Artificial viruses and nanomachines: towards increasing chaos (1/2)

“I think that the chances of humans surviving on Earth by the end of the century do not exceed fifty percent”

— Martin Rees

We have reproduced several passages from the book Our last century? (2004) by the famous British astrophysicist Martin Rees. After initially discussing the growing risk of nuclear disaster, he discusses several biotechnological and nanotechnological threats that could potentially cause the death of millions of people, or even destroy the entire biosphere, which would mean the extinction of all life on Earth. President of the Royal Society between 2005 and 2010, co-founder of the Center for the Study of Existential Risks at the University of Cambridge^[1], Martin Rees is part of this elite of scientists who dedicate his life to finding a way to prevent a global disaster caused by technology^[2]. Along with billionaire Elon Musk and actor Morgan Freeman, he is also one of the “external consultants” of the Future of Life Institute^[3].

Despite the innumerable technological disasters of the last 200 years (industrial wars, industrial accidents, a biosphere totally contaminated by chemical products, climate change, mass extinction of living species, etc.), despite those that will certainly not fail to occur during the 21st century, Martin Rees does not intend to stop scientific research and the development of new technologies. No, for him, it is the human error, not the technological world-system that is destroying the planet's capacity to host life. Towards the end of his book, Rees evokes with overflowing passion the future colonization of the solar system by machines. The best scientists in the world know very well that the end is coming, but it is more convenient for a respected scientist to project himself into an interstellar utopia than to question the system that crowned him, and to accept the obvious: only the fall of the technological system will save us from extinction.

Photo: still from the movie Army of the Twelve Monkeys (1996).

Bio-risks

More worrying than nuclear risks are the potential dangers associated with microbiology and genetics. Several countries have sought for decades and in the greatest secrecy to manufacture chemical and biological weapons; Iraq is suspected of pursuing an offensive program, as did South Africa in the past. Techniques for manufacturing and dispersing deadly pathogens are becoming better and better controlled, especially in the United States and Great Britain, where efforts are constantly being made to improve defense systems against this type of attack.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union mobilized its researchers as never before in order to develop biological and chemical weapons. One of these, Kanatjan Alibekov (who Westernized his name to Ken Alibeck when he moved to the West in 1992) was at one point in charge of the program. Biopreparat. In his book Biohazard, he reports on a team of over 30,000 workers and describes the efforts undertaken to modify organisms in order to make them more virulent and more resistant to vaccines. In 1992, Boris Yeltsin admitted what Western observers had long suspected, namely that at least sixty-six of the mysterious deaths that occurred in the city of Sverdlovsk in 1979 were due to anthrax fungi from one of the laboratories of Biopreparat.

Biological or chemical warfare has long been perceived as a poor choice for countries that do not have nuclear weapons. But today, a devastating attack no longer needs to be organized at the level of a state or an organization, as isolated individuals can get what they need — the major problem is therefore managing these groups or groups. Unlike uranium enrichment techniques for fissile weapons, which require sophisticated non-reusable equipment, the manufacture of deadly chemicals or toxins does not require much material; it is also almost the same as in medicine or agriculture, and the techniques and know-how are reusable. According to Fred Ikle, “The knowledge and techniques required to manufacture super biological weapons will be scattered in hospital and agricultural research laboratories and factories that exist everywhere. Only a police state could officially control these new instruments and use them as weapons of mass destruction.”

Thousands, if not millions, of individuals will one day be able to access the means to disseminate “weapons” that can cause pandemics, some of which may spread throughout the world. It would be enough for a few members of a suicidal sect, or even a single embittered individual, to trigger this type of attack. In fact, minor bio-attacks have already been attempted, but the perpetrators were not competent enough and the techniques used were too rudimentary to achieve the destructive power of a conventional explosive. In 1984, followers of the Rajneeshee sect (the man with the yellow saris and fifty Rolls Royces) contaminated sandwich bars in Wasco, Oregon with salmonella; 750 people became ill with gastroenteritis. The aim of this operation was, it seems, to prevent residents from voting in municipal elections, which would have encouraged the adoption of an urban plan in the town where the sect was based. But the origin of this epidemic was only discovered a year later, which clearly shows the difficulty in finding the perpetrators of a biological attack. The Japanese sect Aum Shinrikyo, which, in the early 1990s, developed several pathogens, including botulinum toxin, Q fever and anthrax, released sarin, a nerve gas, into the Tokyo subway, causing twelve deaths; the victims could have been much more numerous if the dispersion of the gas in the air had been more effective.

In September 2001, envelopes containing anthrax fungi were sent to two American senators as well as to several media. There were five deaths — a tragic event but smaller than the number of fatal road accidents recorded in one day. But — and this is important — American media coverage of this event caused a “wave of terror” that swept across the country. It is easy to imagine the psychological consequences on the population of an attack that would kill thousands of people. In fact, the impact of this type of attack could be more serious with a variant of the bacteria that is resistant to antibiotics and, of course, if its dispersal were effective. This threat is driving the biological “arms race,” which involves trying to create drugs and viruses that can target a specific bacterium, and building detectors to detect pathogens in minute concentrations.

What would be the effects of a biological attack today?

Studies and tests carried out to assess the possible consequences of a biological attack and the response of emergency services are numerous. In 1970, the World Health Organization estimated that airdropping 50 kilograms of anthrax fungi on a city could cause nearly one hundred thousand deaths. More recently, in 1999, the Jason group, a consortium of highly specialized researchers who are regular advisers to the American Department of Defense, imagined several scenarios to try to imagine what would happen if the anthrax virus was released on the New York subway, with the microbe spreading through the tunnels via passengers. If the surgery was done without the public's knowledge, the first signs of the disease would appear only a few days later, when the victims (then scattered all over the country) would complain of symptoms to their doctors.

The Jason group also studied the effects of castor, a chemical agent that attacks ribosomes and disrupts the action of proteins, and whose lethal dose is only ten micrograms. But the sarin attack on the Tokyo subway still spared thousands of people, proof that dispersing a pathogen is technically complex.

Achieving effective aerial dispersal is a difficulty common to all chemical agents, as well as to non-infectious biological agents (anthrax, for example), although it is true that a few grams of a pathogen could In principle cause millions of deaths.

For infectious diseases, initial dispersal is not as decisive a factor as for anthrax (which is not transmitted from one individual to another), and even localized dispersal, especially in a mobile population, could cause a large-scale epidemic. In this respect, the most worrying of the known viruses is that of smallpox. It was completely eradicated thanks to the commendable efforts undertaken by the WHO in the 1970s, but two stocks of it were kept, one at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, America, the other in a Moscow laboratory with the ominous name Vector. The reason given is that these viruses could be used to manufacture vaccines, but there is a suspicion that there are clandestine storage locations in other countries, increasing fears of terrorist actions related to this virus.

This disease, which is almost as contagious as mumps, kills nearly a third of those affected. According to several official studies on the consequences of the spread of this deadly virus, these would be catastrophic for a large city, even if the epidemic were under control and the victims numbered only a few hundred. Medicines would be lacking, especially in the absence of sufficient vaccines, and if the epidemic spread across borders, it would cause several million deaths.

In July 2001, an American operation called “Black Winter 9” in which personalities participated (former senator Sam Nunn was the American president and the governor of Oklahoma played his own role) simulated a secret smallpox attack in the United States accompanied by related reactions and measures. It was assumed that the aerial clouds contaminated by the virus were simultaneously dropped in three shopping centers in several states. At worst, the scenario caused three million people to be infected (a third of whom died). Vaccination in disaster radically ended the spread of the disease (the vaccine remains effective four days after the onset of infection). But a global infection — the virus being dropped over an airport or dropped on a plane — could trigger a runaway epidemic in regions of the world where the vaccine is less available than in industrialized countries. The incubation period is 12 days; therefore, starting with the first obvious case, the first victims would spread all over the world and induce secondary infections. It would then be too late to impose an effective quarantine.

In “Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon”, a docudrama broadcast by the BBC, a suicide fanatic from New York infects enough people to start a pandemic of sixty million victims. This extreme scenario was inspired by a computer model (perhaps not completely reliable) of how the virus deploys. The essential factor in calculating the progression of an epidemic is the “multiplier”, that is, the number of people infected by a typical victim. For this assessment, the multiplier was ten. However, some experts argue that smallpox is not as infectious as people say, that its human-to-human transmission generally requires several hours of proximity, and that these scenarios therefore exaggerate the ease with which an infected person transmits the disease. But there is evidence (an outbreak of smallpox in a German hospital in 1970, for example) that the virus can be transmitted through air currents and physical contact. According to some experts, a multiplier of ten, appropriate for a hospital, would be five outside; for others, the multiplier would be only two.

These variable elements are of paramount importance because they are the ones that make it possible to determine the time needed to overcome an epidemic through mass vaccination or quarantine. It would obviously be more difficult to control it if (as is the case in the BBC scenario) before being detected, it was introduced into developing countries, where the response to this type of emergency would be slower and less effective. And there are certainly viruses that transmit even more quickly. In Great Britain, the foot and mouth disease epidemic that occurred in 2001 had disastrous consequences on national agriculture despite the extensive measures taken to contain it. The consequences of such an infection would be even worse if the disease were spread deliberately. Biological attacks threaten humans and animals but could also threaten crops and ecosystems. Recently, the Jason group experimented with trying to sabotage agricultural production in the American Mid-West to try to assess the damage caused by “wheat rust,” a fungus that occurs naturally and sometimes destroys up to ten percent of crops in California. One of the characteristics common to all biological attacks is that, although their consequences do not yet affect the whole world, they are detected too late. In fact, if biological weapons are not used during organized conflicts, it is not only out of scruples but because the military would lack time and would not have the means to control the spread of the virus. This is where dissidents or isolated terrorists have an advantage: that of being able, in no time, to disguise the origin of an attack, at the time and place where the pathogen was released. It would be more likely to locate it quickly if medical information and analyses were available at the national level, as this would make it possible to detect a sudden increase in the number of patients with specific symptoms, or the almost simultaneous onset of a rare or abnormal syndrome. An attack of any kind would cause debacle and panic. The alarming media coverage of the anthrax episode in the United States in 2001 shows that a threat, even localized, can affect the mentalities of an entire continent. Because even in the event of a smallpox epidemic announced with caution, fear and hysteria, encouraged and amplified by the media, would upset daily life on a global scale.

Martin Rees