Maybe they can find a common DNA profile for an efficient bio-weapon. Oops.
I think we already reached the end of the bioweapon tech tree with Sarin gas.
I think we already reached the end of the bioweapon tech tree with Sarin gas.
The problem with bio-weapons has always been "blow back." Narrowing the scope of the weapon would help a lot with that.
You need something which reproduces itself even in non-targets, which enters the cell's nucleus, which detects the correct DNA - which may be scattered across the genome! -, which has a mechanism that kills the target people, and where none of this will mutate so as to stop effectiveness, change/broaden the target population, etc.
Furthermore, just because people identify as a group does not mean they have a distinct genetic pattern. How would you target "Christians" or "Americans" or "Hispanics"?
This appears to be a harder task than curing cancer, in that many of the same techniques could be used to target cancerous cells but that does not require the ability to spread from person to person.
A bioweapon doesn't appear in a vacuum. The required technological advances will be widely known. In this fantastical cancer-free world, why wouldn't your local health care center have the ability to sequence unexpected genomes and prepare a vaccine or phage in the same day?
You don’t need to have a 1:1 mapping in order to be effective. Incapacitating a sufficient number of a group is enough.
Similarly, such a bioweapon in an assassination context doesn’t need to only kill the target or go unnoticed. It’s enough that it is a disease or irritant that a particular individual is susceptible to.
Assuming you have a communicable bioweapon which is somehow able to target based on genetics, and assuming the rest of the world isn't able to defend against it, that still leaves the very tricky question of finding a genetic basis which characterizes any of those three categories in a way which is sufficiently effective.
Do you really believe there is way to identify "Christians" based on genetics?
"Incapacitating a sufficient number of a group" is NOT enough. You also need specificity.
What genetic markers indicate "American"? Sure, if you target something simple like "has a Y chromosome" you might take out about 50% of the US population, which is likely a sufficient number, but you'll do equal damage to your own population.
How would a bioweapon meaningfully target "Hispanics"? The term is definitely not based in genetics. If some villagers from a German town emigrated to Argentina and others from the same village emigrated to Canada, then according to the US the descendants of the first group are just as Hispanic as Black Spanish-speaking Cubans, while the descendants of the second group are "white".
But, okay, you've figured something out. Now how do you prevent your bioweapon from mutating the specificity away? You've added a lot of machinery to the organism which must be preserved perfectly even though that machinery isn't required in order to reproduce.
The more failsafes you put in, the bulkier the organism and/or the fewer genetic markers you can target.
Clearly you should be promoting DEI as a way to increase group robustness against future bioweapons. ;)
You just need to think you have.
And as I wrote, this sort of bioweapon won't be possible until we've effectively cured cancer, and likely also developed methods which can easily identify and stop it.
Again, the technology would be able to cure cancer. Do you really think all those employees - who know that their friends and family could be cured of their cancer - would be willing to keep mum of the cure?
If I'm wrong, what are you thinking of?
Throw one into a gene therapy vector and it could conceivably reproduce itself (though that seems like a bad idea for a cancer therapeutic anyway).
mRNA cancer therapeutics do not target nuclear DNA. They do not enter the nucleus and they produce proteins to trigger an immune response against the targeted disease, not against the DNA of the targeted disease.
If there are already viable full-cure treatments for all those cancers then why aren't there viable full-cure treatments for this sort of bioweapon?
Feeling ill? Sequence all the organisms in your blood, spot the unexpected ones, develop a vaccine/phage against it, and poof - all better.
Sure, you can construct movie plot scenarios to do anything. In a movie, our hero can use a lighter to ignite the leaking fuel trail from a jet plane taking off and cause it to blow Up. That doesn't mean it's likely or even feasible.
Plenty of possibilities. A cancer is ultimately a mutated genome in a viable cell gone awry. Even with contagious cancers (like the one killing the Tasmanian Devils) you're still ultimately dealing with an infectious eukaryotic cell of basically the same species type as the organism, and our mammalian immune systems are already used to targeting our own cells gone awry. Viruses, satellite viruses, prokaryotes, other eukaryotes, edited out, and whatever I'm forgetting will require a diversity of approaches (unless someone invents pico-scale teleportation).
Anything which can do that can target the mutated genome of a cancer in a human.
> of basically the same species type as the organism
Which means you will not be able to target a single person or subpopulation, because they are all the same species type.
That's your strawman. But I can - easily, at that - imagine a POC that would be specific enough to kill a single human with a very high degree of success given some meta data about them and a sample of their DNA. I'm for obvious reasons not going to expand on that here because we have too many idiots in this world but the fact that you can't imagine such things doesn't mean that others can not.
I can easily imagine hopping on the next Pan Am rocket service to Luna City.
I can easily imagine using a space laser to kill that same human.
I can easily imagine taking a bridge from Key West to Cuba.
I can easily imagine taking a pill to regrow an amputated leg.
Just because you can easily imagine a POC doesn't mean it's doable in our lifetimes.
What are you going to target in the DNA? Is it a single short sequence or multiple markers across the genome? How does the bioweapon sequence that DNA to find it? How does that then trigger the appropriate biological response? How do you prevent mutations? What infectious organism will you use? How do you know the target isn't already immune to that infection?
Even if you expand on one or two of these in convincing detail (congrats on your future Nobel Prize, by the way), that's still not enough for the idiots in the world to make a usable weapon.
And so many easier ways to kill someone exist.
If targeting proteins or regulatory regions of DNA, how? Are you going to try to CRISPR it? This may be effective in quiescent or senescent cells. But I think even quiescent cells have some DNA repair pathways. At best such targeting may speed up the aging process and cause some cancers.
Are you going to integrate a toxic gene at a specific chromosomal locus? Maybe that would work. You'd need a very efficient gene therapy approach to do it though.
You don't have to be able to target any group to be able to target some groups. Blacks, Jews and Uighurs might be sufficient. And those definitely have genetic markers.
"Jews" is less diverse, but it's not like there's a single "I am Jewish" marker. Just look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_studies_on_Jews to see how difficult is it, with overlaps to other populations, and the need to correlate multiple haplogroups. How do you put all that detection machinery into a bioweapon?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghurs suggest there are similar issues with Uyghurs - what will the bioweapon target if "the average genetic ancestry of Uyghurs is 63.7% East Asian-related and 36.3% European-related"?
And how do you prevent the bioweapon from mutating that specificity away?
Yes, such a weapon will never be very precise. But since no weapon ever is (collateral damage) that doesn't mean it won't be used.
> And how do you prevent the bioweapon from mutating that specificity away?
You don't. But even that won't stop such a weapon from being used. Every weapon that man kind has been able to envision and create has been used. Not a single exception.
Setting that aside, the hydrogen bomb has not been used as a weapon, only a deterrent.
Same for the neutron bomb (an "enhanced radiation weapon").
And nuclear depth bombs ("All nuclear anti-submarine weapons were withdrawn from service by China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom and the United States in or around 1990.[citation needed] They were replaced by conventional weapons such as the Mk 54 Torpedo that provided ever-increasing accuracy and range as anti-submarine warfare technology improved." says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_depth_bomb ).
"The United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories weaponized anthrax, tularemia, brucellosis, Q-fever and others.[51] ... In 1969, US President Richard Nixon decided to unilaterally terminate the offensive biological weapons program of the US, allowing only scientific research for defensive measures." says https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_warfare .
Have all those weaponized organism really been used as a weapon? Not to my knowledge.
These all sound like exceptions.
I guess if you could target one person specifically? But then again there are way easier ways to kill people.