe that bio-terrorism is what kept slick willie awake at night
hahaHAHAHAHA
"Biotech is Godzilla" - Sepultura
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBEuNJal8yA
No comments yet?
How the hell am i supposed to spend my lunch break? I read other articles and comments already!
If you have spare time, I'd appreciate a digest of the RTFA: I tried reading it, my (sole) neuron got curly with the effort and I skipped to the end where I read:
This work was supported by grants from the United Kingdom’s Economic and Social Research Council and from the US National Science Foundation.
Yay, that's a factoid I could grasp.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
While there doesn't seem to be a 100% clear answer on how hard biological weapons actually are to make(nation states have definitely played with them, sometimes just by bottling wild nasties, sometimes by modification or selective breeding, amateurs don't seem to have managed much for the moment), the thing that makes 'biodefense' feel like something of a lost cause is that so much of it is a deeply unsexy(and surprisingly unpopular) mix of public health and infrastructure work.
Sure, somebody has to wear the cool positive-pressure suits and do Tense Movie Science in the biohazard level 4 labs; but if a novel strain of something for which there isn't presently a vaccine pops up, the only relevant question will be along the lines of 'do we have anything resembling the capacity to provide supportive care/any remedies that are available in a mass infection context?' The answer, of course, is 'ha, ha, are you joking? Have you seen the wait times for anything short of serious trauma at your local ER?'
That's the trouble: Barring some sort of technology-indistinguishable-from-magic(an immunological simulation powerful enough to take a pathogen's genetic sequence as input and spit out a vaccine formulation ready to hit production, or something similarly Not Available Now), your main defensive options are comparatively low-tech; but very broad based and probably quite expensive, improvements in healthcare capacity and epidemiological surveillance, combined with lots and lots of basic research in medicine(since a good bioweapon will be at least somewhat novel, you can't really target research against it, so you need to have as much as possible in terms of supportive care, general understanding of strategies for rapidly evaluating and countering novel pathogens, etc, etc.) Unfortunately, that's exactly the sort of plan that would never sell, and, since it involves spending lots of money every year against a threat that may not even show up, makes a great target every time budget time rolls around.
Biotech could mean:
1) lethal dose (per kg or ounce of enemy) of bioactive molecule
2) lethal contagious organism
The latter would mean you create a memory (DNA or RNA) as a template for its contagious state.
By nature of the replication mechanism of the memory mutations will occur. Every year we have proof of how effective these mutations are - and how effective the marketing of big pharmaceutical companies are by flooding us with vaccination programs.
It's like digging a hole and the hole getting bigger and bigger (pandemic) until you are bound to fall in it one day or the other.
Amazing how the author of that book actually changed something...too bad other books like 1984, Brave New World and the short story Right to Read get used like a manual for oppression instead.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
If you read nothing else in TFA, read the sections "The technological determinism model" and "The sociotechnical model", and pretend it's written about computer tech, because it applies there, too. I believe we're getting near the end of "the computer revolution", because there is not a sufficient market to fund development at the rate we've seen in the past. I believe Ray Kurzweil will have to fund the singularity himself, because for the endpoint to happen, all points in between here and there have to be funded, and I don't see that happening. I think from a technical needs perspective, we are well into the point of diminishing returns, and the market is starting to reflect that.
"One time at my lab, a petri dish of genetically modified super-virus went missing. That day we made a pinky swear never to admit we crossed Ebola with the common cold."
"Why the hell would you cross Ebola with the common cold?"
"We never did. That would be a terrible, terrible thing."
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
I do like a good thriller novel and they don't really keep me up at night (except the reading part). Mostly b/c i have no involvement in the protection of most of these things. Reading the summary above makes me realize again the weight on any executive office. I can assume somebody is taking care of it. The president/prime minister/whatever realizes this is another thing he is responsible for stopping. No wonder they get grey so fast.
As another testement to the power of fiction, George Bush read one of Stephen King's books and got $500 million in funding for protection against Plymouth Furies.
> "In 1998, President Bill Clinton read a novel about
> biological warfare that deeply disturbed him. In fact,
> the story reportedly kept him up all night."
"Clinton also called for remote-disable devices for vehicles after reading a story about a car, and for fire axes to be on 10-foot chain tethers after reading a story about a guy."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Night in the oval office...
Make a bunch of clandestine transactions to acquire equipment that could potentially be used to create a bioweapon (even if you don't have any money to actually complete the transactions). Step 2, watch the 'Great Satan' flush billions down the toilet defending against the non-threat.
Bonus points if you get the Great Satan to flush trillions down the toilet invading a country you hate because they think you are there.
Triple bonus score: Get yourself a good 'Oswald' that they can spend years hunting down.
There is a substantial risk of a bioterrorist attack on the US from the Hezbollah operations in Mexico. Whether you believe John McAfee's revelations or not:
http://www.whoismcafee.com/a-clear-and-present-danger/
The truth is the scenario he presents is possible entirely plausible.
The solution is to enforce the Federal border control laws. The Feds won't do it. So the Arizona State government took matters into their own hands and created a state law that was similar to the Federal law, but Arizona would be able to enforce it. The Obama Administration took Arizona to court and the state border law cannot be enforced (not that the Obama Administration also took states to court to stop them defending Constitutional rights by enacting anti-Sharia legislation; since Sharia is opposed to all other Constitutional right). The Obama Administration's solution was instead to put up signs warning US citizens to stay away from areas where the narcos and people smugglers operate:
http://thecitysquare.blogspot.com/2010/09/feds-cede-border-to-smugglers-warn.html http://thecitysquare.blogspot.com/2010/07/arizona-law-is-working-already.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_v._United_States
Enforcing *existing laws* would do more for border security that some gadgets. Just as drugs come in that border it is easy for ricin or other bioagents to come in. Hezbollah and their Iran backers would just love to have the option to sow terror in the US with a bioattack: in addition to the option they have of two dozen Shahab 3 IRBM missiles they have installed in Venezuela; and will probably upgrade to Shahab 5 missiles with nuclear warheads soon. Don't worry, your President has just appointed Hagel who thinks that talking with the Iranians is best. Yes, they Iranians have already had a decade of talks and more talks will just give them more time to finish their nukes (which they are close to having the capability of making, if they haven't made one already; US intelligence is not sure it can tell the difference).
All this means the US was wrong to oppose Arizona in making a State law that enforced Federal laws that weren't being enforced. It also means that US citizens are in a greater danger than they have ever been before - but their mainstream media is not reporting on this stuff, so the majority of people are still asleep to the threats that are arising.
Before you mod me down or counter-post, please collect your citations that refuse the existence of the signs that warn US citizens because the border has effectively been ceded to narcos; or evidence against the Iranian IRBMs in Venezuela; or evidence against Hezbollah wanting to conduct bio-attacks on US soil. I doubt you'll find objective links. These threats are real - and fortunately the US agencies have been more competent than the jihadis and narcos, so far. Although the ATF "Fast and Furious" scandal does make one wonder - what the hell was the Obama Administration thinking?
I'm guessing Clinton read The White Plague at some point too.
It would explain his goal to f*ck every woman he met!
-Styopa
Am I the only one who read it that way?
In the subject article, Kathleen Vogel argues that research in the field of Science and Technology Studies (of which, no doubt coincidentally, she is a professor) that technology development proceeds more along an "evolutionary" path than a "revolutionary" path.
This is actually not a bad argument. if one is describing the integration of technologies into the overall fabric of societies. Even though technologies do tend to develop in a revolutionary fashion (a well-established fact that she'd apparently like to ignore), actual widespread integration and beneficial use of technologies is a much slower and uncertain process.
With respect to bi-terrorism, however, it is a supremely irrelevant argument. The putative terrorist's goal is not beneficial integration of technology into society, it is the use of technology to induce terror. While, for example, beneficial technology needs to be safe and effective, and particularly in the health and biotech sector is held to extremely high standards for those attributes, a terrorist's exploitation of technology need be neither. If it even works a little, and doesn't kill the terrorist before deployment, it's good enough. The evolution model is simply inapplicable here, and Vogel should be embarrassed to make such a fallacious argument.
Not that the revolution argument is all that great, either, as a predictor of trerrorism. Biotech is hard, and even marginal success is challenging to obtain. But the evidence is incontrovertible that high-quality tools for biotech experimentation have become far more effective and far less expensive over the last 20 years, and the knowledge base has certainly increased dramatically. However, assimilating that knowledge base and using it effectively for developing weapons is not trivial--the literature tends to focus on beneficial applications, and a fair amount of skill and insight is needed to move in other directions.
In the end, these factors are unknowable (except perhaps the equipment cost advantage). That's what makes the threat worth studying, and that's one of the reasons we have an intelligence community: to think, as Herman Kahn put it, about the unthinkable. I certainly wouldn't argue that the IC always does a great job at those analyses, but at least they do them. Arguing, from an irrelevant academic viewpoint, that we can ignore the bio-terror threat because industry hasn't been able to bring effective gene therapies to market, well, that's just silly.
When Alphas consider the issue of bio-weapons, a simple conclusion is reached. All malicious intelligent life (like Humans) will reach a point in their civilizations where one of two situations apply.
1) The biological machine that carries the intelligent life is profoundly vulnerable to an engineered system attack. The entire species therefore perishes when its technology allows such bio-weapons to be created.
2) The biological machine that carries the intelligent life is no more vulnerable to an engineered system attack than to natural diseases. In this case, the species may outlive the threat of nuclear annihilation and continue to exist indefinitely.
If the first option is true, we are doomed. Biological weapons are analogous to the rogue code used to attack computers, only in our case we have no means to install biological ' firewalls' or 'anti-viral' packages.
You see, the way in which Human biology works is finite, and fully discoverable. You people do not believe in 'intelligent design' so it is an article of faith to you that evolution is blind. Unfortunately, biological weapons are most certainly an example of INTELLIGENT DESIGN. This little fact PROVES that biological weapons are not inherently doomed to have the same success rates as naturally occurring biological agents of attack like parasites, bacteria, virii, prions etc.
The mapping of Human DNA, and the assessment of the function of individual gene sequences, allows a hackers mind to take on the problem of building the ultimate bioweapon. Biologists are the most useless of proper scientists, lacking proper understanding of maths and logic. An ultimate bioweapon, if possible at all, will come from skill-sets found in engineers and computer scientists.
In the end, it probably comes down to what you believe. If you are an extremist atheist, you have no spiritual beliefs, and think that a Man no more possesses a soul than does a rock. In this case, being insane, you believe there is no such thing as 'intelligent design' and yet, by some bizarre paradox, Man is capable of 'intelligent design'. The conclusion YOU reach is that Man, when not dissecting conscious fellow-Humans under the excuse that they are nothing but "logs", can and will create life ending bio-weapons, and nothing can prevent this fate.
Those with spiritual beliefs (the non-insane) understand that the conscious mind that gives meaning to the universe is higher than the clockwork mechanism of said universe. As a consequence, it is likely that life is somehow protected against the most perverse actions of certain Humans, reducing the threat of the worst bio-weapons to the level of the threat represented by the worst naturally occurring biological attacks.
The funny thing is that either position really concludes with the idea that there is nothing we can do. There is either no problem, or an unstoppable problem. I'm afraid you non-spiritual atheists are betting on the unstoppable.