The Bioterrorist Next Door
Man-made killer bird flu is here. Can — should — governments try to stop it?
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/12/14/the_bioterrorist_next_door
It is a long article by most people’s standards (7 pages, my goodness!) but I encourage anyone interested in bio-terrorism/bio-warfare to read it. I know from extensive personal experience working in the lab that while not completely trivial, the skills needed to produce bio-weapons are very straightforward and can be taught to anyone who can follow detailed instructions. There really isn’t any possible way to make this technology not available to bad guys, short of sending our entire society back to the stone age (really, you can do this with stone age technology as well if you got the smarts).
Just like our planet being smacked by another massive asteroid or comet is an absolute certainty, given enough time, so is another pandemic triggered either by ‘natural’ (there is nothing natural about the way we house animals in our food chain) or deliberate evolution of some virus somewhere. In our older stone age societies, a whole village might die, but the people couldn’t travel fast enough to cause wide-spread death. Even the black plague, as brutal as it was, wasn’t carried by humans, it was carried by the fleas of rats, which meant that it was controllable (though it took centuries to work out how to do so). The worst-case scenario would be a long incubating virus that is contagious the whole time and then is slowly debilitating until it finally kills you. That would lead to wholesale infections all throughout the world. Something that hits fast and kills fast will move fast initially, but simply telling everyone to stay home for a week and then isolating the remaining victims would be all it would take to stop its progress. Whether or not the next ‘natural’ pandemic is the first type or the second type, the real worry is that someone out there can be busy creating the worst type on purpose, then deliberately releasing it everywhere at once (anyone see ”Twelve Monkeys’?).
While _engineering_ a virus to be maximally lethal is still quite a challenge (in many respects researchers don’t really understand how certain virus strains are so much more lethal than others), using the techniques described in the article (which already has enough information for me to replicate the experiments, and, I promise you, I am nothing special when it comes to knowledge about these things) semi-skilled people (at great risk to their lives, of course) can semi-naturally trigger evolution and produce quite lethal versions of a virus in well under a year, possibly in as little as a couple of months.
Stuff like this always reminds me of the book “The White Plague” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague) by one of my favorite authors, Frank Herbert. Basically, it is a molecular biologist who sees his family blown apart by terrorists and goes insane, but not so insane that he can’t function as a scientist. He then carefully engineers a disease that only targets women, but is carried by men and women. A devastating weapon as the men (it was mostly men responsible for his family’s death) get to spend the rest of their lives contemplating the demise of society and possibly the human species.
