Why a new era of synthetic biology could make the dangers of the atomic age seem quaint.
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It’s not hard to understand why our lives are increasingly wrapped up in the latest twists and turns of the cyberworld. That supercomputer you are carrying in your pocket (when its tiny colorful screen isn’t parked six inches in front of your eyes) is a synthesizer of all the world’s knowledge, photography, art, music, and data. It is also a kind of X-ray machine that can provide insights into the deepest recesses of our personal lives: our preferences, choices, intimate moments, health, purchases, and indeed our character.
Yet the impact of all that information and data pales in comparison to what is heading our way in the world of biology. Biological, not cybernetic, developments will determine the course of the 21st century. Ebola, Zika, and the emergence of antibiotic-impervious superbugs are just previews of the coming challenges.
By the turn of the next century, most scientists believe biological technologies will introduce the most wrenching changes — both practical and ethical — in our daily lives. These technologies will include human and animal life extension, crop and livestock genetic manipulation, and human performance enhancement, which together will begin changing the very nature of what it means to be human. As futurist and visionary Ray Kurzweil has famously opined, “The singularity is near,” meaning the merger of information, big data, artificial intelligence, and biology. Stand by for heavy rolls, as we say in the Navy.
A main element of the biological revolution will be its impact on security in the broadest sense of the term, as well as on the more specific realm of military activity. Both of these are part of the work being done by various laboratories around the globe, including here in the United States at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, where I serve as a senior fellow.
Some of the most promising advances made at JHU APL and elsewhere involve man-machine interfaces, with particular emphasis on brain-machine connections that would allow the use of disconnected limbs; more rapid disease identification in response to both natural and man-made epidemics; artificial intelligence, which offers the greatest near-term potential for both positive benefit and military application (i.e., autonomous attack drones); human performance enhancement, including significant reduction in sleep needs, increases in mental acuity, and improvements in exoskeleton and skin “armor”; and efficient genome editing using CRISPR-Cas, a technology that has become widely available to ever smaller laboratory settings, including individuals working out of their homes.
…A major challenge for such diplomacy is that individual nations, transnational organizations, or even individuals will soon have access — if they don’t already — to biological tools that permit manipulation of living organisms. The rise of low-cost synthetic biology technologies, the falling cost of DNA sequencing, and the diffusion of knowledge through the internet create the conditions for a breakout biological event not dissimilar to the Spanish influenza of roughly a century ago. In that plague, by some estimates, nearly 40 percent of the world’s population was infected, with a 10 to 20 percent mortality rate. Extrapolated to our current global population, that would equate to more than 400 million dead.
Most alarming would be that either rogue nations or violent transnational groups would gain access to these technologies and use them to create biological weapons of mass destruction. As Josh Wolfe, a leading researcher at Johns Hopkins, has said, “Natural biological weapons are limited by the characteristics of agents that are not ideal for weaponization; synthetic biological weapons can be designed without these limitations.”
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Additionally, there is an imperative to open a broader conversation about the coming impact of the biological world. As citizens, both in the United States and globally, we spend far too much time focused on information and cyber-technologies. The weaponization of biology is coming, and coming quickly. And our ability to control that process — or not – will determine our destiny.
Full article: Zika Is Just the First Front in the 21st-Century Biowar (Foreign Policy)
Global Geopolitics 