The WHO has delayed again on deciding to destroy smallpox stocks at the official repositories in the US and Russia. This is a classic scenario of, “if you outlaw guns only outlaws will have guns.”
First, anyone who thinks the US and Russian stocks are the only ones is naive. Seriously, when we were scrabbling around in the Third World plucking scabs off smallpox victims to hide in our freezers, do you really think we were the only ones? Any government that ever even thought about bioweapons would have been desperate to get a piece of that action (literally) before the supply ran out.
Second, it won’t be that many years before that strange, shy fellow in the basement apartment will be able to crank out some frankenpox in his kitchen lab, maybe using mail order parts. Today, this has been done in state-of-the-art labs with polio virus (mail order parts) and the 1918 influenza virus (made from scratch using original virus templates).
These things are useful for medical research, no problem. But some outspoken scientists like Roger Brent (Molecular Sciences Institute) have been warning that as time goes by, it’ll become easier and easier for a weekend biohacker to create biological weapons as a hobby. Writer Paul Boutin spent some time with Brent to see how hard it would be to do a little biohacking. He noted, “Every hands-on gene hacker I polled during my project estimated they could synthesize smallpox in a month or two.”
For now, bad people seem to agree that bombs work pretty well for randomly killing people. Luckily, they tend to stick with what works. And let’s face it, it takes a lot of time and effort to get educated to do something really nefarious like make a bioweapon. But when some Kaczynski wannabe or Islamic extremist group finally manages to whip up some DIY smallpox, it’s really not going to matter whether the US and Russia have any in their secret strongholds. That is, it’s not going to matter to anyone except the US and Russia, where they’ll be kicking themselves for having destroyed the samples they need for researching countermeasures. I guess they’ll just have to make more.
Tags: smallpox,biohacker,polio,1918 influenza
bioterrorism,Roger Brent,bioweapon,biological weapons
Filed under: biological science, biological weapons, infectious disease
Ew. What a terrifying thought. I mean, I’m not ignorant to the fact that biological weapons are a big threat but you talk like it’s DEFINITELY going to happen. Creepy.
Not to worry, things might happen but even so I am over 98% certain it would not be the end of the world.