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Satan bug within reach
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GENETIC engineers already have it within their grasp to devise a lethal bio-weapon for terrorists and rogue states, the British science publication Nature warns this week.
Small changes in the DNA of well-known bacteria and viruses could turn these agents into mass killers, the prestigious journal says in an article to appear in Thursday's issue.
"Making subtle genetic alterations to existing pathogens to increase their virulence or durability in the environment, or to make them harder to detect or to treat with drugs, is within the limits of today's technology," Nature says.
"With the decoding of a pathogen's entire genome now commonplace, and transgenic techniques advancing all the time, some researchers believe that the sinister potential of biology can no longer be ignored."
Bio-warfare--use of germs or viruses such as anthrax or smallpox--has long been a scenario considered by military strategists.
However, the risk has increased thanks to advances in knowledge about how genes work, new techniques for moving pieces of DNA around, and the relative ease, compared with the past, with which a rogue organization could build or hire a lab to build such a weapon.
Scientists interviewed by Nature ruled out, for the time being, the ability to build new, artificial agents from a set of component parts.
A far simpler way would be to tweak the performance of an existing bacteria to make it more resistant to antibiotics, they said.
A scientist in the US, Willem Stemmer, chief scientist with Maxygen, a California pharmaceutical research firm, used one of these techniques to explore how resistance genes work, Nature reports.
He created a strain of the common intestinal bug Escherichia coli that was 32,000 times more resistant to the antibiotic cefotaxime than conventional strains. Stemmer destroyed the superbug in response to concerns from the American Society for Microbiology about potential misuse.
In a case published in January, a pair of Australian scientists, Ron Jackson and Ian Ramshaw accidentally created an astonishingly virulent strain of mousepox, a cousin of smallpox, among laboratory mice.
The scientists realized that if similar genetic manipulation was carried out on smallpox, an unstoppable killer could be unleashed. They decided to publish their findings to draw attention to the potential misuse of biotechnology.(SD-Agencies)
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