In John Brunner's epic science fiction novel, set in 2010, the science of biological engineering has advanced to the point where even university students can produce genetically tailored organisms. To put it another way, by 2010, so Brunner postulates, terrorists can produce their own bio-weapons. This is one of the sub-plots in the novel.

Brunner wrote his book 40 years ago in 1968.

2010 is almost here. So how good was Brunner's guess? Are we almost at the point where terrorists can produce their own bio-weapon?

Meet the burgeoning science of synthetic biology. Synthetic Biology is:

A) the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and

B) the re-design of existing, natural biological systems for useful purposes.

See:

http://syntheticbiology.org/

Well and good. But does this require an expensive lab and a lot of hard to acquire equipment? Is engineering your own organisms in practice as hard as building your own nukes?

Introducing iGEM.

iGEM stands for "International Genetically Engineered Machine."

See:

http://2008.igem.org/About

Students from all across the word compete to produce the most useful, most ingenious organisms using "standard parts" supplied by MIT. This year's winning team is from Slovenia.

Here is a handy link to a catalogue of the parts available.

http://partsregistry.org/Part_Types

You can get any number of E coli strains.

What do readers think?

Was Brunner right? Have we almost reached the stage where terrorists could construct their own bio-weapons?

What are the implications of the spread of this sort of technology?

Here is the iGEM page for "Team Melbourne."

http://2008.igem.org/Team:Melbourne

In thinking about this don't think in terms of a "doomsday bug" that can wipe out the whole of humanity as in the "I am legend" movie. That is very unlikely. Rather think in terms of terrorists engineering local outbreaks of some sort of haemorrhagic fever that kill a few hundred.

Also think in terms of viruses that may infect crops or farm animals rather than humans.

However the "I am legend" plot may not be as far fetched as it seems. Researchers are trying to use viruses to control cancer as this page on the Mayo Clinic website shows.

http://www.mayoclinic.org/news2008-rst/5042.html

Steven.... the mind boggles..why do you even ask the question...?

You could rephrase it as an outright assertion and be on safe ground.

Any one of us could cause untold damage to our communities in a variety of ways.. good grief.... you don't need to be a molecular biologist to do that.

Yes Steven, many people can engineer bioweapons these days. In fact a group of researchers in Adelaide a few years back accidentally made a super infective flu virus.

For serious genetic engineering though, you need a reasonable laboratory to prevent contamination of your cultures, access to biotechnology reagents and some proper starting material as well as a decent education to understand what you are doing. If religious terrorists are able to get these (especially the education), then it's possible.

On the simpler side, if you were able to get your hands on a plasmid that encodes for a serious toxin, say aflatoxin or botulinum toxin and were able to get into an expression vector (easy for a genetics lab), then you could produce massive amounts of the stuff for weapons. But this kind of thing is not for kitchen benchtops or garages, you need decent equipment, eg incubators, autoclave, access to antibiotics and expression vectors etc. But it's possible, unlikely but possible.

The most likely scenario, is just using the plain old stocks of what we have now, eg. anthrax etc. Easy to grow, and they cause a lot of concern without indiscriminately wiping out humanity.

You also need a decent laboratory so that you don't kill yourself as soon as you get something even slightly infectious. That requires some support that terrorists don't generally have unless they are state sponsored.

Or.... you could just read Buggy's post and just put it all into practice..

*swatttt*

I can see eco-terrorism being a problem, whether it's squirting some nasties out of a water pistol at livestock at the Royal Easter Show or transporting a bunch of cane toads into some pristine wilderness.

Acquiring human pathogens may be a bit of a problem for the amateur but maybe not so for the more dedicated, although cultivating some legionella may be as far as it goes - unless you have contacts inside a research laboratory.

Then again, tainting a city's water supply could be as easy as strategically dumping barrel of PCBs.

If it's that easy for me to quickly come up with some simple scenarios that that, what are the limits for the dedicated and resourceful professional?