The Speculist: Biowar 101

Paul Boutin has a must-read report on the danger of biowar. He asked geneticist Roger Brent whether a layperson could learn the skills necessary to sequence a disease.

He got his answer by learning to do it himself.

Making DNA turns out to be easy if you have the right hardware. The critical piece of gear is a DNA synthesizer. Brent already has one, a yellowing plastic machine the size of an office printer, called an ABI 394. "So, what kind of authorization do I need to buy this equipment?" I ask.

"I suggest you start by typing "used DNA synthesizer" into Google," Brent says.

I hit eBay first, where ABI 394s go for about $5,000. Anything I can't score at an auction is available for a small markup at sites like usedlabequip.com. Two days later I have a total: $29,700—taxes and shipping not included. Nucleosides (the A, C, T, G genetic building blocks) and other chemicals for the synthesizer cost more than the hardware—in the end, a single base pair of DNA runs about a buck to make. Enough raw material to build, say, the smallpox genome would take just over $200,000.

The real cost of villainy is in overhead. Even with the ready availability of equipment, you still need space, staff, and time. Brent guesses he would need a couple million dollars to whip up a batch of smallpox from scratch. No need for state sponsors or stolen top-secret germ samples. "An advanced grad student could do it," Brent says.

$2 million dollars puts this out of the reach of the typical suburban mad scientist, but not Osama bin Laden. And we can expect this price to drop. Even now this is a very cheap and easily obtained weapon of mass destruction that's more dangerous than a nuke. No big labs or large infrastructure is required, and no suspicious purchases would set off alarm bells.

Paul Boutin's article makes it clear that industry insiders think that a bio-attack is inevitable and imminent.

Every hands-on gene hacker I polled during my project estimated they could synthesize smallpox in a month or two. I remember that game from my engineering days, so I mentally scale their estimates using the old software manager's formula: Double the length, then move up to the next increment of time. That gives us two to four years—assuming no one has already started working.

So, 2008-2010... if we're lucky. The West needs to get serious about counter-measures to such attacks. Fortunately there is reason to be optimistic.

Tara O'Toole, director of the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Biosecurity, says after-the-fact vaccines won't stop a plague; they take months to develop and deploy. She believes the only option is a general-purpose virus detector and destroyer, which has yet to be invented. The cost would be enormous, but don't think of it as just an antiterror tool. "If we do what we need to for biodefense, we're going to do an enormous amount of good for routine health care and global disease," says O'Toole. "We could, as a planet, eliminate large lethal epidemics of infectious disease in our lifetime."

Comments

Scary stuff. Is anyone actively working on this proposed general-purpose virus detector and destroyer, or will that come about only after a couple or three bio-terror attacks?

Posted by: Phil Bowermaster | March 8, 2006 07:06 AM

Did I dream the anthrax attacks in October 2001? It seems to have dropped out of the "collective consciousness" long back and disappeared down the memory hole. That's always been a sticky point for me; the war on terror is so much wider than averting another 9/11, and surprisingly, neither the most hawkish of the hawks or their most venomous opposition seems to remember the widespread panic and fear (not to mention a number of actual deaths) that a few dozen anthrax-laden letters caused back then.

As much as the media hyperventilates about Bin Laden still being on the loose, and as much as moonbats use that to pound Bush over the head, there has been absolutely no reporting on where our intelligence agencies are with the investigation into who carried out those anthrax attacks and how they got access to the stuff. It seems that a few X-ray machines at the post office are enough for everyone to willfully stick their heads back in the sand.

Posted by: D. Vision | March 8, 2006 09:34 AM

Phil:

Yes, a "general-purpose virus detector and destroyer" is being worked on. The seriousness of those efforts v. the seriousness of the risk is very questionable.

It might take an attack to wake up our defenders.

Yes, those Anthrax attacks certainly qualify as bio-terror. They were even "weaponized" as I recall.

Perhaps the author was predicting the first bio attack from a disease sequenced in a lab.

Posted by: Stephen Gordon | March 8, 2006 01:47 PM

There's a large difference between Anthrax and smallpox. Anthrax is not know to be transmissible between people, even the inhalation version (see http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/dbmd/diseaseinfo/anthrax_g.htm). Smallpox is transmissible from person to person, although not nearly as easily as something like a flu virus.

In many ways Anthrax is more like a chemical weapon than a bio-weapon.

Probably the biggest danger would be someone modifying one of the current flu viruses that we don't have much immunity to, and making it more lethal and able to spread from person to person. But that is a far more difficult research project than simply replicating a disease whose DNA sequence is already known and available.

But I'm not a bio-weapons expert.

Posted by: AndrewS | March 8, 2006 04:29 PM

Another thing to consider is that a lot of the effort to combat the spread of disease depends on the cooperation of the public. Imagine a few dozen people deliberately attempting to catch whatever the dangerous disease of the day is and spread it. They just have to have a good idea how to spread the disease (assuming they can catch it in the first place). No fancy technology needed.

Posted by: Karl Hallowell | March 8, 2006 06:50 PM

Karl,

I just had a horrific thought. Imagine Islamofascists deliberately infecting themselves with AIDS and then spreading it en masse (via promiscuous sex with infidel women, rape even) for the will of Allah. One smooth-talking jihadist could infect dozens of women a year, who could in turn infect dozens of dozens more people, eventually leading to hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of infections.

Truly frightening.

Posted by: D. Vision | March 8, 2006 11:14 PM

There's already examples of deliberate infection with HIV. Currently, I think the danger is minimal. A smooth-talking jihadist might be able to infect more people than would otherwise be infected, but I think the harm is limited. There's a good chance that secondary infections would have occured anyway. In a sense, HIV has reached saturation in much of the developed world. Additional infections wouldn't have much long term impact on the number of cases. They might in countries that are still seeing rising numbers of cases, say India or China.

It would have been more damaging, if that jihadist had done this sort of thing before there were even tests for HIV or public awareness of the disease. He could donate blood and plasma on a frequent basis over different regions, smooth-talk, etc. That is, infect people who weren't traditionally in the high-risk groups of drug users and promiscuous male homosexuals. Apparently, one of the factors hindering the spread of the disease was that it took a while to grow out of its initial target populations.

Posted by: Karl Hallowell | March 9, 2006 02:19 PM

The Speculist

Live to see it.

Biowar 101

Comments

Post a comment