A few years ago nuclear warfare was the big bogeyman. Now, in the
aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks, anthrax-laced letters in
the United States and the Bali bombings, the prominence previously given
to nuclear warfare has been replaced with the biological warfare threat. A
critical difference, however, is that biological weapons are more
accessible to Joe and Josephine Public. Producing bio-bugs is low-tech
stuff and anyone with a first-class honours degree in science, access to
the Internet and a good-quality beef bouillon can manufacture some pretty
lethal bugs.
Well, that may be a slight exaggeration, but the point is with all that
fission and fusion stuff, it's much more difficult to build a nuclear bomb
in your backyard. Also, even though those who lived through the Cold War
talked about it a lot, they never really believed nuclear warfare would
happen. Deterrence would prevent it!
Biological warfare is scarier because it is more plausible. This is
evidenced by the widespread fear we are now witnessing. In some parts of
the United States for example, people go through security checks to buy
stamps at post offices just in case these same good citizens are posting
anthrax spores to Grandma or their local politician.
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Until fairly recently, information on converting pathogens and toxins
into biological warfare agents and on methods for their dispersal was
largely unavailable. However over the past decade a Pandora's box of
bioweapon related data has opened. Paul Zielbauer and William Broad
reported in the New York Times (21 November, 2001) that American citizen
Timothy W Tobiason was selling thousands of copies of his self-published
germ-warfare cookbook containing step-by-step instructions on producing
and delivering pathogens, natural poisons and toxic chemicals.
Bioterrorism experts say that Tobiason's book is accurate enough to be
dangerous.
These entrepreneurs have been inadvertently helped by the Government.
According to Dr R Zilinskas at last year's Twelfth Annual International
Arms Control Conference in New Mexico, the United States Government, as
part of its routine declassification program, released a number of studies
from the pre-1969 offensive biological warfare program that contain
sensitive "how to" information on various lethal bio-agents. The
Government is now trying to shut the door after the horse has bolted.
With the need for scientists in universities and other scientific
institutions to either "publish or perish", a more worrying
trend is the growing number of scientific papers published in legitimate
microbiology and biotechnology journals that may be relevant to
developing, producing and/or delivering biological weapons.
Individuals or groups seeking to develop biological weapons in
violation of international law are unlikely to be driven by the
"publish or perish" philosophy - publication numbers wouldn't be
strong performance criteria for terrorism! So, it is safe to assume that
people who submit research papers to scientific journals do so for
peaceful purposes like developing and producing harmless commercial
products - food additives, biopesticides, vaccines and so forth. However,
the scientific knowledge and technical know-how contained in these papers
could also be misused by various people trying to develop biological
weapons.
A brief search of the literature reveals a list of possibilities. For
example, the growth characteristics of the harmless bacterium Bacillus
thuringiensis, an agricultural pesticide, are the same as those of
Bacillus anthracis, or anthrax. A published recipe for the industrial
production line of B. thuringiensis could easily be modified to
manufacture anthrax. Then there are numerous published methods used to
develop attenuated live virus vaccines. These methods could be applied to
develop more virulent viral strains for weapons, such as the information
published about aerosol spray drug delivery systems (developed to replace
insulin injections for diabetes and for intranasal delivery of a live
anti-influenza virus vaccine) which is also the most efficient way of
disseminating biological warfare agents.
A further example is published research on tobacco plants genetically
engineered to produce a highly active E. coli immunogen which is
structurally similar to cholera toxin. Large quantities of protein toxins
could be made cheaply and easily using this method. Last year, Jennifer
Couzin reported in Science (Vol 297, 2002) that infectious poliovirus was
synthesised by researchers who assembled custom DNA strands ordered from a
commercial biotechnology company. The researchers built an almost perfect
replica of poliovirus by reading a recipe available in a public database.
Scientists suggested that this same technology could be used to make
smallpox, Ebola or the 1918 influenza strain that killed 20-40 million
people.
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The good news is that it is unlikely that un-educated lone terrorists
or organisations with rudimentary scientific expertise would pursue the
scientific literature in search of recipes for biological weapons.
The bad news is that the most serious threat is from scientists working
in sophisticated, well-funded biological warfare programs conducted by
rogue countries or in affluent terrorists organisations such as Aum
Shinrikyo, which recruit skilled scientists and engineers to produce
biological and chemical weapons. These potentially have the capacity and
capability to search scientific literature to develop new and
sophisticated bio-weapons.
So, as there is some legitimate concern that scientific knowledge could
be used inappropriately, should scientific information therefore be
regulated?