Today's Biothreats – Where the Past Predictions Meet the Future

Abstract

The catastrophic spread of COVID-19 pandemic, uncontrolled by modern medical science, regardless of whether it is artificial or not, clearly shows the limits of human mind and knowledge to resist this and other similar challenges. The purpose of this work is to show the danger of dual-use biotechnologies in the development of fundamentally new approaches to biological damage to humans. The forecasts of the development of biotechnologies, made by the experts of the American organization JASON and other specialists 23 years ago, are analyzed. It is shown in the article, that in general these forecasts and assessments turned out to be true. The technologies that, most probably, can be used for the development of new means of biological destruction are: binary bioweapons – these are two-component systems that are relatively safe to handle but become deadly when the two components come together on deployment; designer genes – where specific unnatural gene sequences are built into viruses or other life forms to incorporate into the genome of the unsuspecting host, which later becomes the victim; gene therapy – today a medical (partial) reality; the technology that allows medicine to repair or replace defective genes in a diseased individual might be subverted to introduce pathogenic sequences into healthy individuals; stealth viruses – viruses that could be fashioned by a researcher to infect the host but remain silent until activated by some physiological or environmental trigger; host-swapping diseases – new zoonotic agents which might be developed specifically for bioweapon purposes by modifying existing pathogens to seek human hosts; designer diseases – where the detailed knowledge of biochemical signaling pathways could conceivably be used to create designer diseases. In addition to those predicted by JASON, another dualuse technology has emerged recently – synthetic biology. It is a very powerful interdisciplinary branch of biology. Specific examples of the use of these technologies to create new means of biological warfare are given in the article. The author believes that it is necessary not only to track new dual-use biotechnologies, but also to improve conventional and scientific methods of monitoring their use.