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A simulated mass-casualty drill on board the USS Ronald Reagan (CVN-76).
U.S. Navy (Gabriel Martinez)

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Synthetic Bioweapons Are Coming

Emerging and Disruptive Technology Essay Contest–First Prize
Sponsored by MITRE

Gene-editing advances pose a serious threat.
By Michael Knutzen
June 2021
Proceedings
Featured Article
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The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed critical weaknesses in the human domain of warfare at just the moment technology has emerged that gives bad actors new power to exploit those weaknesses. Developments in synthetic biology will create next-generation bioweapons, “human-domain fires” that will fundamentally change the strategic environment and create a threat naval planners must consider now, before it is encountered at sea.

A Human-Domain Plague

In a March 2020 press release praising the effectiveness of its preventative medicine, the Navy proudly declared: “No cases of COVID-19 have been diagnosed aboard any U.S. 7th Fleet Navy vessel.”1 One week later, cases were spreading so rapidly, the USS Theodore Roosevelt (CVN-71) effectively became a “mission-kill.”

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1. U.S. Seventh Fleet Public Affairs, “Navy Preventative Medicine Teams Embark Ships in 7th Fleet,” Commander, Pacific Fleet, 20 March 2020.

2. Aurelian Breeden, “How an Invisible Foe Slipped Aboard a French Navy Ship,” The New York Times, 19 April 2020.

3. U.S. Special Operations Command, Operating in the Human Domain, (Fayetteville, NC: U.S. Department of Defense, August 2015), 3.

4. National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, Biodefense in the Age of Synthetic Biology (Washington DC: National Academies Press, 2018), 1.

5. “CRISPR Timeline,” The Broad Institute.

6. Ekaterina Pak, “CRISPR: A Game-changing Genetic Engineering Technique,” Harvard University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Blog, 31 July 2014.

7. Cindi Li, Jessica Liu, James Yang, and Miranda Zhong, “SPIDERMAN: SPIDroin engineeRing with chroMoprotein And Natural Dye,” 2019 International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition, Cambridge, UK.

8. Department of State, Adherence to and Compliance with Arms Control, Nonproliferation, and Disarmament Agreements and Commitments (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State, August 2019), 45–48.

9. Gregory D. Koblentz, Living Weapons: Biological Warfare and International Security (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009), 22.

10. Ji-Wei Guo and Xue-sen Yang, “Ultramicro, Nonlethal, and Reversible: Looking Ahead to Military Biotechnology,” Military Review 85, no. 4 (July 2005): 75–78.

11. “West Point Biochemist Warns about Threat of Bioweapons,” CBS News, 20 January 2021.

12. Elsa Kania and Wilson Vorndick, “Weaponizing Biotech: How China’s Military Is Preparing for a ‘New Domain of Warfare,’” Defense One, 14 August 2019.

13. Gopal Ratnam, “Hey, Soldiers and Spies—Think Twice about That Home Genetic Ancestry Test,” Roll Call, 24 December 2020.

14. Lucas Ropek, “U.S. Intelligence Claims China Wants to Steal Your DNA,” Gizmodo, 29 January 2021.

15. Ji-Wei Guo, “The Command of Biotechnology and Merciful Conquest in Military Opposition,” People’s Liberation Army Journal of Military Medicine 171, no. 11 (2006): 1,150–54.

16. Ming Zhang, “China: War Without Rules,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 55, no. 6 (1 November 1999): 16–18.

17. Liang Qiao, and Xiansui Wang, Warfare Beyond Rules (Beijing: PLA Literature and Arts Publishing House, February 1999), 25.

18. Qiao and Wang, Warfare Beyond Rules, 24.

19. Zhang, “China: War Without Rules,” 16–18.

20. Kania and Vorndick, “Weaponizing Biotech: How China’s Military Is Preparing for a ‘New Domain of Warfare.’”

21. Ben Hubbard, “Syria Used Chemical Weapons 3 Times in One Week, Watchdog Says,” The New York Times, 8 April 2020; Mark Urban, “Skripal Poisoning: Third Russian Suspect ‘Commanded Attack,’” BBC, 28 June 2019.

22. Michelle Rourke, Alexandra Phelan, and Rebecca Katz, “Access and Benefit Sharing: Implications for Accessing Biological Samples for United Nations Secretary-General Mechanism Investigations,” Georgetown University Center for Global Health Science and Security, December 2019.

23. “CRISPR Technology to Cure Sickle Cell Disease,” Science Daily, 21 January 2021.

24. “The Next Biotech Superpower,” Nature Biotechnology, nature.com, 5 November 2019.

Michael Knutzen

Mr. Knutzen, a former Army intelligence soldier, is a Presidential Management Fellow at the Department of Homeland Security. He has a master’s degree from the University of Denver, where he concentrated in health security and biodefense. The views in this article are the author’s alone.

More Stories From This Author View Biography

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