Paul Boutin wrote this feature on DIY biochemwomd for a national publication some months back — but some editorial reshuffling happened, and the story never ran. Paul shared a copy with me a few weeks ago. I thought it was terrific, and asked if we might share it with BoingBoing readers. Paul kindly obliged, and here it is:
BIOWAR FOR DUMMIES:
How hard is it to build your own weapon of mass destruction? We take a crash course in supervirus engineering to find out.Anthrax. Smallpox. Ebola. For thriller writers and policy crusaders, biological warfare was a standard what-if scenario long before anyone mailed anthrax to government and media offices in 2001. Pentagon war games like Dark Winter, held just before 9/11, and this year’s Atlantic Storm suggested that terrorists could unleash germs with the killing power of a nuclear weapon.
Scientists, though, have always been skeptical. Only massive, state-sponsored programs—not terrorist cells or lone kooks—pose a plausible threat, they say. As the head of the Federation of American Scientists working group on bioweapons put it in a 2002 Los Angeles Times op-ed: “A significant bioterror attack today would require the support of a national program to succeed.”
Or not. A few months ago, Roger Brent, a geneticist who runs a California biotech firm, sent me an unpublished paper in which he wrote that genetically engineered bioweapons developed by small teams are a bigger threat than suitcase nukes.
Brent is one of a growing number of researchers who believe that a bioterrorist wouldn’t need a team of virologists and state funding. He says advances in DNA-hacking technology have reached the point where an evil lab assistant with the right resources could do the job.
Link to full text, with photos. Image above: “The ABI 394 synthesizer. Think of it as an inkjet printer for DNA.”