GENE HACKMEN The new assassins

GENE HACKMEN The new assassins Genetically engineered viruses are tomorrow's biobombs     Imagine this: an American student receives a couple of pills in the mail. She assumes they are drugs she picked up from an online pharmacy. She takes them and develops a cold. Soon, she’s shedding millions of virus particles and infecting a number of people in her college. The next week, the president of the US is scheduled to speak on campus. Most of those attending have a cold. When the president arrives, the virus particles descend on him. But in him, they don’t cause a cold. They react with a specific DNA sequence in his cells, and cause a fastacting neural disease that causes memory loss and then death.     This may sound like the plot of a future Mission Impossible movie, but Andrew Hessel, an expert on genetics and microbiology, and Mark Goodman, a global security specialist, argue in The Atlantic that such a scenario will soon be possible. Advances in genetic engineering and biotechnology have come to the stage where viruses targeting select individuals with specific sequences in their DNA can be deployed as tools of assassination.     In fact, governments are already preparing for this. In 2009, Ronald Kessler, an award-winning investigative journalist, revealed that Navy stewards gather everything that the US president has touched – be it toothbrushes or towels — and sanitize and destroy them in an effort to keep potential enemies from obtaining his genetic material. The same year, US secret cable 09STATE37561 asked State Department personnel posted in Africa to collect “data … include(ing) … fingerprints, facial images, DNA, and iris scans” of leaders of Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.     Moore’s law – “every 12 months (it is now 24 months), the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double” – applies equally to the field of genetic engineering, Goodman and Hessel claim. They quote Bill Gates as saying that if he were a kid today he wouldn’t be hacking computers, he’d be hacking biology. The costs of genetic engineering dropped dramatically. science of synthetic biology makes DNA design and synthesis much easier. Geneticists have already begun tweaking existing designs and creating new ones.     Craig Ventner, the American scientist responsible for sequencing the human genome – describing the complete set of human genetic information – was also the first to create an artificial cell. The costs of building personally targeted bioweapons have also come down. What cost Craig Ventner $300 million in 2007 can now be done at a fraction of that cost and with far less skill. The four building blocks of DNA – Adenine, Guanine, Cytosine and Thymine – translate easily computer symbols. power of computer processing makes creating drugs that will affect only a person with a specific DNA sequence so easy that it can soon be outsourced to biology students, claim Hessel and Goodman. Right now, DNA hacking is targeted at finding cures for specific cancer mutations, but according to Jimmy Lin, a genomics researcher who works on designing treatments for rare childhood diseases based on individual genetic analysis, “when you’re familiar with the research, it’s really feasible that a well-funded group could pull this (genebased kill) off.”     For more: theatlantic.com; independent.com  DNA PLOTS: Cheaper-to-make designer diseases will replace the sniper's bullets