Genetic engineers loom as future threat?

Press, 14 August 1984, Page 18

Genetic engineers loom as future threat?

NZPA-Reuter London Genetic engineers working for a white supremacist government produce a disease which kills only blacks. On behalf of a black government, others develop a strain that spares blacks but destroys whites. Military scientists, using new gene-splicing techniques, make an extremely potent virus, converting common influenza, so that it can be sprayed as a lethal epidemic into a hostile country. Geneticists develop bacteria that will attack specific human organs — for instance, the eyes of enemy soldiers.

Ultimately they refine techniques of cell replication — cloning — and begin to manufacture fearless, amoral soldiers.

These possibilities may sound like science fiction, but they are beginning to be taken seriously by Western officials.

The genetic engineering revolution, which has allowed scientists to tinker with the heredity of living organisms, has given biological experimentation a frightening new potential. Human cloning is only a distant possibility, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (5.1.P.R.1.) says. However, making hardier, more lethal disease strains or those that would single out ethnic or racial groups may soon be possible. 5.1.P.R.1.’s 1984 yearbook, in discussing biological weapons, cites evidence that

blacks are more sensitive than whites to a strain of tuberculosis and to a herpes virus that can cause mononucleosis, a blood disease, in whites and cancer in blacks.

A gene-spliced variant of such a disease could make a potent race weapon. A 1972 biological and toxin weapons convention bans the production and use of such weapons. Both super-Powers and Britain are signatories of the treaty, but Washington has accused Moscow of violating it and seeking to use genetic engineering for biological war research. The Soviet Union has denied the charge. The Reagan Administration last April proposed a new treaty that would ban all chemical weapons and would police enforcement through a strict system of verification, something now lacking.

So far, the Soviet Union has reacted negatively in debates at a 40-nation disarmament conference in Geneva. The 1984 edition of the Pentagon’s annual data book, “Soviet Military Power,” says Moscow has built at least seven biological war research centres.

“There is an apparent effort on the part of the Soviets to transfer selected aspects of genetic engineering research to their biological war centres,” it says. Among the possibilities raised by genetic engineering are new diseases with no known cure, according to

the report. Gene-manipulation could convert bacteria or viruses which are now too unstable for storage or biological warfare into effective weapons, the Pentagon study says. It says that in Soviet fighting doctrine, biological war agents are regarded as strategic weapons and that many Soviet missile systems are technically capable of spreading disease over large areas. A Pentagon official told the American Association for the Advancement of Science last spring that “biotechnology” firms should be restricted in exporting “militarily critical” genetic engineering laboratory equipment to the Eastern bloc.

Gene-splicing has great commercial and medical potential. Experts say it could be used to produce vaccines for hepatitis or herpes, to cure some forms of cancer, sickle-cell anaemia and haemophilia, and to help mass-produce insulin for diabetics.

The Pentagon, which destroyed its biological weapons stocks in 1969, is funding research on genetic engineering, including the cloning of micro-organisms. It says the work is strictly for protective purposes as allowed under the 1972 treaty. Several projects are aimed at finding an antidote for nerve gas. The United States research, which is unclassified, has drawn criticism from some arms control

advocates. A recent book on the subject, “No Fire, No Thunder,” by three British academics who support the peace movement, says that Washington is exploiting a loophole in the treaty. Sean Murphy, Alastair Hay, and Steven Rose say there is evidence that the United States has produced “highly pathogenic organisms ... under the flag of medical or ‘protective’ research.”

The book says: “There is no doubt that many countries throughout the world are doing the same.”

Some western military analysts doubt biological warfare would be effective because the weapons are too hard to control.

However, a 1970 study by the World Health Organisation concluded that a single

air strike with anthrax agents on a city of five million might leave nearly 100,000 dead. Biological warfare can be traced to ancient times, . when the Greeks and * Romans used animal and ’ human corpses to poison » wells.

During the Middle Ages, bubonic plague victims, were hurled over city walls to make the troops outside '• retreat in fear.

Japan experimented with biological weapons during the Second World War, ac- ~ cording to United States; documents.

The Reagan Administration said a 1979 outbreak of anthrax in the Soviet city of Sverdlovsk was the result of an accident at a biological warfare experiment centre. Moscow insisted the disease had spread to humans from infected livestock.