Tomorrowland (29 page)

Presidential DNA could be used in a variety of politically sensitive ways, perhaps to fabricate evidence of an affair, fuel speculation about birthplace and heritage, or identify genetic markers for a bevy of diseases that could cast doubt on leadership ability and mental acuity. How much does it take to unseat a president? The first signs of President Ronald Reagan’s Alzheimer’s emerged during his second term. While doctors now believe it was then too mild to affect his ability to govern, if information about his condition had been made public while he was still in office, would the American people have demanded his resignation? Could Congress be forced to impeach?

For the Secret Service, this opens the door for attack scenarios worthy of a Hollywood thriller. Advances in stem cell research make it possible for any living cell to be transformed into any other cell type, including neurons or heart cells or even in vitro–derived (IVD) sperm. Any live cells recovered from a dirty glass or an old napkin or such could, in theory, be used to manufacture synthetic sperm cells. And so, out of the blue, a president could be outed by a “former lover” coming forward with DNA “evidence” of a sexual encounter, like the proverbial semen stain on the dress. Sophisticated testing could distinguish fake IVD sperm from the real thing — they are not identical — but the results might never convince the lay public. IVD sperm may also someday prove capable of fertilizing eggs, allowing for surreptitious love children to be born using standard in vitro fertilization technologies.

As mentioned, even modern cancer therapies can be harnessed for malicious ends. Personalized therapies designed to attack a single patient’s cancer cells are already moving out of the laboratory and into clinical trials. Synthetic biology is poised to rapidly expand and accelerate this process by making individualized
viral therapies inexpensive. Such “magic bullets” can target cancer cells with extreme precision. But what if these bullets were trained against healthy cells instead? Trained against retinal cells, the result would be blindness. Against the hypothalamus, a memory wipe is possible. And the liver? Death would come in a matter of months.

The delivery of this sort of biological agent would be very difficult to detect. Viruses are tasteless and odorless and easily aerosolized. Hidden in a perfume bottle, a quick dab on the wrists in the general proximity of the target is all an assassination attempt would require. If the pathogen had been designed to zero in specifically on the president’s DNA, then nobody else present would even get sick.

Pernicious agents could be crafted to do their damage months or even years after exposure, depending on the goals of the designer. Several viruses are already known to spark cancers. New ones could eventually be designed to infect the brain with, say, synthetic schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or early-onset Alzheimer’s. Stranger possibilities exist as well. A disease engineered to amplify the production of cortisol and dopamine could induce extreme paranoia, turning, say, a presidential dove into a warmongering hawk. Or a virus that boosts the production of oxytocin, the chemical responsible for feelings of trust, could play hell with a leader’s negotiating abilities, leaving the country open to an array of biodiplomatic assaults. Some of these ideas aren’t even new. The US Air Force’s Wright laboratory in Ohio theorized about chemical-based pheromone bombs as far back as 1994.

Of course, heads of state are not the only ones vulnerable to this coming wave of synbio threats. Al Qaeda flew planes into buildings to cripple Wall Street, but imagine the damage an attack targeting the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies could do to the world economy. Forget kidnapping rich foreign nationals as a means of profit, soon merely kidnapping their DNA might be enough. Celebrities will face an entirely new kind of stalker. As
homebrew biology matures, these technologies could end up being used to “settle” all sorts of disputes, even those of the domestic variety.

Without question, it’s a brave new world.

9.

Despite the rapid acceleration of exploitable biotechnology, the Secret Service is not powerless to protect the president. Steps can be taken. Establishing a crack scientific task force to continually monitor, forecast, and evaluate new risks is the obvious place to start. Deploying sensing technologies is another. Already, biodetectors have been built that can identify known pathogens in less than three minutes. These can get better — a
lot
better — but, even so, they might not be enough. Synthetic biology opens the door to finely targeted, entirely new biothreats — how can we detect that which we’ve never seen before?

In this, the Secret Service has one big advantage over the Center for Disease Control: Its principle responsibility is the protection of a specific person. This makes it possible to build
specific
biosensing technologies around the president’s genome. We can use his living cells to build an early warning system with molecular accuracy.

Live cell cultures taken from the president could also be kept at the ready — a biological equivalent to data backups. The Secret Service already carries several pints of the president’s blood with the motorcade, just in case an emergency transfusion is necessary. These biological backup systems could be expanded to include “clean DNA,” essentially verified stem cell libraries suitable for bone marrow transplantation or to provide enhanced antiviral or antimicrobial capabilities. As tissue-printing technology improves, the president’s cells could even be turned into ready-made, standby replacement organs.

Yet even if we were to implement all of these proposed measures,
there is no guarantee that the presidential genome could ever be completely protected. As hard as it may be, the Secret Service might have to accept that they’re not going to be able to fully counter all biothreats any more than they could guarantee the president will never catch a cold.

In light of this fact, one possible solution — not without its drawbacks — is radical transparency. Either release the president’s DNA and other relevant biological data to a select group of security-cleared researchers or, the far more controversial step, to the public at large. These ideas may seem counterintuitive, perhaps even startling, but we have come to believe that open-sourcing this problem — and actively engaging the American public in the challenge of protecting their leader — might turn out to be the best defense available.

For starters, cost is a factor. Any in-house protection effort is going to be exceptionally pricey. Certainly, considering what’s at stake, the country would bear the expense, but is this the best solution? After all, over the past five years, DIY Drones, a not-for-profit, online community of autonomous aircraft hobbyists (working for free, in their spare time), produced a $300-dollar Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) with 90 percent of the functionality of the military’s $35,000 Raven. This kind of price reduction is typical of open-sourced projects, which is why open-sourcing presidential biosecurity may turn out to be the best way to pay for presidential biosecurity.

Moreover, doing biosecurity in-house means attracting and retaining a very high level of talent. This puts the Secret Service in competition with industry, a fiscally untenable position, and academia, where many of the more interesting problems now lie. But tapping the collective intelligence of the life science community — our first scenario — enlists the help of the group best prepared to address this problem, at a price we can afford (free).

Open-sourcing the president’s genetic information to a select group of security-cleared researchers brings other benefits as well. It would allow the life sciences to follow in the footsteps of
the computer sciences, where so-called “red team exercises” or “penetration testing,” are extremely common security practices. In these exercises, the red team, usually a group of faux black-hat hackers, attempts to find weaknesses in an organization’s (blue team) defenses. A similar environment could be developed for biological war games. Samples of presidential DNA (live cells) could be provided to two teams of trusted and vetted researchers. The blue team tries to develop strategies for protection; the red team tries to attack. In this way, actual risks can be assessed and real defensive strategies — for example, combination drug therapies (genetically personalized like today’s cancer drugs) — can be evaluated.

One of the reasons this practice has been so widely instituted in the computer world is because the field’s speed of development far exceeds the ability of security experts to keep pace. Because the biological sciences are now advancing significantly faster than computing, little short of an internal Manhattan-style project could put the Secret Service ahead of this curve, to say nothing of keeping them there. The FBI has far greater resources at its disposal than the Secret Service (almost 36,000 people work there, compared to roughly 6,500 at the Secret Service), yet, five years ago, the FBI concluded the
only
way it could keep up with biological threats was by involving the whole of the life science community in the endeavor.

So why go further? Why take the seemingly radical step of releasing the president’s genome to the rest of the world instead of just a security-cleared group? As the aforementioned Wiki-leaked, State Department cables makes clear, the surreptitious gathering of genetic material has already begun. It would not be surprising if the president’s DNA has already been collected and analyzed and our adversaries are merely waiting for the right opportunity to exploit the results. The assault could even be homegrown, the result of increasingly divisive party politics and the release of unscrupulous attack ads.

In the November 2008 issue of the
New England Journal of Medicine
, Drs. Robert Green and George Annas warned against this possibility, writing that soon “advances in genomics will make it more likely that DNA will be collected and analyzed to assess genetic risk information that could be used for or, more likely, against presidential candidates.” It’s also not hard to imagine a biological analogue to the computer hacking group Anonymous arising, with the goal of providing a transparent picture of world leaders’ genomes and medical histories. Sooner or later, even without open-sourcing, the president’s genome will end up in the public eye.

So the question becomes: Is it more dangerous to play defense and hope for the best, or to go on offense and prepare for the worst? Neither choice is terrific, but even beyond the important issues of cost and talent-attraction, open-sourcing, as Dr. Claire Fraser, director of the Institute for Genomics at the University of Maryland points out, “would level the playing field, removing the need for intelligence agencies to plan for every possible worst-case scenario.”

It would also allow the White House to avoid the media storm that would likely occur if someone else leaked the president’s genome, while simultaneously providing a “normal” presidential baseline against which future samples can be compared. In addition, this would produce an exceptional level of early detection of cancers and other metabolic diseases. And, if such diseases were found, it could likewise accelerate personalized therapies.

The largest factor to consider is time. Currently, some 14,000 Americans are working in labs with access to seriously pathogenic materials; we don’t know how many tens of thousands more are doing the same overseas. Outside of those labs, with equipment now extremely cheap, the fundamental tools and techniques of genetic engineering are accessible to anyone interested. Not all that interest will be built around peaceful intentions. On December 8, 2011, Saudi Arabian prince Turki bin
Faisal, who has twice served as an ambassador to the US, called for his country to acquire WMDs, including biological weapons, to defend against Iran and Israel’s nuclear ambitions.

Back in 2003, a panel of life science experts convened by the National Science Foundation for the CIA’s Strategic Assessment Group pointed out that because the processes and techniques needed for the development of advanced bio agents are “dual-use” — they can be used for both good or ill — it will soon be extremely difficult to distinguish legitimate research from the production of bioweapons. As a result, the panelists argued, a qualitatively different relationship between the government and the life science communities might be needed to effectively grapple with future threats.

In our view, it’s no longer a question of might. Advances in biotechnology are quickly and radically changing the scientific landscape. We are entering a world where imagination is the only brake on biology, where dedicated individuals can create new life from scratch. Today, when a difficult problem is mentioned, a commonly heard refrain is, “There’s an app for that.” Sooner than you might believe, “applications” will be replaced by synthetically created “organisms” — as in, “There’s an org for that” — when we think about the solutions to many of our problems. Crowdsourcing the protection of the presidential genome, in light of this coming revolution, may prove to be the only way to protect the president. And in the process, the rest of us.

The God of Sperm

THE CONTROVERSIAL FUTURE OF BIRTH

Most of the innovators we’ve covered in these pages emerged from beyond the mainstream. Whether it’s Dezso Molnar and his flying motorcycle or William Dobelle and his artificial vision implant or Craig Venter and his synthetic genome — all three are much more maverick outsider than cozy insider. And the main character in this, our final story, is no different.

Cappy Rothman started out his career as a courier for the mob — literally a bagman. But one thing led to another, and today’s he’s the most powerful man in the fertility industry and, by extension, arguably the person on this planet with the most influence over the future of childbirth. And this fact, in all of its staggering implications, is the point.

Our technology has begun keeping pace with our imagination. Equally astounding, access to that technology has become so democratized that maverick outsiders can now take on challenges that two decades back were the sole province of large governments and major corporations and two millennia back belonged only to the gods.