Volume 1, Issue 3 
3rd Quarter, 2006


How We Can Manage Our Way Through the Intertwined Promise and Peril of Accelerating Change

Ray Kurzweil

page 13 of 15

The same tools that can empower us to overcome cancer can also empower bioterrorists to create a bio-engineered virus that Kurzweil Quotewould combine three bad characteristics: be deadly, spread easily through the air, and be stealthy, that is, have a long incubation period. New viruses come along but they do not happen to be at the worst part of the spectrum on all of those characteristics. For example, SARS spreads pretty easily, but not through the air. It was pretty deadly, with about a 30% death rate. It is not very stealthy, because it has a fairly short incubation period. With software viruses, we do have regulation, which slows down the responsible practitioners. A bioterrorist does not have to put his or her invention through the FDA. This is an issue about which I have given testimony to Congress. 

We are close at hand to some effective new technologies that have a broad-spectrum effect against biological viruses and we need to accelerate those. We need to consciously, as a society, put more stones on the defensive side of the equation. I have advocated a Manhattan style project to develop defensive biological virus technologies. A good example is RNA interference. I have described a rapid response system based on RNAi. We obtain a new virus; we sequence it in a few days, which we can do now.  We develop an RNA interference medication which works against viruses, because viruses are genetic information. We have shown that we can stop viral diseases with RNA interference. We would then rapidly gear up production of this medication. We could do that with today's technology, but nobody is organizing that. There are other methods that should also be pursued. For example, we should greatly accelerate vaccine development and develop new means of production that do not rely on eggs. 

But the meta lesson here is we really need to address the regulatory issue. I am on the Army Science Advisory Group, which advises the Army on science and technology issues. The Army is responsible for bioterrorism response in this country. They are very concerned about the FDA, because it is not going to be feasible to test responses to bioterrorism agents using the normal regulatory model. We need to put a few stones on the defensive side of the scale by spending money specifically on the defensive side of the equation. As opposed to the calls for relinquishment, which basically will not work. The dangerous technologies are the same ones that are beneficial and you cannot relinquish them without a broad totalitarian system. That was the lesson in the novel Brave New World. It does not work; it just drives the technologies underground, where they continue in a less stable fashion. The responsible scientists then would not have easy access to the knowledge needed to defend civilization.

We do need ethical guidelines. The Asilomar guidelines in the biotechnology field have worked reasonably well. Yet they are not foolproof and obviously, irresponsible practitioners such as terrorists are not going to follow those guidelines. We are tantalizingly close to having broad-spectrum anti-biological virus tools. It is going to be a race. Someone could right now put out an existential-threat pathogen. We want to make sure we have the defenses ready when we need them. 

The knowledge and tools to do that are much more widespread than the knowledge and tools to create an atomic bomb. It is not easy to create an atomic bomb, to get the knowledge, let alone the materials. Yet you can go to a routine college laboratory and all the tools and knowledge are there to create a bio-engineered pathogen. 

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