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 Anthony F. Hillen5/12/2007
Biological Weapons amidst the Biotech Revolution
The End of a Looming Threat or a Nightmare Exacerbated? 
 
 The world is on the cusp of a biotech revolution that portends a myriad of salubrious scientificbreakthroughs that will undoubtedly change our lives for the better. Nevertheless, some potentially catastrophic security concerns are likely to accompany the development of these otherwisepropitious technological achievements. History suggests that emerging political, business and socialstructures are more adept at utilizing nascent technologies than their more established counterparts. The biotech revolution stands to alter the conduct of warfare more dramatically than the infotechrevolution. Biotechnology affords sub-state groups the type of destructive power previously available only to the superpowers. The production of biological weapons has become an increasingly diffuse scientific enterprise since the end of the Cold War, and as far as terrorists are concerned,they represent the ultimate means of sewing political discord and instigating economic disruption.Deploying biological weapons has become exceedingly simple, their development is not capital-intensive and they do not require sophisticated delivery systems to be lethally effective. Unlikenuclear weapons that destroy everything within a certain radius, biological weapons are uniquely advantageous in that they can shutdown vital activity without destroying physical infrastructure. Atthe height of its biological weapons program, the Soviet Union had ICBMs loaded with severalkilograms of highly infectious pathogens processed into a powder finer than bath talc that can driftin the air for miles at a time. Pathogens are ideally dispersed in an aerosol cloud of particlesmeasuring about one to five microns in diameter (in other words, a line of a hundred particles in arow would scarcely equal the thickness of a human hair), inhaling just one of these particles can belethal.In general, there are two types of biological weapons: the contagious variety (like smallpox) thatspread rapidly, potentially resulting in unrestricted chaos and death; and then there are those withlimited lethality that cannot be spread from person to person, such as cutaneous Anthrax. Modern
research efforts aimed at developing militarily effective biological agents often “weaponize” certain
diseases by increasing their pathogenicity and refining their deliverability. Genetically altering thepathogenicity of infectious organisms can boost their lethality and make them more resistant to
treatments and vaccines. Weaponization can also involve a refinement of the toxin’s means of 
delivery and release. Biological weapons offer a great deal of flexibility in terms of delivery systems,they can be unleashed on their targets using missiles with toxin-loaded explosive warheads, cluster-bombs, crop-dusting aircraft, vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices, or even simple hand-delivery.Several pathogens can be used as weapons, but the unique virulence of four toxins in particularsuggests that they are the most likely candidates for weaponization. Smallpox is a particularly attractive choice because, according to the World Health Organization (WHO), it was officially eradicated in 1977. As such, it is no longer vaccinated against because the mortality-rate associated with the vaccine was no longer considered to be worth the risk for an extinct disease. The vaccineonly lasts for about 15-20 years, so even individuals that received the last few vaccinations in theearly 1980s are no longer protected, making it a very attractive pathogen to weaponize. Anthrax is a
 
non-communicable but notoriously infectious disease, contracted by touching or inhaling 
Bacillus anthracis 
spores. Contracting anthrax cutaneously is fatal in two out of ten cases, but inhaling thespores is typically fatal regardless of treatment. The second disease likely to be used is Botulism, atoxin produced by 
Clostridium botulinum 
bacteria that causes muscular paralysis and often leads to fatalrespiratory failure. In its natural form, Botulism is generally treatable, but a weaponized toxin couldbe orders of magnitude more lethal. Finally, Pneumonic Plague is caused by the
Yersinia pestis 
 bacteria typically found in rodents, the organism responsible for the 14
th
century global pandemicthat killed approximately 75 million people. Plague symptoms are typified by fever, chest pain,bloody sputum, and eventually death. The disease can be treated by modern medicine, but the
symptoms’ slow onset (usually about three days) increases the speed at which the disease propagates
itself, which makes containment extremely difficult. The United States operated an offensive biological weapons program at the United States Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), in Fort Detrick, Maryland.President Nixon shut down the program in 1969, for fear of pioneering weapons that could later beturned against the United States or its allies. Although some of them may have been designed tospread disinformation, a significant number of news articles and journal publications since the 1970ssuggest that biological weapons are ineffective as a strategic deterrent and operationally impracticalat the tactical level. Logic, however, suggests that those assertions are incorrect. Pathogens can be
highly effective weapons, researchers need only “test them to find out [which ones hold the mostpromise], and then learn how to make them work” says
Ken Alibek (formerly Dr. Kanatjan Alibekov, a Soviet biological weapons engineer at
Biopreparat 
 ). Alibekov insists that biological weapons can be effective because he developed one: a durable, highly infectious, and vaccine-resistant strain of Anthrax.Should it choose to mount an attack on a densely populated metropolitan area, one of thechallenges a rogue state or terrorist organization would face would be to locate individuals with theappropriate scientific background and then convincing (or more likely, coercing) them to supporttheir cause. Very few individuals outside the United States and the former Soviet Union aretechnically competent enough to dry and process virus and bacteria samples into protectively-coatedmicro-particles capable of being inhaled. Monitoring the employment and international travel habitsof scientists with backgrounds in fields like micro-biology used to be relatively simple when they  were predominantly trained at Western universities and easily identifiable. But after the events of September 11
th
2001 and the anthrax-letter attacks a month later, the US dramatically curtailed itsacceptance of foreigners to its universities and research institutions. International students seeking an American education have been discouraged from doing so by recently implemented visarestrictions and steadily increasing tuition costs. However, it would be a negligent mistake for policy-makers to assume that the expertise necessary for manipulating pathogens is exclusively available inthe West; there are a number of first-rate biological science institutions around the world.Furthermore the widespread availability of online research data, including step-by-step productionprotocols, means that terrorists can clandestinely obtain the knowledge to produce biological weapons from practically anywhere.Compared to the task of acquiring rare scientific expertise, obtaining the hardware necessary toproduce biological weapons is surprisingly far less daunting. R 
esearch involving “hot” viruses
(airborne infections without a known cure) like Ebola or Marburg virus, generally require a Bio-Safety Level 4 laboratory, facilities featuring multiple air-locked chambers with closely monitored
 
directed air flow. Technicians in BSL-4 labs wear protective suits with individual oxygen suppliesand work on samples enclosed in a specialized cabinet with an air supply of its own. Although thetechnical requirements associated with facilities considered BSL-3 and above have been consideredto be too demanding for their construction in less developed countries, certain technologicalbreakthroughs allow modular mobile BSL-3 labs to be constructed on short order and in the mostinhospitable environments. Another disconcerting fact is that the virus-propagating flasks known as
“bioreactors” are available for as little as $25 on eBay 
.
Once produced, delivering the pathogen to its
target is relatively simple. A “line
-
source laydown” by a modified commercial helicopter or crop
-dusting aircraft could disperse enough weaponized powder over an open-air stadium or musicconcert to kill thousands of people directly and hundreds of thousands indirectly through contagiousinfection. The global diffusion of information pertaining to the production of biological weapons is aserious cause for concern, but even more disconcerting is the relative simplicity of acquiring pathogenic organisms. Before genetically-modified viruses became the pathogen of choice forbiological weapons, South African and Iraqi scientists were significantly impressed with the potentialmilitary value of naturally occurring and widely available pathogens. Some of the more promising ones include fungal toxins like mycotoxins and aflatoxins; commonly occurring anthrax spores; andother viruses, toxins, and bacteria that result in botulism, cholera, polio, or influenza. The lethality and widespread availability of such pathogens suggests that terrorists will likely attempt to use themat some point in the future. The small-scale production of pathogens using cloning technology isanother source of biological weapons that has been negligently underestimated. Once a disease-causing gene has been identified and its location published in an academic journal, scientists orterrorists can use cloning kits (available from typical lab equipment catalogs) to clone that gene andthen splice it into a common host bacteria.Emerging Defense Technologies The biotech revolution has spawned a number of cutting-edge technologies; some of whichcould potentially provide a significant advantage against the threat of biological weapons. The USDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) realized the significance of biotechnology for defense applications in the mid-1990s. By 1999 the agency funded more than $40 million dollars worth of bio-defense research projects. That budget grew to nearly $150 million in 2002, primarily 
due to DARPA Director Larry Lynn’s emphasis on pathogen countermeasures. (Marshall)
 In 1996 DARPA began funding a project that focused on removing foreign bodies from thebloodstream, a concept originally developed by Dr. Ronald Taylor at Dartmouth University. According to Taylor, a receptor located on the surface of red blood cells known as CR1, is primarily 
responsible for removing materials that the immune system’s
complement-cascade-proteins 
have tagged asforeign. The alien substances are then bound to the CR1 receptor and flushed out of the body through the liver. This particular technology has the potential to purge any known virus from thehuman body in less than two hours. Another ambitious research effort bankrolled by DARPA in the late 1990s involvedmanipulating mesenchymal stem cells to detect and respond to biological threats. Mesenchymal stemcells constitute the primary source of bone, cartilage, fat, and muscle tissue. The general idea is that
these cells can be “preprogrammed” with a number of transplanted genes, which would then
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