Deadly designer bioweapons
2003-11-17 09:28
Washington - A group of US scientists has warned the Central Intelligence Agency that recent advances in biotechnology could give life to "designer" biological weapons able to target selected groups of people, act with a delay and turn deadly in reaction to medicine, according to a CIA document made public here.
The warning came during a closed-door seminar organised at the request of the CIA by the National Academy of Sciences to devise strategies for dealing with the dangerous by-products of the so-called genomic revolution.
The spy agency would not disclose when and where the meeting occurred. Its unclassified account of the seminar dated November 3 was obtained by the Federation of American Scientists, a non-profit organisation based in the US capital.
"The effects of some of these engineered biological agents could be worse that any disease known to man," the CIA report warned.
Scientists have cautioned that explosive growth in knowledge about genes and their functions could make traditional means of monitoring weapons of mass destruction obsolete, according to the document.
This could make weapons that currently exist only in science fiction novels real over the next decade.
The new tools of war were likely to include binary biological agents made up of two components that are relatively harmless separately but that become deadly when combined, according to the CIA account.
"A particularly insidious example would be a mild pathogen that when combined with its antidote becomes virulent," the report said.
It may well be possible in the future, experts explained, to design a virus that, acting alone, would cause just flu-like symptoms but that would turn deadly when its target takes an aspirin in the hope of relieving a headache.
Other "designer" biological warfare (BW) agents could be made to resist antibiotics, evade an immune response and permanently wreck a person's genetic make-up, the panelists told the CIA.
They told the agency to expect a "stealth" virus that could remain dormant inside its victims for extended periods of time before being activated.
One panelist cited the possibility of a stealth virus attack that could disable a large portion of the population over 40 with severe arthritis, concealing its origin and saddling a country with massive medical bills, according to the CIA report.
"The resulting diversity of new BW agents could enable such a broad range of attack scenarios that it would be virtually impossible to anticipate and defend against," the agency account pointed out.