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| The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is so concerned about the potential abuse of new biotechnology that it is launching an appeal to governments, the international scientific community and the concerned public to stop and take stock before it is too late. The major worry is that rapid advances in bio-technology could make it easier to wage biological warfare, to deliberately spread diseases agents designed to alter bodily functions such as consciousness, fertility or control of behaviour . | Biotehnology , the industrial application of techniques taken from the biological sciences, will be a major field of scientific activity, and presumably advance, in the coming decades. Like almost any technological or scientific process , it is neither good nor evil in itself: what counts is how it is used. The innovations on which scientists even now stand on the threshhold promise enormous benefits to humanity. They may be the key to producing vaccines for diseases that are today incurable -- AIDS for example -- increasing food supplies or preventing some types of genetic disorders. |
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Biotechnology, which is by no means reserved to rich countries and super-powers, also presents an enormous potential for abuse. Some of the possibilities sound like bad science fiction , but participants in a recent meeting in Montreux, Switzerland were not fantasizing very much when, among other possibilities, they ideantified : -- Known biological warfare agents that could be made easier to use. Anthrax, for example, could be manipulated to become resistant to antibiotics, to drying out or exposure to ultra-violet light, all of whch normally renders the spores harmless. -- Harmless microbes that can be made dangerous. --Unintended outcomes that turn lethal. This happened when Australian researchers created a very dangerous strain of "mouse pox virus". The experimanet was published only after careful consideration -- as a warning about the dangers of such research. --Undetected attacks that could alter bodily funtions by changing, even slightly, the concentrations of body chemicals that regulate sleep, consciousness, behaviour, fertility or body temperature. No one can say today how far along practical applications of such reserach is. What is certain is that developments are coming very fast. That is why the ICRC launched its appeal to governments, international organisations, the scientific community and civil society at large. There is such a thing as an International Biological Weapons Convention; the problem is that the monitoring system for compliance is very weak. Governments, and their military people hide behind the pharmaceutical industry and its trade secrets -- and vice versa. Governemnts will meet again next November for a session of what is called a "Review Conference" on the Convention, but it is highly unlikely that any serious progress will be made toward compliance. The ICRC appeal has nothing to do with sanctions or military action against any countries who are today alleged to posess chemical or biological weapons. Its purpose is to make the public aware of the dangers which biotechnology could unleash. In 1925 an international convention to bar the use of poison gas (a misuse of the modern chemistry of the time) was signed and has been generally adhered to, with few exceptions, in the last 77 years. The ICRC and others who are concerned about the misuse of biotehnology would like to see controls imposed without having to go through a biotechnical equivalent of the gas attacks of the First World War . |
