Tomorrowland (27 page)

In the coming years, criminals will doubtless dedicate significant resources to exploiting these biological advances, just as they’ve exploited a panoply of earlier technologies. Today biocrime is in its infancy. Yet thanks to the accelerating growth rate in biotechnology, it could soon become as problematic as cyber crime, perhaps even more so.

We used to measure the gap between paradigm-shifting technological breakthroughs in centuries. Today, we measure them in years. For most of us, this is very good news. For the Secret Service, the story is different. Its job, difficult to begin with, may soon become impossible. Our next commander-in-chief will be our first commander-in-chief to have to deal with genetically based, made-to-order biothreats.

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If you really want to understand the nature of what’s happening in the biosciences today, then you need to understand the rate at which information technology is accelerating. In 1965, Gordon Moore famously realized that the number of transistors on a computer chip had been doubling every year since the invention of the integrated circuit in 1958. Moore, who would go on to cofound Intel, used this information to predict the trend would
continue “for at least ten years.” He was right. The trend did continue for ten more years, and ten more after that, and ten more after that. All told, his prediction has stayed accurate for nearly six decades, becoming so durable that it’s now known as Moore’s Law and used by the semiconductor industry as a guide for future planning.

Moore’s Law originally stated that every 12 months (it was later updated to every 12–24 months), the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double, which means that computers will get twice as fast for the same price — an example of exponential growth in action. While linear growth is a slow, sequential proposition (1 becomes 2 becomes 3 becomes 4, etc.), exponential growth is an explosive doubling (1 becomes 2 becomes 4 becomes 8, etc.) with a transformational effect. In the 1970s, the most powerful supercomputer in the world was a Cray. It required a small room to hold and cost roughly $8 million. Today, the iPhone that sits in your pocket is a million times cheaper and a thousand times more powerful than a Cray. This is exponential growth at work.

In the years since Moore’s observation, scientists have discovered exponential growth in dozens and dozens of technologies. The expansion of telephone lines in the United States, the amount of Internet data traffic in a year, the bytes of computer data storage available per dollar, the number of digital camera pixels per dollar, the amount of data transferable over optical fiber — just to name a few — all follow this pattern. In fact, exponential growth is so prevalent, researchers now suspect it underpins all information-based technologies — that is, any technology (like a computer) used to input, store, process, retrieve, and transmit digital information — and this includes biology.

Over the past few decades, scientists have come to see that the four letters of the genetic alphabet — A (adenine), C (cytosine), G (guanine), and T (thymine) — can be transformed into the ones and zeroes of binary code, allowing for the easy, electronic manipulation of DNA. With this development, biology has
turned a significant corner, morphing into an exponentially advancing information-based science. As a result, the fundamental tools of genetic engineering, tools specifically designed for the manipulation of life — tools easily co-opted for the destruction of life — are now radically falling in cost and rising in power. Today, anyone with a knack for science, a decent Internet connection, and enough cash to buy a used car has what it takes to become a bio-hacker.

Of course, these developments greatly increase several dangers to our society. The most nightmarish involve bad actors creating weapons of mass destruction, or careless scientists unleashing accidental plagues. These are very real concerns that urgently and obviously need more attention. Personalized bioweapons, the focus of this story, are a subtler and less catastrophic threat and, perhaps for that reason, society has barely begun to consider them. Yet we believe that they will be put into use much more readily than bioweapons of mass destruction. For starters, while criminals might think twice about committing a massacre, murder is downright commonplace. Within a few years, politicians, celebrities, leaders of industry, or just about anyone, really, will be vulnerable to murder by genetically engineered bioweapon. Many such killings could go undetected, confused with death by natural causes; many others would be difficult to pin on a defendant, especially given disease latency. Both of these factors are likely to make personalized bioweapons extremely attractive to anyone bearing ill will.

Moreover — as we’ll explore in greater detail — these same scientific developments pave the way for an entirely new kind of personal warfare. Imagine inducing paranoid schizophrenia in the CEO of a multinational conglomerate to gain a competitive business advantage, for example, or infecting shoppers with the urge to impulse buy.

We have chosen to focus this investigation mostly on the President’s biosecurity because the president’s welfare is paramount to national security — and because a discussion of the challenges
faced by those charged with his protection will illuminate just how difficult (and different) “security” will be in the coming years.

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So what does it take to attack the president’s DNA? A direct frontal assault against his genome requires, of course, first being able to decode genomes. Until recently, this was no simple matter. In 1990, when the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health announced their intention to sequence the human genome, it was considered the most ambitious life sciences project ever undertaken. A fifteen-year timetable was established and a budget of $3 billion was set aside. Progress did not come quickly. Even after years’ worth of hard work, many experts believed that neither the time nor the money budgeted for the job would be enough to complete it.

Opinions started to change in 1998, when the entrepreneurial biologist Craig Venter and his company Celera got into the race. Taking advantage of the exponential growth in biotechnology, Venter relied on a new generation of gene sequencers and a novel, computer-intensive approach called shotgun sequencing to deliver a fully sequenced human genome in less than two years, for just under $300 million.

Venter’s achievement was stunning; it was also just the beginning. By 2007, just eight years later, the cost of sequencing a human genome had dropped to $1 million. In 2008, it was $60,000, and in 2011, $5,000. Over the next few years, the $1,000 dollar barrier looks likely to fall. At the current rate of decline, within five years, the cost will be below $100. In the history of the world, no other technology has dropped in price and increased in performance so dramatically.

Still, it takes more than just a gene sequencer to build a sophisticated, personally targeted bioweapon. To begin with, a
would-be attacker must collect and grow live cells from her target (more on this later), so cell-culturing tools are a necessity. Next, a molecular profile for the cells must be generated, involving DNA sequencers, microarray scanners, mass spectrometers, and more. Once a detailed genetic blueprint has been built, the attacker can begin to design, build, and test a pathogen, a process that starts with genetic databases and software and ends in virus and cell-culture work.

Putting all this equipment together isn’t trivial, yet, as researchers have upgraded to new tools, large companies have merged and consolidated operations, and smaller shops have run out of money and failed, plenty of used lab equipment has been dumped onto the resale market. As a result, while all of the gear needed to engineer a personalized bioweapon would cost well over a million dollars new; used, on eBay, it can be had for as little as $10,000. Strip out the analysis equipment — since these processes can now be outsourced — and a basic cell-culture rig can be cobbled together for under $1,000.

Biological knowledge, too, is becoming increasingly democratized. Websites like
jove.com
(Journal of Visualized Experiments, or JoVE) provide thousands of how-to instructional videos. MIT offers advanced online courses. Many journals are going open-access, making the latest research freely available. Or, if you want a more hands-on approach, just enmesh yourself in any of the dozens and dozens of do-it-yourself biology (DIY Bio) organizations that have lately sprung up to make genetic engineering into a hobbyist’s pursuit — which is no small development. Bill Gates, in a recent interview, told reporters that if he were a kid today, forget about hacking computers, he’d be hacking biology. And, for those with neither the lab nor the learning, there are dozens of service providers willing to do all the serious science for a fee.

Since the invention of genetic engineering in 1972, the high cost of equipment and the high cost of getting enough education to use that equipment effectively kept most with ill intentions away from these technologies. Those barriers to entry are now gone.
“Unfortunately,” said former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in a December 7, 2011, speech to the global review board for the Biological Weapons Convention, “the ability for terrorists or other nonstate actors to develop and use these weapons is growing. Therefore this must be a renewed focus of our efforts, because there are warning signs and they are too serious to ignore.”

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The radical expansion of biology’s frontier raises an uncomfortable question: How do you guard against threats that don’t yet exist? Genetic engineering sits at the edge of a new era. The older era belonged to DNA sequencing, which is simply the act of reading genetic code — identifying and extracting meaning from the ordering of the four chemicals that make up DNA. But now we’re learning how to write DNA, and this creates possibilities both grand and terrifying.

Again, Craig Venter helped usher in this shift. In the late 1990s, while working to read the human genome, he also began wondering what it would take to write one. He wanted to know: What does the minimal genome required for life look like? Back then, DNA synthesis technology was too crude and expensive to consider writing a minimum genome for life or, more to our point, constructing a sophisticated bioweapon. And gene-splicing techniques, which involve the tricky work of using enzymes to cut up DNA from one or more organisms and then stitch it back together, were too unwieldy for the task.

Exponential advances in biotechnology have obliterated these problems. The latest technology — known as synthetic biology, or synbio — moves the work from the molecular to the digital. Genetic code is manipulated using the equivalent of a word processor. With the press of a button, DNA can be cut and pasted, effortlessly imported from one species into another. Single letters can be swapped in and out with precision. And once the code
looks right? Simply hit send. A dozen different DNA print shops can now turn these bits into biology.

In May 2010, with the help of these new tools, Venter answered his question, creating the world’s first self-replicating, synthetic chromosome. To pull this off, he used a computer to design a novel bacterial genome (over a million base pairs in total). Once the design was complete, the code was emailed to Blue Heron Biotechnology, a Seattle-based company that specializes in synthesizing DNA from digital blueprints. Blue Heron took Venter’s blueprint of As, Ts, Cs, and Gs and returned a vial filled with freeze-dried strands of the DNA. Just as one might load an operating system into a computer, Venter then inserted the synthetic code into a denucleated bacterial cell. The new cell soon began generating proteins or, to use the computer term popular with today’s biologists, it “booted up,” starting to metabolize, grow, and, most important, divide, based entirely on the instructions from the injected DNA. As this replication proceeded, each new cell carried only Venter’s synthetic instructions. For all practical purposes, it was an altogether new life form, created from scratch. Venter called it “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer.”

But Venter’s work merely grazed the surface. Increasing technical simplicity and plummeting costs are allowing synthetic biologists to tinker with life in ways never before feasible. In 2004, for example, Jay Keasling, a biochemical engineer at Berkeley, stitched together ten synthetic genes from three different organisms to create a novel yeast that can manufacture artemisinic acid, the precursor to the antimalarial drug artemisinin, natural supplies of which are extremely low. The work would have been next to impossible without synthetic biology.

Meanwhile, Venter’s company, Synthetic Genomics, is working on a designer algae that consumes CO2 and excretes biofuel; it is also trying to develop synthetic flu-fighting vaccines made in days instead of the six to eight months now required. Solazyme, a synthetic biology company based in San Francisco, is making
biodiesel with engineered microalgae. Material scientists are also getting into the act; DuPont recently designed an organism that utilizes corn syrup to create a widely used polymer base for plastics manufacturing, saving 40 percent on energy costs.

Other synthetic biologists are playing with more fundamental cellular mechanisms. The Florida-based Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution has added two new bases to DNA’s traditional four (A, T, G, C), creating a new genetic alphabet. At Harvard, geneticist George Church has supercharged evolution with his Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering (MAGE) process, which randomly swaps multiple genes at once. Instead of creating novel genomes one at a time, MAGE creates billions of variants in a matter of days.

Finally, because synbio makes DNA design, synthesis, and assembly so easy, we’re already moving from the tweaking of existing designs to the construction of entirely new organisms — species that have never been seen before, species birthed entirely in our imagination. Since we can control the environments these organisms will live in, we will soon be generating living creatures capable of feats impossible in the “natural” world. Imagine organisms that can thrive in battery acid or on the surface of Mars, or enzymes able to polymerize carbon into diamonds or nanotubes. The ultimate limits to synthetic biology are hard to discern, and have yet to be explored.