Programmable Bioweapons Could Be the Nuclear Bombs of Future Wars
Programmable Bioweapons Could Be the Nuclear Bombs of Future Wars


In the past, scientists leveraged their knowledge about the atom to win a war at an immense human cost, and we’ve lived under the constant threat of nuclear heat death ever since. In the future, we will face unimaginable ethical dilemmas as we engineer nature to kill. 



Synthetic biology is like a souped-up version of genetic engineering—instead of merely tweaking the DNA of existing organisms, it re-programs genes to perform specific functions. Like circuits and other sensors in electronics, synthetic biology configures organic components to create organisms that function in new ways—a plant that can sniff out anything from drugs to pollution, for example, or an entirely new form of computer-designed life.

			
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When it comes to war, however, the results of synthetic biology could as disastrous as nuclear weapons were in the past, according to a panel of academic experts who spoke on the topic at today’s New America Future of War conference in Washington, DC.







“We can line up all of the positives that have come from physics and the negatives that have come from physics, and they are complicated in their outcomes,” said Michael Crow, president of Arizona State University. “The biologically-based conflicts of the future would be wild by comparison: I’ll wipe out your food supply, I’ll wipe out your water, I’ll wipe out your ability to reproduce, I’ll wipe out your ability for your gene line to advance.”

“We have to figure out some way to rethink this stuff before we can no longer think about it,” Crow said.

DARPA, the blue-sky research wing of the US military, has been investigating the possibilities of synthetic biology for warfare for years and created a dedicated unit, the Biological Technologies Office, in 2014. The insane ideas investigated by the agency over the years have included immortal synthetic beings with “off” switches and on-demand pharmaceuticals synthesized in the field. 





“Do we need to create the monster ourselves?”

These kinds of advances in the capabilities of synthetic biology have motivated environmental watchdog groups to issue calls for moratoriums on research in the field, and some scientists themselves have even halted work on avian flu of their own volition due to concerns over the newly discovered ability to re-engineer the virus to be transmitted between animals. The moratorium was lifted in 2013.

In October of 2014, the government stepped in to stop that research once again. A series of safety lapses—long-lost vials of smallpox discovered in a government lab, deadly avian flu accidentally shipped to a lab that didn’t ask for it, and scientists exposed to anthrax—prompted the federal government to halt all new funding for “gain of function” research that repurposes deadly biological agents. That moratorium is still in place.





But with all this thoughtful consideration over the ethics of designing biological beings meant to kill, the hawks will surely ask: what are other nations doing? A key aspect of warfare is defense, after all, even in the futuristic WTF realm of synthetic biology. China, for example, has been active in the field for years.

“In the military context, I think it’s a huge dilemma for, say, our military, because we know there’s people out there who won’t follow the same self-imposed restrictions,” said Gary Marchant, faculty director of Arizona State’s Center for Law, Science, and Innovation. “To understand what those threats are and to be able to counter them, do we need to create the monster ourselves?”

The solution right now, according to the panelists, boils down to a cultural change within the sciences and the military—scientists don’t like gag orders on research and the military will likely want to take advantage of any new weapon it can—that takes a forward-looking view and considers the eventual costs of powerful new technologies. 





According to Marchant, professional codes of ethics that reach beyond the jurisdictions of national laws would be most effective. Crow, however, believes ethics need to be hard-coded into our future synthetic creations. 

“[We need] to code into the actual machines, individual science, the process itself, these abilities—like in the case of Isaac Asimov‘s notion of robotics, the robot can never be designed to injure a human,” Crow said. “That’s no joke, that’s not science fiction. That’s a code inside the model.”




