Socialism or extinction

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Of Mice & Men

By Conn Hallinan

San Francisco Examiner
May 11, 2001

This is a story of mice and men, and how the latter
turned the former into something that should be keeping
us all up at night.

The tale begins three years ago with a group of
Australian gene engineers trying to devise a way to
protect food supplies by making mice and rats infertile.
So they did this very fancy thing: they inserted a mouse
gene into a mousepox virus. The idea was that the gene
would stimulate an overproduction of interleukin-4, an
essential ingredient in mouse immune systems. That, in
turn, would prevent the implantation of an egg in the
uteru of a female mouse. Presto, infertile mice.

But something terrible happened between the drawing board
to the mouse, and instead of making the mice infertile,
the mousepox turned lethal, killing even those mice
vaccinated against the disease. So why stay up nights
worrying about dead mice? Because interkeukin-4 is an
essential ingredient in our own immune systems, and what
can be done to mice, can be done to men. As one
Department of Defense scientist told the New York Times,
"It demonstrates a frightening message. Maybe it is
easier to do these things than we think."

The Australian killer would never have happened if the
world had paid attention to a group of scientists, and
Nobel laureates, who met in Asilomar, Ca. back in 1975 to
try to establish guidelines for the newly minted field of
genetic engineering. That conference pledged, in the
words of Caltech microbial geneticist Robert Sinsheimer,
" to take every possible precaution to keep these
creations out of our biosphere."

But two years later, an unholy alliance of biotech
industries and the U.S. military, led by former Nobel
winner James Watson, a discoverer of DNA, called for
wide-open research and a no-holds barred application of
genetic engineering. Calling the Asilomar guidelines "an
exercise in the theater of the absurd," Watson called
efforts to control DNA research "a massive miscalculation
in which we cried wolf without ever having seen or even
heard one."

Well, the wolf is at the door, a door, according to Feb.
8, 2001 report by the U.S. Energy Department, which is
hardly locked and bolted. The Department found that eight
biological weapons labs lacked required oversight and
control, and that experiments involving anthrax, plague,
and botulism raised "the potential for greater risk to
workers and possibly others." Three of those labs,
Sandia, and Lawrence in Livermore and Berkeley, are in
Northern California

Most people assume that biological warfare was eliminated
by the 1972 Biological Weapons Treaty and the only people
out there with bad bugs are the so-called "rogue states"
like Libya, Iraq, Iran and North Korea. But bioweapons
research is permitted under the Treaty as long as it is
"defensive," not "offensive." The difference, however, is
hardly obvious. "The Pentagon says everything is
defensive when a lot of things are offensive," said now-
Senator Barbara Boxer when she was in the House. "The
research is the same. You have the same organisms present
to do the test."

A lot of the things being looked at in those labs are not
things you would want to encounter, and if they ever got
out into the biosphere, we are talking major trouble. The
National Institute of Health Recombinant DNA Advisory
Committee approved a proposal that inserted a diphtheria
toxin gene into the E. coli bacteria commonly found in
the human intestine. According to Sinsheimer, the test
"probably contravened the 1972 Treaty and was certainly a
dangerous thing to do." Just how dangerous was underlined
by a Rand Corporation report discussing the
"weaponization"" of E. coli by inserting the toxin for
botulism in it, one of the deadliest poisons known. The
report suggested that "liberally added to water supplies
and various food," E. coli could "eliminate large numbers
of people."

Over the past few months, organizations ranging from the
CIA to the National Homeland Defense Agency have warned
about "bio-terrorism." Americans have indeed been the
targets of biological weapons, but from our own
government. In 1950, the U.S. Navy pumped Serratia
marcescens into the fog rolling in through San Francisco
Bay to test the vulnerability of the Bay Area to
biowarfare. While the bacteria are generally benign, they
aren't always. The "experement" likely killed Edward
Nevins, a San Francisco pipefitter, whose autopsy
revealed heart valves clogged with the pathogen. Bacteria
were also sprayed on Norfolk, Hampton and Newport News in
Virginia.

The Army admits to 339 open-air tests of biological
weapons in the U.S., including the release of Hemophilus
pertussis (Whooping cough) in Sebring and Palmetto,
Florida. Whooping cough cases increased 12 fold, and
deaths increased three-fold in Florida that year. Anthrax
and Q Fever were released at high altitudes over Utah and
Nevada to study dispersal patterns, and rodents infected
with plague, tularemia, and Venezuelan equine
encephalomyelitis were released in the Dugway Proving
Grounds near Salt Lake City.

The Army even tested a so-called "ethnic weapon" using
coccidiomycosis or "Valley Fever, " a fungus to which
African-Americans and Asians are particularly
susceptible. A variety of the fungus was released in the
Naval Depot at Mechanicsberg, Penn, which had a mostly
African-American civilian workforce. In testimony before
Congress on the Mechanicsberg operation, a Department of
Defense official said,"Since Negroes are more susceptible
to coccidiodies than whites, this fungus disease was
simulated by using" a mutant of Valley Fever.

The recent DOE report on slack procedures should hardly
come as a surprise. In the past 40 years there have been
over 5,000 laboratory-acquired infections among
researchers. And 15 years ago a Governmental Affairs
Committee's Oversight Subcommittee found "serious
deficiencies" exist in the safety procedures on biowar
research. The danger from biological warfare is less
likely to come from a terrorist organization than some
government- run lab.

At this moment, more than 50 countries are meeting in
Geneva in an effort to tighten up loopholes in the 1972
Treaty. Neither the Clinton nor Bush Administrations have
been very helpful in this effort. The U.S. has
consistently raised objections to on-site inspections of
private industry (where much of the bioresearch in the
U.S. takes place) and refuses to open the issue of
"defensive" biological weapons. The Fifth Review
Conference for the Treaty is scheduled for November, and
a number of countries are trying to stiffen the Treaty's
provisions, particularly those relating to cheating.

If those efforts fail, then countries will begin to
"research" what happened in Australia, only this time
around it won't be mice they'll target. Let someone gene
spice a pathogen to a Rhinovirus, or common cold, and
global warming will only concern whatever species
replaces us.

For more information on this subject, contact the Council
for Responsible Genetics and its publication, Gene Watch
<http://www.gene-watch.org>

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