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Hacking the President’s DNA
"The U.S. government is surreptitiously collecting the DNA of world leaders, and is reportedly protecting that of Barack Obama. Decoded, these genetic blueprints could provide compromising information. In the not-too-distant future, they may provide something more as well—the basis for the creation of personalized bioweapons that could take down a president and leave no trace."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/hacking-the-presidents-dna/309147/
Just a little bit of the article, as it's longish and the intro is speculative:
"........consider that the DNA of world leaders is already a subject of intrigue. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President’s Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would‑be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. (The Secret Service would neither confirm nor deny this practice, nor would it comment on any other aspect of this article.) And according to a 2010 release of secret cables by WikiLeaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed our embassies to surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior United Nations officials. Clearly, the U.S. sees strategic advantage in knowing the specific biology of world leaders; it would be surprising if other nations didn’t feel the same.
While no use of an advanced, genetically targeted bio-weapon has been reported, the authors of this piece—including an expert in genetics and microbiology (Andrew Hessel) and one in global security and law enforcement (Marc Goodman)—are convinced we are drawing close to this possibility. Most of the enabling technologies are in place, already serving the needs of academic R&D groups and commercial biotech organizations. And these technologies are becoming exponentially more powerful, particularly those that allow for the easy manipulation of DNA.
The evolution of cancer treatment provides one window into what’s happening. Most cancer drugs kill cells. Today’s chemotherapies are offshoots of chemical-warfare agents: we’ve turned weapons into cancer medicines, albeit crude ones—and as with carpet bombing, collateral damage is a given. But now, thanks to advances in genetics, we know that each cancer is unique, and research is shifting to the development of personalized medicines—designer therapies that can exterminate specific cancerous cells in a specific way, in a specific person; therapies focused like lasers.
To be sure, around the turn of the millennium, significant fanfare surrounded personalized medicine, especially in the field of genetics. A lot of that is now gone. The prevailing wisdom is that the tech has not lived up to the talk, but this isn’t surprising. Gartner, an information-technology research-and-advisory firm, has coined the term hype cycle to describe exactly this sort of phenomenon: a new technology is introduced with enthusiasm, only to be followed by an emotional low when it fails to immediately deliver on its promise. But Gartner also discovered that the cycle doesn’t typically end in what the firm calls “the trough of disillusionment.” Rising from those ashes is a “slope of enlightenment”—meaning that when viewed from a longer-term historical perspective, the majority of these much-hyped groundbreaking developments do, eventually, break plenty of new ground.
As George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, explains, this is what is now happening in personalized medicine. “The fields of gene therapies, viral delivery, and other personalized therapies are progressing rapidly,” Church says, “with several clinical trials succeeding into Phase 2 and 3,” when the therapies are tried on progressively larger numbers of test subjects. “Many of these treatments target cells that differ in only one—rare—genetic variation relative to surrounding cells or individuals.” The Finnish start-up Oncos Therapeutics has already treated close to 300 cancer patients using a scaled-down form of this kind of targeted technology.
These developments are, for the most part, positive—promising better treatment, new cures, and, eventually, longer life. But it wouldn’t take much to subvert such therapies and come full circle, turning personalized medicines into personalized bioweapons. “Right now,” says Jimmy Lin, a genomics researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and the founder of Rare Genomics, a nonprofit organization that designs treatments for rare childhood diseases based on individual genetic analysis, “we have drugs that target specific cancer mutations. Examples include Gleevec, Zelboraf, and Xalkori. Vertex,” a pharmaceutical company based in Massachusetts, “has famously made a drug for cystic-fibrosis patients with a particular mutation. The genetic targeting of individuals is a little farther out. But a state-sponsored program of the Stuxnet variety might be able to accomplish this in a few years. Of course, this work isn’t very well known, so if you tell most people about this, they say that the time frame sounds like science fiction. But when you’re familiar with the research, it’s really feasible that a well-funded group could pull this off.” We would do well to begin planning for that possibility sooner rather than later............."
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/hacking-the-presidents-dna/309147/
Just a little bit of the article, as it's longish and the intro is speculative:
"........consider that the DNA of world leaders is already a subject of intrigue. According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President’s Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would‑be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. (The Secret Service would neither confirm nor deny this practice, nor would it comment on any other aspect of this article.) And according to a 2010 release of secret cables by WikiLeaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed our embassies to surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior United Nations officials. Clearly, the U.S. sees strategic advantage in knowing the specific biology of world leaders; it would be surprising if other nations didn’t feel the same.
While no use of an advanced, genetically targeted bio-weapon has been reported, the authors of this piece—including an expert in genetics and microbiology (Andrew Hessel) and one in global security and law enforcement (Marc Goodman)—are convinced we are drawing close to this possibility. Most of the enabling technologies are in place, already serving the needs of academic R&D groups and commercial biotech organizations. And these technologies are becoming exponentially more powerful, particularly those that allow for the easy manipulation of DNA.
The evolution of cancer treatment provides one window into what’s happening. Most cancer drugs kill cells. Today’s chemotherapies are offshoots of chemical-warfare agents: we’ve turned weapons into cancer medicines, albeit crude ones—and as with carpet bombing, collateral damage is a given. But now, thanks to advances in genetics, we know that each cancer is unique, and research is shifting to the development of personalized medicines—designer therapies that can exterminate specific cancerous cells in a specific way, in a specific person; therapies focused like lasers.
To be sure, around the turn of the millennium, significant fanfare surrounded personalized medicine, especially in the field of genetics. A lot of that is now gone. The prevailing wisdom is that the tech has not lived up to the talk, but this isn’t surprising. Gartner, an information-technology research-and-advisory firm, has coined the term hype cycle to describe exactly this sort of phenomenon: a new technology is introduced with enthusiasm, only to be followed by an emotional low when it fails to immediately deliver on its promise. But Gartner also discovered that the cycle doesn’t typically end in what the firm calls “the trough of disillusionment.” Rising from those ashes is a “slope of enlightenment”—meaning that when viewed from a longer-term historical perspective, the majority of these much-hyped groundbreaking developments do, eventually, break plenty of new ground.
As George Church, a geneticist at Harvard, explains, this is what is now happening in personalized medicine. “The fields of gene therapies, viral delivery, and other personalized therapies are progressing rapidly,” Church says, “with several clinical trials succeeding into Phase 2 and 3,” when the therapies are tried on progressively larger numbers of test subjects. “Many of these treatments target cells that differ in only one—rare—genetic variation relative to surrounding cells or individuals.” The Finnish start-up Oncos Therapeutics has already treated close to 300 cancer patients using a scaled-down form of this kind of targeted technology.
These developments are, for the most part, positive—promising better treatment, new cures, and, eventually, longer life. But it wouldn’t take much to subvert such therapies and come full circle, turning personalized medicines into personalized bioweapons. “Right now,” says Jimmy Lin, a genomics researcher at Washington University in St. Louis and the founder of Rare Genomics, a nonprofit organization that designs treatments for rare childhood diseases based on individual genetic analysis, “we have drugs that target specific cancer mutations. Examples include Gleevec, Zelboraf, and Xalkori. Vertex,” a pharmaceutical company based in Massachusetts, “has famously made a drug for cystic-fibrosis patients with a particular mutation. The genetic targeting of individuals is a little farther out. But a state-sponsored program of the Stuxnet variety might be able to accomplish this in a few years. Of course, this work isn’t very well known, so if you tell most people about this, they say that the time frame sounds like science fiction. But when you’re familiar with the research, it’s really feasible that a well-funded group could pull this off.” We would do well to begin planning for that possibility sooner rather than later............."
Ha, no kidding.
No wonder I keep feeling like I'm living in a sci-fi film !
This has the makings of a great best seller!!
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