The Germ of New Weapons: Genetic Code Creates Danger

["Johannes Schneider" <Johannes.Schneider@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

>From the FAZ website:

www.faz.com

The Germ of New Weapons: Genetic Code Creates Danger

By Udo Ulfkotte

FRANKFURT. In the months leading to the announcement on June 26 that a rough
draft of the human code had been completed, some doctors grew uneasy over
the prospective effects such an advance would have on warfare.

Some of these doctors, members of the British Medical Association, painted a
dark picture last January about the dangers of genetic weapons. The
association envisioned weapons that could target only those with certain
genetic markers and said: "From a genetic point of view, there are more
similarities between different people and peoples than differences. But the
differences are there, and these individual or combined differences can be
used to distinguish members of one ethnic group from those of another."
Adding a darker tone to their views, the scientists predicted that a genetic
weapon could be used to only destroy white people, black people or Arabs.

Such predictions lead to several questions: Are civilian research projects
like the Human Genome Project supplying the basic knowledge required for
such "ethno-weapons"? Can killer viruses be adapted to target certain
peoples?

Scientists working for Western secret services and the military say it will
hardly be possible in the foreseeable future to modify viruses or bacteria
to produce a weapon that can differentiate between different ethnic groups,
noting that the currently known genetic differences between individual
groups of peoples are too small. Therefore, it seems that the militaries of
the world are unlikely in this decade to fight on a genetic battlefield with
weapons for which there is no defense. Nevertheless, once scientists can
read the "Book of Life," this nightmare vision could become reality within
decades.

If someone knows which ethnic groups are genetically susceptible to certain
illnesses and also knows how to protect themselves with a vaccination from
such weapons, they could also use this knowledge for warfare. And with this
knowledge, the very same person could also create new -- to date unknown --
pathogens. As was the case in nuclear research, advancements in the field of
genetics are also a source of new dangers for the long term.

Even without any detailed knowledge of the human genetic code, militaries
long have been interested in biological weapons. In 1970, the U.S. journal
Military Review published a report that detailed U.S. efforts during the
1950s. According to the magazine, U.S. military scientists tried to tailor
the Valley Fever virus to the Afro-American target group because they had a
tenfold likelihood of dying from this illness than white people. It is also
known that Soviet researchers were working on a weapon of genetically
modified pathogens that would target only Chinese people. This kind of
research still continues to be carried out in many countries around the
world, such as North Korea, China, Taiwan, Iraq, Iran and Syria.

In the 1990s, in a study titled Deployment of Armed Forces 2020, the German
military pointed to the future dangers of biological weapons "against
genetically different groups of peoples." These kinds of warfare agents
would be harmless to an attacker's own soldiers but would prove to be lethal
for people from another genetic group. The study may have been drawn up amid
reports about research being carried out in South Africa that at the time
unexpectedly forced its way into public knowledge.

The South African Truth Commission, which investigated the country's
apartheid system, brought to light certain details of a biological weapons
program carried out during the era. The report stated that the former head
of the South African program, Wouter Basson, misused scientific findings to
test biological weapons that would only kill black people. Cholera pathogens
(sprayed as an aerosol) -- one of South Africa's many areas of
experimentation -- were intended, as far as possible, to kill only black
people. Other research was dedicated to making black women infertile.

Other governments were interested in the weapons technology research carried
out by the South Africans, including -- allegedly -- Israel. Twelve
kilometers (7.5 miles) south of Tel Aviv in Nes Tsiona is the Israeli secret
research center for chemical and biological weapons, where the effectiveness
of the latest weapons is tested on horses, pigs, dogs and monkeys. It is
also where the Israelis produced the chemicals used by the Israeli secret
service Mossad in 1997 during its failed attempt to kill the Hamas leader
Khaled Meshal in Jordan.

When in November 1998 the British newspaper the Sunday Times published
details of the Nes Tsiona research project under the headline "Israel
develops an ethnic bomb," the Israeli government reacted with outrage and
denied everything. The research, the Israelis said at the time, was of a
purely defensive nature. Israel was not developing biological weapons in Nes
Tsiona, they said, but was rather attempting -- in cooperation with the
researchers -- to find a way of protecting themselves from these weapons.
But the Federation of American Scientists noted that if someone were working
defensively in the field of biotechnology and biotechnical weapons, they
could also put their findings to offensive use.
Jul. 10