Eric Niiler has an article in today’s (July 10, 2017) WIRED.com with the title above, discussing the disruptive field of gene editing; and, the potential misuses of this emerging technology. Physicians, especially virologists, are always worried to some degree about where and when the next natural pandemic might emerge. But increasingly, some of the same individuals are beginning to speak louder and write more frequently about a potential pandemic being deliberately started by an individual or individuals, after genetically modifying an existing virus or bug, so that it becomes highly infectious; and, highly lethal.
Mr. Niiler writes that the u.S. is mostly prepared when it comes to dealing or confronting a natural, but nasty virus, or bug. He notes that “the Pentagon operates infectious disease labs and [global health] surveillance networks in places like Kenya, Georgia, and Thailand, as well as a giant research center, and vaccine-making unit just outside Washington D.C.,” at the U.S. Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), in Ft. Detrick, Maryland. “With some 200K troops deployed at bases in 171 countries,” Mr. Niiler wrote, it certainly behooves the Department of Defense to stay on top of emerging diseases that could pose an undue threat to their personnel. “But,” he adds, “Pentagon planners are starting to wonder what happens if the next deadly flu or hemorrhagic fever doesn’t come from a mosquito-infested jungle, or bat-crowded cave. With new gene-editing tools like Crispr-Cas9, state enemies [North Korea especially] could, theoretically, create unique organisms by mixing-and-matching bits of genetic information.”
“As this scenario evolves from sci-fi to the real world possibility, many public health experts, biology researchers, and even the military have begun to examine the possible threats,” according to Christian Hassell, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Chemical and Biological Defense. “We had people asking us, ‘How is the government responding to this? What is the threat it poses, if any?”
So, in order to get a better understanding of this emerging, disruptive technology; and, how it could potentially be used for nefarious purposes, Hassell got buy-in from SecDef Mattis, to approve funding a year-long review by the National Academy of Sciences. Work is underway by the various stakeholders and participants to agree on “the scope and direction of the probe,” as well as a “classified review,’ Mr. Niiler wrote, before an unclassified version is publicly released sometime next year/2018. Mr. Niiler writes that the findings and recommendations of the panel/task force, “could have implications for defensive strategies against a new type of bioweapon; [that is also] potentially more difficult to identify; because, it resembles its “natural” counterpart.” A issue that will certainly be heavily debated, will be whether or not to recommend that ‘biological research, that has potentially nefarious applications,” Mr. Niiler added. In a preview of just how contentious this particular issue is likely to be, “conflict,” among the participants “spiked, during the public portion of a meeting of the panel last Thursday, and likely continued into a closed-door session the next day/last Friday,” he noted. “Some scientists at the meeting felt the molecular biology community is already doing enough to monitor itself: The academic biology and DIY bio-hacking communities have voluntary codes of ethics to deter experimentation by would-be bad guys. And they [the researchers in both ‘communities’] fear what might happen to important genetic research if the Pentagon gets too paranoid,” Mr. Niiler wrote.
How does one monitor for this kind of threat? Besides an engaged scientific community policing its own, Penn State’s Howard Salis “has developed a computer program to predict what a new organism will do, based on its genetic sequence,” Mr. Niiler wrote. “He thinks the best way to stop bad actors is at the beginning.” “How do you stop someone at the testing stage, or at the clinical stage of doing something bad?” Salis asked the audience to contemplate. “If you catch that actor trying to design the system, it’s early in the process, it’s easy to see what they’re designing.”
“For now, the threat of a hyper-lethal designer virus remains hypothetical,” Mr. Niiler wrote. “This is not a tomorrow threat, it might be a tomorrow-tomorrow threat,” says Daniel Gerstein, an analyst at the Rand Corporation, former science policy adviser for the Obama administration. “I don’t think it’s purely science fiction. But, we have not seen a lot of terrorists looking to manipulate genome sequences.”
“And, even if they do, the good news (for now) is that responding to a super-charged, human-made virus is pretty much the same as responding to a nasty Ebola- or Zika-like outbreak,” according to Cmdr. Franca Jones, Chief of Global Emerging Infections Surveillance for the Pentagon’s Defense Health Agency. “There are ways to determine if a flu virus came from the lab, or a jungle,” Mr. Niiler wrote. “We should be able to detect newly created organisms using a variety of methodology we have available, DNA sequencing being one,” Cmdr. Jones told WIRED.com. “But, whether it’s natural, or lab-grown, public health officials will still need the resources to respond to an infectious disease outbreak,” Mr. Niiler wrote. “When it comes to our infrastructure to respond,” Cmdr. Jones said, “I don’t think there is much difference.”
It is somewhat of a mystery why we haven’t had a “Dr. Moreau,” either deliberately letting into the wild a highly infectious, deadly virus, or accidentally. I still think that the U.S., or the world needs a facility designed somewhat like the one Michael Crichton envisioned in his
1969 sci-fi thriller/book/movie, ‘The Andromeda Strain.’ There will almost certainly be another global pandemic in the not too distant future; and, probably sooner than we all would want. But, the advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, big data mining, and the widespread availability of much of this research and information being instantly available via the worldwide web — make the potential threat of a deliberate release of such a terrible virus more possible. And, the pace of advancement in this domain, will take your breath away.
‘A Crack In Creation’
Ms. Jennifer Doudna is considered a Crispir pioneer and was the feature of an extensive interview in last weekend’s (July 8/9, 2017) Wall Street Journal, in an article by Kyle Peterson. According to Ms. Doudna’s Wikipedia biography, Dr. Doudna is a Professor of Chemistry; and of, Molecular and Cell Biology, at the Department of Chemistry and Engineering, at the University of California, Berkeley. Mr. Pererson begins, “rewriting the code of life has never been so easy. In 2012, scientists demonstrated a new DNA-editing technique called Crispr. Five years later, it is being used to cure mice with HIV, and hemophilia. Geneticists are engineering pigs to make them suitable as human organ donors. [Billionaire] Bill Gates, is spending $75M to endow a few Anopheles mosquitoes, which spread malaria, with a sort of a genetic time bomb that could wipe out the species. {And] A team [of geneticists] at Harvard plans to edit 1.5M letters of elephant DNA to resurrect the woolly mammoth.”
“I have frankly been flabbergasted at the pace of the field,” Ms. Doudna told Mr. Peterson. “We’re barely five years out; and, it’s already in early clinical trials for cancer. It’s unbelievable.”
“The thing to understand about Crispr,” Mr. Peterson wrote, “isn’t its acronym — for the record, it stands for Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats — but, that it makes editing DNA easy, cheap, and precise.” Ms. Doudna has a new book out, “A Crack In Creation,” in which she explains how the Crispir process works: “An enzyme called Cas9 can be programmed to launch onto any 20-letter sequence of DNA. Once there, the double helix, splitting the DNA into two. Scientists supply a snippet of genetic material they want to insert, making sure its ends match up with the cut strands. When the cell’s repair mechanism kicks in to fix the cut, it pastes it into the new DNA,” sequence.
“It’s so exact,” Mr. Peterson wrote, “that Crispr blurs the meaning of “genetically modified organism.” “The activists yelling about “frankenfish,” are generally upset about transgenic plants and animals — those with DNA inserted from other species.”
Crispr/Gene Editing ‘Is So Easy, Anybody Can Do It’ — The Next Pandemic Could Be Downloaded From The Internet
The majority of Mr. Peterson’s interview with Ms. Doudna, as well as the majority of his article, discusses Crispir, and its potential commercial/medical benefits; and, it isn’t till near the end of the article that he discusses the potential use of this technology for nefarious purposes.
“A final Crispr worry,” he wrote, “is that it makes DNA editing so easy, anyone can do it. Simple hobby kits sell online for [as little as] $150; and, a community biotech lab in Brooklyn [New York, currently] offers a class for $400.” And, movie actress, Jennifer Lopez, “is reportedly working on a television drama called, “C.R.I.S.P.R.,” according to the Hollywood Reporter, “explores the next generation of terror: DNA hacking.”
Ms. Doudna downplayed the terror, or malicious use of this technology near the end of the interview with Mr. Peterson. She said “Genetics is complicated. You have to have quite a bit of knowledge, I think, to be able to do anything that’s truly dangerous,” she said. “There’s been a little bit of hype, in my opinion, about DIY kits; and, are we going to have rouge scientists — or even non-scientists — randomly doing crazy stuff. I think that’s not likely.”
Ms. Doudna’s opinion is probably widely shared in the scientific community; and, the Pentagon must proceed carefully, because too much government oversight, regulation, or interference could definitely stifle innovation and progress. But, it is prudent and warranted that a serious, thorough examination/study be done -which will hear all sides of the issue: those who believe in the promise of this technology; and, those who fear its misuse by the darker angels of our nature. And, I have read and heard other very smart people, who know this domain, who would beg to disagree with Ms. Doudna about how ‘easy,’ or how ‘hard,’ this technology is to replicate for nefarious purposes The truth, as it does in many cases — probably lies…somewhere in between the two views.
I have heard very smart people who know this area well, that a high school biology major can use the knowledge already available on the Internet, to create a super-bug that could kill a half-billion people in a very short period of time. Why no one, or no terrorist group has actually attempted to carry out such a terrible act, is a different question — and one, that we really have no answers for. Thank goodness they haven’t. But, hope is not a strategy; and, we need to figure out what the best course of action is — without stifling critical research; and, allowing ‘a thousand flowers to bloom,’ in an area that holds great promise. That’s why, in a perfect world, with all the funds needed, I would vote for a facility along the lines Michael Crichton envisioned in the Andromeda Strain. But, we’re a country $20T in debt, and there are lots of other threats that we face — cyber, nuclear, etc. that also demand our attention, resources, and commitment. There are no easy answers. This panel looking into this emerging area, will have its work cut out for them. And, like almost all difficult issues, there are likely….no easy answers. V/R, RCP
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