Personalized biological weapons will soon be a reality

We have translated a long article published in 2012 in the American magazine The Atlantic. Journalist Steven Kotler, microbiologist and geneticist Andrew Hessel, and security expert Marc Goodman took stock of advances in biotechnology and painted a frightening picture. They detailed how technological progress is making it increasingly easy and undetectable for malicious actors to design biological weapons. An interesting article that provides a better understanding of the history, functioning and development of the biotechnology sector.

These novel biological weapons can be customized to precisely target certain types of DNA (in order to eradicate a population with certain genetic characteristics for example) or even unique DNA (to kill a specific person, a celebrity or a political figure). The other interest of this article is to support ATR's analysis of the technological system: impossibility of controlling technological development and its consequences; destruction of the autonomy of living organisms and submission to technocratic despotism; open source scam presented as emancipation; etc.

Image of the article: Illumina claims that its NovaSeq X machine will reduce the price of sequencing to 200 dollars per human genome. The era of fast and cheap genome sequencing is here, and that's not good news.

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Hacking the president's DNA

The American government is quietly collecting the DNA of world leaders and would protect that of Barack Obama. Once decoded, these genomes could provide compromising information. In the not too distant future, they could also provide something more: the basis for creating custom biological weapons that can take down a president without leaving a trace.

HERE IS HOW THE FUTURE ARRIVED. It all started innocently, in the early 2000s, when some businesses began to realize that highly skilled tasks, previously performed internally by a single employee, could be effectively delivered to a larger group of people via the Internet at [practice also known as Crowdsourcing, NdT]. Initially, it was just about designing T-shirts (Threadless.com) and writing encyclopedias (Wikipedia.com). But very quickly, this trend made its way into the exact sciences. Very quickly, the search for extraterrestrial life, the development of autonomous cars, and the folding of enzymes into new proteins were carried out in this way. With the fundamental tools of genetic manipulation — tools that cost millions of dollars just ten years ago — having fallen precipitously, crowdsourcing the design of biological agents was the next logical step.

In 2008, informal DNA design competitions offering small awards quickly emerged. Then in 2011, with the launch of the General Electrics $100 million breast cancer challenge, the field moved on to more serious competitions. In early 2015, when personalized gene therapies for terminal cancers were at the forefront of medicine, virus-designing websites began to appear. Visitors could download information about their illness and virologists could provide recipes for a personalized cure. From a medical point of view, all of this made perfect sense: nature had done a great job designing viruses over millions of years. With a little bit of tinkering, they became ideal vehicles for administering gene therapies.

Very quickly, these sites were inundated with requests that went well beyond cancer. Diagnostic agents, vaccines, antimicrobials, even synthetic psychoactive drugs, all these products were on the menu. What people did with these organic products is an enigma for everyone. No international body had yet been created to monitor them.

For example, in November 2016, when a novice visitor by the name of Cap'n Capsid proposed a challenge on the viral design site 99Virons, no alarm sounded; his challenge was trivial and was one of approximately 100 design requests submitted that day. Perhaps Cap'n Capsid was a consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, and his challenge was a new attempt to understand the radical evolution of the research and development landscape. In fact, he could have been anyone, but the problem was no less interesting. In addition, Capsid offered 500 dollars for the winning project, which is no small thing for only a few hours of work.

Later on, 99Virions' connection logs will show that Cap'n Capsid's IP address came from Panama, although it was likely a fake IP. The design specification itself did not raise concerns. Written in SBOL, an open-source language popular with synthetic biology enthusiasts, it looked like a standard vaccine request. So people got to work, just like the automated computer programs that had been written to automatically evolve the new models. These algorithms were becoming more and more efficient and were winning nearly a third of the challenges.

In the space of 12 hours, 243 models were submitted, most of them by computer systems. But this time the winner, GeneGenie27, was a human being: a 20-year-old Columbia University student with a talent for virology. His project was quickly delivered to a thriving online biosynthetic marketplace based in Shanghai. Less than a minute later, an Icelandic startup specializing in synthesis won the contract to transform the 5,984 base pairs into real genetic material. Three days later, a pack of fast-dissolving 10-milligram microtablets was placed in a FedEx envelope and delivered to a courier.

Two days later, Samantha, a second-year political science student at Harvard University, received the package. Thinking it was a new synthetic psychedelic that she had ordered online, she slipped a tablet into her left nostril that evening and then went to her closet. After she had finished dressing, the tablet had begun to dissolve and a few bits of foreign genetic material had entered the cells of her nasal mucosa.

But that evening drug only seemed to have given him the flu. Later that night, Samantha was suffering from a mild fever and was shedding billions of virus particles. These particles were spreading across campus in an exponentially growing chain reaction that, aside from a slight fever and a few sneezes, was absolutely harmless. Everything changes when the virus encounters cells that contain a very specific DNA sequence, a sequence that acts as a molecular key to unlock less harmless secondary functions. This secondary sequence triggers a fast-acting neurodestructive disease that leads to memory loss and then death. The only person in the world with this DNA sequence was the President of the United States, who was due to speak at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard later this week. Sure, there would be thousands of people on campus who would have got their nose in their nose, but the Secret Service would probably have no idea.

It was December, after all, cold and flu season.

The scenario we've just outlined may seem like science fiction — and, indeed, it does include a few futuristic jumps. Many members of the scientific community will say that the sequence of events is too fast. However, since the beginning of this century, the acceleration of technological development has shown a clear tendency to make the impossible possible, and in no time. Last year, Watson, an artificial intelligence from IBM, understood natural language well enough to beat human champion Ken Jennings at the game Jeopardy. At the time of writing, soldiers with bionic limbs are back in service and autonomous cars are driving on our streets. However, most of these advances are minimal compared to the great leap forward in biosciences right now, a leap whose consequences we are just beginning to imagine.

Customized biological weapons are a subtler and less catastrophic threat than accidental epidemics or weapons of mass destruction. However, the likelihood of custom biological weapons being used is much higher.

More specifically, the DNA of world leaders is already the subject of intrigue. According to Ronald Kessler, author of the book In the President's Secret Service (2009), Navy stewards gather bed sheets, drinking glasses, and other objects that the president touched — they are then sterilized or destroyed — in order to prevent possible criminals from obtaining his genetic material. (The Secret Service did not want to confirm or deny this practice, nor did they want to comment on any other aspect of this article.) According to secret information published in 2010 by WikiLeaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered our embassies to discreetly take DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior United Nations officials. Clearly, the United States sees a strategic advantage in knowing the DNA of world leaders; it would be surprising if other nations disagreed.

Although no use of an advanced bioweapon, with genetic targeting, has been reported, the authors of this article — including an expert in genetics and microbiology (Andrew Hessel) and a security and crime expert (Marc Goodman) — are confident that we are getting closer to that possibility. Most of the required technologies are there and already meet the needs of academic R&D groups and biotech companies. These technologies are becoming more and more powerful, especially those that allow DNA to be easily manipulated.

The evolution of cancer treatment makes it possible to understand what is happening. Most cancer drugs kill cells. Current chemotherapies are based on chemical warfare agents: we have transformed weapons into drugs against cancer, even if they are rudimentary. And as in the case of bombings, collateral damage is inevitable. But today, thanks to advances in genetics, we know that each cancer is unique, and research is moving towards the development of personalized drugs — tailor-made therapies that can exterminate specific cancer cells, in a specific way, and in a specific person; therapies as precise as lasers.

It is true that at the turn of the millennium, personalized medicine was the subject of a great media hype, especially in the field of genetics. A large part of this craze has now disappeared. The dominant trend is that technology has not lived up to the hype, which is not surprising. Gartner, an information technology research and consulting firm, invented the term Hype cycle [runaway cycle, NdT] to describe exactly this type of phenomenon: a new technology is introduced with enthusiasm, then it is followed by a downturn when it does not immediately deliver on its promises. But Gartner also discovered that the cycle continues beyond what they call “the trough of disillusionment.” From these ashes a “rise of enlightenment” is reborn, which means that, from a longer-term historical perspective, the majority of these much-heralded revolutionary developments end up opening up new perspectives.

As George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, explains, this is what is happening in the field of personalized medicine right now. “The fields of gene therapies, virus creation, and other personalized therapies are progressing rapidly,” explains George Church, “and several clinical trials have moved to phase 2 and 3,” meaning that therapies are being tested on an increasing number of subjects. “Many of these treatments target cells that differ only in a rare genetic variation compared to cells surrounding areas or to individuals.” The Finnish start-up Oncos Therapeutics has already treated nearly 300 cancer patients using a reduced form of this type of targeted biotechnology.

For the most part, these developments are positive — they herald better treatments, new cures, and, ultimately, longer lives. But it wouldn't take much to subvert these therapies by turning personalized medications into personalized biological weapons.

“Right now,” explains Jimmy Lin, a genomics researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and founder of Rare Genomics, a non-profit organization that designs treatments for rare childhood diseases based on individual genetic analysis, “we have drugs that target specific cancer mutations. Examples include Gleevec, Zelboraf and Xalkori. Vertex”, a pharmaceutical company based in Massachusetts, “has developed a drug for patients with cystic fibrosis who have a particular mutation. Genetic targeting of individuals is a bit further away. But a state-sponsored program, such as Stuxnet, might be able to do that in a few years. Of course, this work is quite unknown, and if you talk to most people about it, they will tell you that it seems like science fiction. But when you know the research community, you realize that it's entirely possible for a well-funded group to succeed.”

We would do well to start preparing for this eventuality as soon as possible.

IF WE REALLY WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS GOING ON IN THE FIELD OF BISCIENCES, WE MUST UNDERSTAND THAT THE SPEED OF DEVELOPMENT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES IS ACCELERATING. In 1965, Gordon Moore realized that the number of integrated circuit components on a computer chip had doubled just about every year since the invention of the integrated circuit in the late 1950s. Moore, who would go on to co-found Intel, predicted that this trend would continue “for at least 10 years.” He was right. The trend actually continued for 10 years, and 10 more years after that. In total, his observation remained accurate for five decades, becoming so enduring that it is now known as “Moore's Law” and used by the semiconductor industry as a guide for future planning.

Originally, Moore's Law stated that every 12 months (now 24 months), the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double, an example of a model known as “exponential growth.” While linear growth is a slow and sequential progression (1 becomes 2 then 2 then 3 then 4, etc.), exponential growth is an explosive doubling (1 becomes 2 then 4 then 8, etc.) that has a transformative effect. In the 1970s, the most powerful supercomputer in the world was a Cray. It required a small room to hold it and cost around $8 million. Today, the iPhone you have in your pocket is over 100 times faster and over 12,000 times cheaper than a Cray. It's exponential growth at work.

Moore's law originally stated that every 12 months (now 24 months), the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double — an example of a model known as “exponential growth.” While linear growth is a slow and sequential proposition (1 becomes 2 then 2 then 3 then 4, etc.), exponential growth is an explosive doubling (1 becomes 2 then 4 then 8, etc.) that has a transformative effect. In the 1970s, the most powerful supercomputer in the world was a Cray. It took an entire room to contain it and it cost around $8 million. Today, the iPhone you have in your pocket is over 100 times faster and over 12,000 times cheaper than a Cray. This is exponential growth.

In the years following Moore's observation, scientists discovered that the exponential growth model is found in numerous other industries and technologies. The volume of Internet data traffic in a year, the number of bytes of computer data storage available per dollar, the number of digital camera pixels per dollar, and the amount of data transferable via fiber optics are among the dozens of measures of technological progress that follow this pattern. In fact, exponential growth is so widespread that researchers now suspect that it is found in all information-based technologies, that is, all technologies used to capture, store, process, retrieve, or transmit digital information.

Over the past few decades, scientists have also discovered that the four letters of the genetic alphabet — A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine) — can be converted to 1's and 0's in the binary code. This allows genetic information to be easily manipulated electronically. With this innovation, biology has reached a new level, transforming itself into an information-based science and progressing exponentially. As a result, the fundamental tools of genetic engineering, designed to manipulate life — tools that could easily be misused for destructive purposes — are seeing their cost fall dramatically and their power increase. Today, anyone with a gift for science, a decent Internet connection, and enough money to buy a used car has what it takes to try their hand at bio-hacking.

These developments significantly increase several threats. The most nightmarish involve malicious actors who would manufacture weapons of mass destruction or careless scientists who would trigger accidental epidemics — very real problems that urgently need to be paid more attention [the New York Times published an article in June 2024 ^[1] explaining why the virus that caused the Covid-19 pandemic probably came out of a laboratory, NdT]. Personalized biological weapons, which are the subject of this article, are a subtler and less catastrophic threat, and perhaps that is why society is only beginning to care about them. However, once available, we think they will be used much more easily than biological weapons of mass destruction. First, while most criminals think twice before carrying out a mass massacre, murder is completely trivial. In the future, politicians, celebrities, business owners—just about anyone in fact—could become the target of a biological attack. Even if fatal, many such attacks could go unnoticed and be mistaken for natural deaths; many other murders would be difficult to blame on a suspect, especially because of the time that elapses between exposure to the pathogen and the onset of symptoms.

Moreover, as we will see in greater detail, these same scientific developments will eventually pave the way for a whole new type of warfare. Imagine, for example, that we could cause extreme paranoia in the CEO of a large company in order to gain a commercial advantage or, later in the future, that we could infect consumers to make them want to buy compulsively.

We chose to focus this investigation primarily on the president's biosecurity. This is because the well-being of the president is paramount to national security — and because a discussion of the challenges in protecting the president will show how difficult (and different) ensuring “safety” will be as biotechnology progresses.

TO DIRECTLY ATTACK the president's genome, you must first be able to decode the genomes. Until recently, this was no trivial matter. In 1990, when the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health announced their intention to sequence the 3 billion base pairs of the human genome over the next 15 years, this project was considered to be the most ambitious project ever undertaken in the life sciences. Despite a budget of $3 billion, progress has been slow. Even after years of hard work, many experts doubted that the planned time and money were sufficient to complete the work.

Things started to change in 1998, when biologist-entrepreneur J. Craig Venter and his company, Celera, started racing. Taking advantage of the exponential growth of biotechnology, Venter relied on a new generation of gene sequencers and a new computer-intensive approach called cookie-cutter sequencing. He managed to decipher a human genome (his own) in less than two years, for an amount of 300 million dollars.

Venter's achievement was astounding, but it was only the beginning. In 2007, seven years later, a human genome could be sequenced for less than $1 million. In 2008, some laboratories did it for 60,000 dollars, and in 2009, for 5,000 dollars. This year, the $1,000 mark seems to be about to be crossed. At the current rate, within five years, the cost will be under $100. In the course of history, there is probably no other technology that has fallen in price and performance has increased so dramatically. [In 2022, sequencing the human genome cost a few hundred dollars, according to the tech-savvy magazine. WIRED ^[2], NdT].

However, it would take more than just a gene sequencer to make a custom bioweapon. To begin with, potential attackers would have to collect and cultivate live cells from the target (more on this later), which would make it necessary to use cell culture devices. Next, a molecular profile of the cells would be established, which would require gene sequencers, microarray scanners, mass spectrometers, etc. Once a detailed genetic pattern has been established, the criminal can begin designing, building, and testing a pathogen, which starts with work on genetic databases and software, and ends with work on viruses and cell cultures. Gathering the equipment needed to do all of this is no easy task. And yet, as researchers have equipped themselves with new tools, as large companies have merged and consolidated their businesses, and as small laboratories have run out of money and gone bankrupt, a lot of used equipment is ending up on the second-hand market. In new condition, the required equipment would cost well over $1 million. On eBay it is possible to get it for only 10,000 dollars. If you remove the analysis tools — since these processes can now be outsourced — you can tinker with a basic cell culture device for less than $1,000. Buying chemicals and lab supplies has never been easier; hundreds of retailers on the web accept credit cards and deliver almost anywhere in the world.

Biological knowledge is also becoming more and more democratic. Websites like JoVE (Journal of Visualized Experiments) offer thousands of practical videos on bioscience techniques. MIT offers online courses. Many journals are open access, making it possible to consult the latest research free of charge, with detailed sections on materials and methods. If you want a more hands-on approach to learning, you can simply join one of the dozens of biotech DIY organizations, such as Genspace and BioCurious, which recently emerged to make genetic engineering a kind of leisure activity. In a recent interview, Bill Gates told a journalist that if he were young today, he would abandon computer hacking for biopiracy. And for those who do not have the laboratory or the necessary knowledge, dozens of Contract Research and Manufacturing Services [“research contract and manufacturing service” or CRAMS] are ready to do much of the complex scientific work for a fee.

From the invention of genetic engineering in 1972 until very recently, the high cost of equipment and the high cost of training to use that equipment effectively kept most malicious people away from these technologies. These barriers to entry have now almost disappeared. In a speech delivered on December 7, 2011 at the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention Review Conference, Hillary Clinton declared that:

“Unfortunately, the capacity of terrorists and other non-state actors to develop and use these weapons is constantly growing. That is why our efforts need to focus on this issue again [...] because there are warning signs and they are too serious to ignore.”

The RADICAL EXPANSION of the frontiers of biology raises an uncomfortable question: how to guard against threats that don't yet exist? Genetic engineering is on the cusp of a new era. The old era was that of DNA sequencing, which is simply reading the genetic code, that is, identifying and understanding the meaning of the order of the four chemical substances that make up DNA. Today we are learning to writing DNA, which opens up perspectives that are both grandiose and terrifying.

Again, Craig Venter contributed to this change. In the mid-1990s, just before starting his work on reading the human genome, he wondered what it would take to write one. He wanted to know what the minimal genome needed for life looked like. It was a good question. At the time, DNA synthesis technology was too rudimentary and too expensive to consider writing a minimal genome for a living organism or, as far as we are concerned, to build a sophisticated biological weapon. And gene splicing techniques, which involve using enzymes to cut existing DNA from one or more organisms and put it back together, were too difficult to implement.

Exponential advances in biotechnology have greatly reduced these problems. The latest technology — known as synthetic biology or “synbio” — is taking work from molecular to digital. The genetic code is manipulated using the equivalent of a word processor. At the push of a button, the code representing DNA can be cut and pasted, imported effortlessly from one species to another. It can be reused and repurposed. DNA bases can be exchanged accurately. And once the code looks right? All you have to do is press “Send.” A dozen DNA printers can now transform these computer bits into biological material.

In May 2010, using these new tools, Venter answered his own question by creating the world's first self-replicating synthetic chromosome. To do this, he used a computer to design a new bacterial genome (of more than a million base pairs in total). Once the design was complete, the code was emailed to Blue Heron Biotechnology, a Seattle-area company that specializes in synthesizing DNA from digital programs. Blue Heron took bases A, T, C, and G from Venter and returned several vials filled with frozen plasmid DNA. Just like loading an operating system into a computer, Venter then inserted the synthetic DNA into a bacterial host cell that had been emptied of its own DNA. The cell quickly began to produce proteins or, to use the computer term in vogue among today's biologists, it “started up”: it began to metabolize, grow and, above all, to divide, based entirely on the code of the injected DNA. The cell divided into two cells, then into four, then into eight. And each new cell only carried Venter's synthetic instructions. It was an entirely new form of life, created practically out of nothing. Venter said it was “the first self-reproducing species on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

But Venter has only scratched the surface. Falling costs and increasing technical simplicity allow synthetic biologists to play with living things like never before. For example, in 2006, Jay D. Keasling, a biochemical engineer at the University of California at Berkeley, assembled 10 synthetic genes from the genetic blueprints of three different organisms to create a new yeast. It is capable of manufacturing the precursor to artemisinin, an antimalarial drug, artemisinic acid, whose natural reserves fluctuate considerably. At the same time, Venter's company, Synthetic Genomics, is working in partnership with ExxonMobil to design an algae that consumes carbon dioxide and releases biofuel; its spin-off company, Synthetic Genomics Vaccines, is trying to develop flu vaccines that can be manufactured in a few hours or days instead of the six months and more that are currently required. Solazyme, a company based in San Francisco, produces biodiesel from modified microalgae. Materials specialists are also embarking on the adventure: DuPont and Tate & Lyle, for example, have jointly designed a highly efficient and environmentally friendly organism that ingests corn sugar and excretes propanediol, a substance used in a wide range of consumer goods, from cosmetics to cleaning products [for information, DuPont is the company that manufactured PFOA, a Teflon molecule, a carcinogenic substance. an extremely persistent carcinogen that has infected almost every human and non-human on Earth [3], NdT].

Other synthetic biologists play with more fundamental cellular mechanisms. Based in Florida, the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution has added two bases (Z and P) to the four traditional bases of DNA, increasing the ancient genetic alphabet. At Harvard, George Church boosted evolution with his process called Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering, which randomly switches several genes at once. Instead of creating new genomes one by one, MAGE creates billions of variants in a matter of days.

Finally, because synthetic biology makes it easier to design, manufacture, and assemble DNA, we are already moving from developing existing genetic models to building new organisms — species that have never been seen on Earth, species that were entirely out of our imagination [for example] The xenbot, NdT]. Since we can control the environments in which these organisms will live — by adjusting things like temperature, pressure, and food sources while eliminating competitors and other stresses — we may soon be creating creatures that can perform feats that are impossible in the “natural” world. Imagine organisms that can thrive on the surface of Mars, or enzymes that can transform simple carbon into diamonds or nanotubes. The ultimate limits of synthetic biology are difficult to discern.

All of this means that our already complicated interactions with biology are about to become much more problematic. Mixing codes from multiple species or creating new organisms could have unexpected consequences. And even in laboratories with high safety standards, accidents can happen. If these accidents involve a break in confinement, what is now a harmless laboratory bacterium could tomorrow produce an ecological disaster. This is what emerged from a report published in 2010 by the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues:

“Uncontrolled dissemination could, in theory, lead to unwanted interbreeding with other organisms, uncontrolled proliferation, the eradication of existing species and threats to biodiversity.”

The threat of bio-error is just as worrying as that of bioterrorism. Although the bacteria created by Venter is essentially harmless to humans, the same techniques could be used to build a virus or a known pathogenic bacterium or, worse, to create a much more lethal version than the natural version [this is already a common practice in laboratories, scientists have fun increasing the function of viruses [3], NdT]. Viruses are particularly easy to synthesize, as Eckard Wimmer, a virologist at Stony Brook University, showed in 2002. He chemically synthesized the polio genome using DNA purchased by mail order. At the time, synthesizing 7,500 nucleotides cost around $300,000 and took several years. Today, a similar synthesis would only take a few weeks and cost a few thousand dollars. By 2020, if the trend continues, it will only take a few minutes and cost around $3. Governments around the world have spent billions to eradicate polio; imagine the damage terrorists could do with a $3 pathogen.

In the 1990s, the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo sect, infamous for its deadly sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995, implemented an active and extremely well-funded biological weapons program. This program included the production of anthrax in its arsenal. When the police finally searched its facilities, they found evidence of a research effort lasting several years at an estimated cost of $30 million. This shows, among other things, that terrorists clearly see an interest in pursuing a biological weapons research program. Although Aum succeeded in causing considerable damage, it failed in its attempts to strike with a biological weapon of mass destruction. In an article published in 2001 in the journal Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, William Rosenau, a terrorism expert who was then working at the Rand Corporation, wrote the following:

“The failure of the Aum sect suggests that it is in fact much more difficult to carry out a deadly bioterrorist attack than government officials and the press sometimes claim. Despite its significant financial resources, dedicated staff, motivation, and lack of oversight by Japanese authorities, the Aum sect has not been able to achieve its goals.”

That was true at the time. Today, two trends are changing the situation. The first began in 2004, when the International Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition was launched at MIT. As part of this competition, teams of high school students and students build simple biological systems from standardized and interchangeable parts. These standardized pieces, now known as BioBricks, are pieces of DNA code, with clearly defined structures and functions, that can be easily linked together to form new combinations, much like a set of genetic Lego bricks. iGEM brings these models together in the Registry of Standard Biological Parts, an open-source database of BioBricks that can be downloaded and accessible to everyone.

Over the years, iGEM teams have pushed back not only technical barriers, but creative barriers as well. In 2008, students were designing organisms with concrete applications; that year, the competition was won by a Slovenian team for its vaccine against Helicobacter pylori, the bacteria responsible for most ulcers. The big winner in 2011, a team from the University of Washington, completed three distinct projects, each of which rivaled the results achieved by world-renowned academics and the biopharmaceutical industry. The teams transformed bacterial cells into all sorts of products, from photographic film to hemoglobin-producing blood substitutes, to miniature hard drives, with data encryption.

The sophistication of iGEM research has increased, as has the level of participation. In 2004, five teams submitted 50 potential BioBricks to the register. Two years later, 32 teams submitted 724 pieces. In 2010, iGEM grew to 130 teams who submitted 1,863 parts, and the registry database had over 5,000 components. As pointed out by New York Times :

“iGEM has prepared an entire generation of the world's brightest scientific minds to adopt the vision of synthetic biology, without anyone really noticing it, even before the public debates and regulations that generally surround such risky and ethically controversial new technologies have begun.”

(iGEM itself asks students to be attentive to any ethical or safety issues and encourages public debate on these issues).

The second trend to take into account is the progress that terrorist and criminal organizations have made in just about every other information technology. Since the advent of the digital revolution, some of the early adopters have proven to be dishonest actors. Telephone hackers like John Draper (aka “Captain Crunch”) discovered in the 1970s that the AT&T telephone network could be hacked to allow free calls using a plastic whistle distributed in cereal boxes (hence the nickname Draper). In the 1980s, the first desktop computers were hijacked by a sophisticated set of computer viruses for malicious purposes and then, in the 1990s, for the purposes of information theft and financial enrichment. In the 2000s, allegedly tamper-proof credit card cryptographic algorithms were reverse engineered and smartphones were repeatedly infected with malicious software. On a larger scale, denial-of-service attacks have become increasingly destructive, crippling everything from personal websites to financial networks. In 2000, “Mafiaboy”, a Canadian high school student acting alone, managed to freeze or slow down the websites of Yahoo, eBay, CNN, Amazon, and Dell.

In 2007, Russian hackers targeted Estonian websites, disrupting financial institutions, broadcasting networks, ministries, and the Estonian parliament. A year later, before the Russian invasion, Georgia suffered a massive cyberattack that paralyzed its banking system and disrupted mobile phone networks. The Iraqi insurgents then reused SkyGrabber — cheap Russian software frequently used to hack satellite television — to intercept video feeds from American Predator drones. This allowed them to monitor and evade American military operations.

Recently, organized crime has begun to entrust certain parts of its illegal transactions to individuals or groups with specialized expertise: printing fake credit cards, money laundering. (In Japan, the Yakuza have even started outsourcing murders to Chinese gangs.) Given the anonymous nature of the online crowd, it's virtually impossible for law enforcement to monitor all of these movements.

The historical trend is clear: whenever new technologies enter the market, illegitimate uses quickly follow legitimate uses. A black market was not long in appearing. So just as criminals and terrorists have exploited numerous other forms of technology, they will certainly soon turn to synthetic biology, the latest digital frontier.

IN 2005, AS PART OF its preparation for this threat, the FBI hired Edward You, an Amgen cancer researcher and former gene therapist at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California. You, now a Supervising Special Agent in the Directorate of Weapons of Mass Destruction in the FBI's Biological Countermeasures Unit, knew that biotechnology was developing too quickly for the office to keep pace. So he decided that the only way to stay ahead of the curve was to develop partnerships with those at the forefront of technology.

“When I started getting involved, it was clear that the FBI was not going to start playing Big Brother in life sciences. It is not our mandate and it is impossible. All the expertise can be found in the scientific community. Our work must consist of local education. We need to create a culture of safety in the community of synthetic biologists, a responsible science, so that researchers themselves understand that they are the guardians of the future.”

To that end, the FBI began organizing free biosecurity conferences, posted weapons of mass destruction awareness coordinators in 56 local offices to connect with the SynBio community (among other responsibilities), and became an iGEM partner. In 2006, after journalists from Guardian After successfully ordering a neutralized fragment of the smallpox virus genome by mail, genetic material suppliers decided to develop self-monitoring guidelines. According to You, the FBI sees the organic emergence of these guidelines as proof that its community policing approach is working. However, we are not sure that these new rules will prevent a pathogen from being sent to a post office box.

Be that as it may, we need to go much further. A report published in October 2011 by the Center for Weapons of Mass Destruction, a non-profit organization run by former Senators Bob Graham (Democrat) and Jim Talent (Republican), indicates that a terrorist attack using a weapon of mass destruction somewhere in the world is likely by the end of 2013, and that the weapon will most likely be biological. In particular, the report highlights the dangers of synthetic biology:

“As DNA synthesis technology continues to advance rapidly, it will soon be possible to synthesize almost any virus whose DNA sequence has been decoded [...] as well as artificial microbes that do not exist in nature. This growing capacity to engineer life at the molecular level carries the risk of facilitating the development of new and more lethal biological weapons.”

Malicious non-state actors are not the only danger to consider. Forty countries, including China, are now hosting research on synthetic biology. The Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), founded in 1999, is the world's largest genome research organization, sequencing the equivalent of approximately 700,000 human genomes per year. (In a recent article by Science, the BGI claimed to have a sequencing capacity greater than that of all American laboratories combined). Last year, during an epidemic ofE. coli in Germany, when it was feared that it was a particularly deadly new strain, the BGI sequenced the culprit in just three days. For comparison, SARS, the deadly variant of pneumonia that caused worldwide panic in 2003, was sequenced in 31 days. BGI seems ready to go beyond DNA sequencing and become one of the main synthesizers of DNA as well.

BGI hires thousands of brilliant young researchers every year. The training is great, but the salaries are apparently low. This means that a significant number of these talented synthetic biologists could start looking for better pay and career opportunities every year. Some of these jobs will undoubtedly be located in countries that are not yet on the synthetic biology radar. Iran, North Korea, and Pakistan will most certainly be hiring.

As the inauguration of Barack Obama approaches, threats against the new president have increased. Each of these threats had to be thoroughly investigated. In his book on the secret service, Ronald Kessler writes that in January 2009, when reports emerged that the Somali Islamist group al-Shabaab might be trying to disrupt Obama's inauguration, the Secret Service's work that day became even more difficult. In total, reports Kessler, the secret services coordinated the actions of some 40,000 agents and officers from 94 police, military and security agencies. Bomb-sniffing dogs were deployed throughout the area and sniper teams were posted along the parade route. This is a considerable capacity to react, but in the future it will no longer be enough. The defense system against weapons created by synthetic biology has yet to be invented.

The range of threats that secret services must guard against already extends well beyond firearms and explosive devices. In recent years, chemical and radiological attacks have been launched against government officials. In 2004, the poisoning of Ukrainian presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko involved TCCD, an extremely toxic dioxin compound. Yushchenko survived, but was severely scarred by chemically induced injuries. In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian security officer, was poisoned to death with the radioisotope Polonium-210. The use of biological weapons is not unknown: the anthrax attacks in 2001 in the United States nearly affected members of the Senate.

The Kremlin has of course been suspected of poisoning its enemies for decades, and anthrax has existed for some time. But genetic technologies are paving the way for a new threat: the DNA of a head of state could be used against him. Defending yourself against this threat is particularly difficult. The vigilance of the secret services will never make it possible to fully secure the president's DNA, because it is now possible to produce a complete genetic pattern from the information contained in a single cell. Each of us loses millions and millions of cells every day. These cells can be collected from any source — a used tissue, a glass, a toothbrush. Every time President Obama shakes hands with a voter, cabinet member, or foreign leader, he leaves behind an exploitable genetic trail. Every time he gives a pen during a bill signing ceremony, he also delivers a few cells. These cells are dead, but the DNA remains intact, revealing potentially compromising details about the president's biology.

To manufacture a biological weapon, living cells would be the real target (although dead cells may suffice in about ten years). They are more difficult to recover. A lock of hair, for example, is dead, but if that hair contains a follicle, it also contains living cells. A sample of fresh blood or saliva, or even a sneeze, taken from a discarded tissue, may suffice. Once recovered, these living cells can be grown, providing a perpetual source of material for research.

Even if Secret Service agents were able to scan all rejected cells in the president's current environment, they couldn't prevent the recovery of DNA from the president's past. DNA is a very stable molecule that can last for thousands of years. Genetic material remains present on old clothes, high school papers — a myriad of objects manipulated and discarded long before the announcement of a presidential candidacy. How much attention was paid to protecting Barack Obama's DNA when he was a senator? Community organizer in Chicago? A law student at Harvard? Toddler? And even if the presidential DNA was completely locked, a good approximation of the code could be made from the cells of the president's children, parents, or siblings, whether living or not.

Presidential DNA could be used in a variety of politically sensitive ways, such as to fabricate evidence of an affair, fuel speculation about birthplace and inheritance, or identify genetic markers of diseases that may cast doubt on leadership abilities and mental acuity. How much would it take to overthrow a president? The first signs of Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's disease may have appeared during his second term. Some doctors now believe that the disease was latent at the time or too mild to affect his ability to govern. But if the information about his condition had been confirmed genetically and made public, would the American people have demanded his resignation? Would Congress have been forced to indict him?

For the secret services, these new vulnerabilities evoke attack scenarios worthy of a Hollywood thriller. Advances in stem cell research make any living cell transformable into many other types of cells, including neurons or heart cells, or even “sperm” produced in vitro. Any living cell recovered from a dirty glass or a crumpled napkin could, in theory, be used to make synthetic sperm. Thus, a president could suddenly be confronted with a “former lover” who would provide DNA evidence of sexual intercourse, such as a sperm stain on a dress. Sophisticated tests would make it possible to distinguish fake sperm obtained in vitro from a real one — they would not be identical — but the results would never be convincing for the general public. Sperm produced in vitro may also one day be able to fertilize eggs, making it possible to give birth to children using standard in vitro fertilization.

As mentioned, even modern cancer therapies could be used for malicious purposes. Personalized therapies designed to attack cancer cells in a specific patient are already being tested in clinical trials. Synthetic biology is poised to extend and accelerate this process by making personalized viral therapies inexpensive. These “magic bombs” can precisely target cancer cells. But what would happen if these bombs were trained to attack healthy cells? Trained against retinal cells, they would produce blindness. Against the hippocampus, they could erase memory. And against the liver? Death would ensue within a few months.

The administration of this type of biological agent would be very difficult to detect. Viruses have no taste when ingested, they are odourless and easily distributed by aerosol. They could be hidden in a perfume bottle; simply applying a small amount to the aggressor's wrist, close to the target, would be enough to commit an assassination attempt. If the pathogen was designed to specifically target the president's DNA, no one else would get sick. Nobody would suspect an attack at the time and this possibility would be considered long after the infection.

Pathogens could be designed to do damage several months or even years after exposure, depending on the designer's goals. Several viruses are already known to trigger cancers. New ones could be designed to infect the brain with, for example, synthetic schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or Alzheimer's disease. Stranger possibilities also exist. A disease designed to amplify the production of cortisol and dopamine could induce extreme paranoia, turning, for example, a pacifist dove into a warmonger. Or, a virus that stimulates the production of oxytocin, the chemical responsible for feelings of trust, could interfere with a manager's negotiation skills. Some of these ideas are not new. As early as 1994, the American Air Force's Wright Laboratory theorized the use of chemical-based pheromone bombs.

Of course, heads of state would not be the only ones vulnerable to the threats of synthetic biology. Al-Qaeda crashed planes into buildings to cripple Wall Street, but imagine the damage to the global economy from an attack on some CEOs of the 500 largest firms. Forget kidnapping rich foreign nationals for ransom; removing their DNA may one day be enough. Celebrities will face a new type of harassment. As mastering synthetic biology becomes easier, these technologies could end up being used to “settle” all sorts of disputes, including domestic ones. There is no doubt that we are at the dawn of a new world.

HOW DO YOU PROTECT the president in the years to come, as biotechnology continues to advance? Despite the acceleration of the progress of easily exploitable biotechnologies, the secret services are not powerless. Steps can be taken to limit risks. The agency did not want to reveal the measures already in place, but the creation of a scientific working group within the agency to monitor, predict and assess new biosafety risks would be an obvious starting point. Deploying detection technologies is another possibility. Biosensors capable of detecting known pathogens in less than three minutes have already been built. They can improve, a lot better, but even then, their effectiveness would be limited. Synthetic biology is paving the way for new, finely customized pathogens, and we need to learn to detect things that have never been crossed before. In this respect, the secret services have a great advantage over the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention or the World Health Organization: their main responsibility is to protect one Alone person. Biosensing technologies could be developed around the president's genome. We could use its living cells to build an early warning system with molecular precision.

Live cell cultures taken from the president could also be kept close at hand — the biological equivalent of data backups. It seems that the secret services are already transporting several liters of blood from the president's group, in case an emergency transfusion is needed. These biological backup systems could be expanded to include “clean DNA,” i.e. verified stem cell libraries that would allow bone marrow transplants or the improvement of antiviral or antimicrobial capabilities. With improved tissue-printing technologies, the president's cells could even be transformed, one day, into ready-to-use replacement organs.

However, even if the secret services implemented all or part of these measures, there is no guarantee that the presidential genome will be fully protected. Anyone who is genuinely determined to get the president's DNA would end up succeeding, regardless of the defenses implemented. The Secret Service may have to accept that they cannot completely counter all biological threats; and they are unable to guarantee that the president will never catch a cold.

In the hope of putting in place the best defense against an attack, one possible solution—which is not without its drawback—is radical transparency: disclosing the president's DNA and other relevant biological data, either to a select group of bioscience researchers who have received security clearances, or (the most controversial measure) to the general public. These ideas may seem counterintuitive, but we've come to think that opening up this problem — and engaging the American people actively in protecting their leader — might prove to be the best defense.

One practical reason is the cost. Any internal protection effort would be exceptionally costly. Certainly, given the challenge, the country would bear the expense, but is that the best solution? After all, over the past five years, DIY Drones, a non-profit online community of autonomous aircraft enthusiasts (working for free, in their spare time), has produced a $300 unmanned aerial vehicle with 90% of the features of a $35,000 Raven military drone. This type of cost reduction is typical of open source projects.

In addition, implementing biosecurity internally involves attracting and maintaining a very high level of skills. The secret service is therefore in competition with industry — an untenable budgetary position — and with academia, which offers researchers the freedom to tackle a wider range of interesting problems. But by drawing on the collective intelligence of the biological science community, the agency would secure free help from the most competent group.

Opening up the president's genetic information to a select group of researchers with security clearances would also have other benefits. It would allow biosciences to follow in the footsteps of computer science, where “Red Team exercises”, or “penetration tests”, are extremely common practices. In these exercises, the Red Team — usually a group of fake hackers — tries to find weaknesses in an organization's defenses (the Blue Team). A similar test environment could be developed for biological warfare.

One reason this type of practice has been so widely instituted in the computer world is that the speed of technological development far exceeds the ability to keep up with the pace of a security expert working alone. Since biological sciences are now progressing faster than computer science, it would only take an internal effort like the Manhattan Project for the Secret Service to get ahead of this curve. The FBI has much greater resources than the Secret Service; nearly 36,000 people work there, for example, compared to less than 7,000 for the Secret Service. However, Edward You and the FBI looked at this same problem and concluded that the single The way for the office to deal with biological threats was to involve the entire biological science community.

So why go any further? Why make the radical decision to disclose the president's genome to the whole world and not just to researchers with security clearances? First, as the US State Department's DNA collection mandate makes clear, the secret collection of genetic material from world leaders has already begun. It would not be surprising if the president's DNA had already been collected and analyzed by America's adversaries. It is also not unthinkable, given the growing vehemence between parties, that the president's political opponents, at the national level, are in possession of his DNA. In the November 2008 issue of New England Journal of Medicine, Robert C. Green and George J. Annas warned against this possibility, writing that by the 2012 election, “advances in genomics will make it more likely to collect and analyze DNA in order to assess genetic risk information that could be used for or, more likely, against presidential candidates.” It's also not hard to imagine the rise of a biological analogue of the hacker group Anonymous, eager to provide a transparent picture of the genomes and medical histories of world leaders. Sooner or later, even in the absence of open-sourcing, a president's genome will end up being made public.

So the question is: is it more dangerous to play defense and hope for the best, or to go on the attack and prepare for the worst? Neither choice is perfect, but beyond the important issues of cost and talent attraction, outsourcing — as Claire Fraser, director of the Institute of Genome Sciences at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, points out — “would level the playing field, by removing the need for intelligence agencies to plan for all possible worst-case scenarios.”

It would also allow the White House to anticipate the media storm that would occur if someone else leaked the president's genome. In addition, the constant review of the president's genome would allow us to establish a baseline and track genetic changes over time, which would produce an exceptional level of early detection of cancers and other metabolic diseases. And if such diseases were discovered, an open access genome could also accelerate the development of personalized therapies.

The most important factor to consider is time. In 2008, some 14,000 people worked in American laboratories with access to critical pathogenic material; we don't know how many tens of thousands more are doing the same abroad. Outside of these laboratories, genetic engineering tools and techniques are available to many other people. In 2003, a group of biological science experts, convened by the National Academy of Sciences for the CIA's Strategic Assessment Group, noted that the processes and techniques needed to develop advanced biological agents could be used to do good as well as to do evil. This means that it will soon be extremely difficult to distinguish legitimate research from research aimed at the manufacture of biological weapons. As a result, “most of the experts interviewed affirmed that a qualitatively different relationship between the government and the biological science community may be required to deal with the future threat of biological weapons as effectively as possible.”

In our opinion, it is no longer a question of feasibility. Advances in biotechnology are radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only obstacle to biology, where determined individuals can create a new living form out of nothing. Today, when we talk about a difficult problem, we often hear the refrain “there is an app for that.” Sooner than you can imagine, The applications will be replaced by Organisms to find solutions to numerous problems. In light of this upcoming revolution in synthetic biology, broader cooperation between scientists and security agencies—defined by open exchanges, ongoing collaboration, and defenses outsourced to the public—may prove to be the only way to protect the president. And, at the same time, the rest of us.

Andrew Hessel, Marc Goodman and Steven Kotler