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The Germ of New Weapons: Genetic Code Creates Danger
By Udo Ulfkotte
FRANKFURT. In the months leading to the announcement on June 26 that a rough draft of the human code had been completed, some doctors grew uneasy over the prospective effects such an advance would have on warfare.
Some of these doctors, members of the British Medical Association, painted a dark picture last January about the dangers of genetic weapons. The association envisioned weapons that could target only those with certain genetic markers and said: "From a genetic point of view, there are more similarities between different people and peoples than differences. But the differences are there, and these individual or combined differences can be used to distinguish members of one ethnic group from those of another." Adding a darker tone to their views, the scientists predicted that a genetic weapon could be used to only destroy white people, black people or Arabs.
Such predictions lead to several questions: Are civilian research projects like the Human Genome Project supplying the basic knowledge required for such "ethno-weapons"? Can killer viruses be adapted to target certain peoples?
Scientists working for Western secret services and the military say it will hardly be possible in the foreseeable future to modify viruses or bacteria to produce a weapon that can differentiate between different ethnic groups, noting that the currently known genetic differences between individual groups of peoples are too small. Therefore, it seems that the militaries of the world are unlikely in this decade to fight on a genetic battlefield with weapons for which there is no defense. Nevertheless, once scientists can read the "Book of Life," this nightmare vision could become reality within decades.
If someone knows which ethnic groups are genetically susceptible to certain illnesses and also knows how to protect themselves with a vaccination from such weapons, they could also use this knowledge for warfare. And with this knowledge, the very same person could also create new -- to date unknown -- pathogens. As was the case in nuclear research, advancements in the field of genetics are also a source of new dangers for the long term.
Even without any detailed knowledge of the human genetic code, militaries long have been interested in biological weapons. In 1970, the U.S. journal Military Review published a report that detailed U.S. efforts during the 1950s. According to the magazine, U.S. military scientists tried to tailor the Valley Fever virus to the Afro-American target group because they had a tenfold likelihood of dying from this illness than white people. It is also known that Soviet researchers were working on a weapon of genetically modified pathogens that would target only Chinese people. This kind of research still continues to be carried out in many countries around the world, such as North Korea, China, Taiwan, Iraq, Iran and Syria.
In the 1990s, in a study titled Deployment of Armed Forces 2020, the German military pointed to the future dangers of biological weapons "against genetically different groups of peoples." These kinds of warfare agents would be harmless to an attacker's own soldiers but would prove to be lethal for people from another genetic group. The study may have been drawn up amid reports about research being carried out in South Africa that at the time unexpectedly forced its way into public knowledge.
The South African Truth Commission, which investigated the country's apartheid system, brought to light certain details of a biological weapons program carried out during the era. The report stated that the former head of the South African program, Wouter Basson, misused scientific findings to test biological weapons that would only kill black people. Cholera pathogens (sprayed as an aerosol) -- one of South Africa's many areas of experimentation -- were intended, as far as possible, to kill only black people. Other research was dedicated to making black women infertile.
Other governments were interested in the weapons technology research carried out by the South Africans, including -- allegedly -- Israel. Twelve kilometers (7.5 miles) south of Tel Aviv in Nes Tsiona is the Israeli secret research center for chemical and biological weapons, where the effectiveness of the latest weapons is tested on horses, pigs, dogs and monkeys. It is also where the Israelis produced the chemicals used by the Israeli secret service Mossad in 1997 during its failed attempt to kill the Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Jordan.
When in November 1998 the British newspaper the Sunday Times published details of the Nes Tsiona research project under the headline "Israel develops an ethnic bomb," the Israeli government reacted with outrage and denied everything. The research, the Israelis said at the time, was of a purely defensive nature. Israel was not developing biological weapons in Nes Tsiona, they said, but was rather attempting -- in cooperation with the researchers -- to find a way of protecting themselves from these weapons. But the Federation of American Scientists noted that if someone were working defensively in the field of biotechnology and biotechnical weapons, they could also put their findings to offensive use. Jul. 10