Part II (Conclusion) of an Exclusive FTW Series
Unholy
Grail: The Quest for
Genetic Weapons
· Food
Crops and Livestock Are An Easy First Target for Gene-Specific Weapons – Has
It Already Happened?
· A Realistic Look at Probabilities, Responsibilities and
Ethical Questions Arising From Experience and the One Nation Arousing the
Most Suspicion – The United States
by Kellia Ramares
[© Copyright
2003, From The Wilderness Publications, www.fromthewilderness.com.
All rights reserved. THIS IS A SUBSCRIBER-ONLY STORY
AND MAY NOT BE POSTED ON A WEB SITE WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN
PERMISSION. Contact media@copvcia.com. This story may be redistributed,
circulated or copied for non-profit purposes only.]
(Special to From The Wilderness)
[In the conclusion of her two-part
series on gene-specific bioweapons Kellia Ramares
reveals an easily overlooked truth. The most likely
and easiest targets of such weapons are food crops
and livestock which would provide the attacking nation
with a degree of deniability. Then, in her conclusion
Ramares states two facts that are probably all too
obvious. Of all the nations in the world the U.S. is the most likely to develop such
weapons and history and that human nature teach us
to expect them, and soon. – MCR]
Mar. 11, 2003, 00:30 PST (FTW)
Talking about Ethnic Weapons:
Not in polite company
The web sites for Human Genome Project Information
are maintained on the web site of the Oak Ridge National
Laboratory.52 Part of the web site is devoted
to information on Ethical, Legal and Social Issues.53 That
page stated that "The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have devoted
3% to 5% of their annual Human Genome Project (HGP)
budgets toward studying the ethical, legal, and social
issues (ELSI) surrounding availability of genetic information.
This represents the world's largest bioethics program,
which has become a model for ELSI programs around the
world."54
The issues raised on that page were: Fairness in the
use of genetic information by insurers, employers,
courts, schools, adoption agencies, and the military,
among others; privacy and confidentiality of genetic
information; psychological impact and stigmatization
due to an individual's genetic differences; reproductive
issues including adequate informed consent for complex
and potentially controversial procedures, use of genetic
information in reproductive decision making, and reproductive
rights; clinical issues; uncertainties associated with
gene tests for susceptibilities and complex conditions;
conceptual and philosophical implications regarding
human responsibility, free will vs. genetic determinism,
and concepts of health and disease; health and environmental
issues concerning genetically modified foods (GM) and
microbes; and commercialization of products including
property rights (patents, copyrights, and trade secrets)
and accessibility of data and materials.55 This
page contains no mention of military applications of
genetics, or the possible development of ethnic weapons.
Likewise, the page that is devoted to Minorities,
Race, and Genomics56 contained information
about conferences for minority leaders to inform them
about the benefits of genetic research, and to discuss
ways of helping more minority group members to develop
careers in genetics. Issues that would be of primary
interest to minority group individuals, i.e.
genetic testing, use of genetics in the courtroom,
patenting and other business issues, and careers in
genetics were the subjects of the conferences. But
the issue of interest to the continued survival of minority
groups, i.e. the development of gene-specific ethnic
weapons, was not on the agenda.
Howard University, perhaps the most prestigious of the historically black colleges and
universities in the United States, has a National Human Genome Center.57 The
formation of the Center was announced on May
1, 2001. Its mission is "to explore the science of and teach
the knowledge about DNA sequence variation and its
interaction with the environment in the causality,
prevention, and treatment of diseases common in African American and other African Diaspora populations."58 The program contains an ethics
unit (GenEthics), which will be a source of bioethics
information for the University and larger community
as a whole. But again, military applications of genetics,
and the implications of those applications for minorities
is not mentioned among the many aspects of ethics with
which the GenEthics unit will concern itself.
Of
course, this is not to say that any attendees of the
minority conferences or the participants in the Howard
University National Human Genome Center or any other
human genome research facility in the world never discuss
or research the ethical implications of genetic weapons.
But the lack of open acknowledgement of the topic is
disturbing. It is also not surprising to Edward Hammond
of the Sunshine Project. He told FTW: "Genetically
targeted weapons or ethnic weapons are a big No-No to
talk about in the world of biological weapons control.
You don’t do it because you get scoffed at the minute
that you do it. I personally think that people are sticking
their heads in the sand about it."
Agroterrorism:
The Likely First Case Scenario
The
first genetic weapons are likely to be aimed, not at
humans, but at agriculture. This is because so much more
is known about plant and animal genetics through years
of work sequencing their genomes and because modern agriculture
has developed genetically uniform crops, which could
be more easily attacked than people. Agricultural genetic
weapons could also have a similar effect on a people
as a direct genetic weapon, by wiping out many of the
food sources of a geographically concentrated ethnic
group.
Dr.
Mark Wheelis, a microbial biochemist and geneticist at
the University of California Davis, focuses his research
on the history of biological warfare, and on biological
weapons control. He sees anti-agricultural bioweapons
as being within the reach, not only of states, but also
of agricultural corporations, organized crime, terrorist
groups and individuals.59
According
to Wheelis, reasons to attack agriculture would include:
attacking the food supply of an enemy belligerent; destabilizing
a government by initiating food shortages or unemployment;
altering supply and demand patterns for a commodity,
or commodity futures, and for other manipulations and
disruptions of trade and financial markets.60
An agricultural bioattack would be easier to carry out than one directly
against humans because there are many plant and animal
diseases that humans could disperse without harming
themselves by handling the bioagents. Fields have little
or no security. If the goal is an economic one, such
as to disrupt trade, the creation of only a few cases
may be necessary to require the quarantine or destruction
of a region’s crops or animals.61 One example
of the havoc an agricultural disease can wreak on farm
economies occurred in England in 2001, when over the
course of 9 months, 5.7 million animals were slaughtered
at a cost of 2.7 billion pounds after an outbreak of
foot and mouth disease.62
Terminator Technology: a gateway to
genetic attacks on agriculture?
Terminator
Technology, developed by St. Louis-based Monsanto Corporation,
is the rubric for any of several
patented processes of genetic engineering for the "control
of plant gene expression," that result in second generation
seeds "committing suicide" by self poisoning when an
outside stimulus, most often the anti-biotic tetracycline,
is applied to the crop.63
The
goal of Terminator is to destroy the millennia old practice
of seed-saving, thus forcing farmers to buy new seed
in the market each year. Not surprisingly, Monsanto has
been busy buying up seed companies. As of 1998, Monsanto
owned Holdens Foundation Seeds, supplier for 25-30% of
US maize acreage, Asgrow Agronmics, the leading soybean
distributor in the US, De Kalb Genetics, the second largest
seed company in the US and the ninth largest in the world,
and Delta and Pine Land Company.64 This latter
acquisition has given Monsanto control of 85% of the
U.S. cotton seed market.65
Though
technically not a genetic weapon as we have defined such
in this article, Terminator technology and corporate
monopolies on seed development and distribution can make
the world more vulnerable to gene-specific attacks on
crops by proliferating genetically identical plants.
In an interview with FTW in
January 2003, Dr. Wheelis said:
Since plant varieties are
particularly highly inbred, and many domestic animals
are very highly inbred, although not to the extent
that many plants are, this does mean that, unlike
humans, where there is a tremendous heterogeneity
in any population, there’s a very high degree of
genetic homogeneity. So you can travel for a hundred
miles in [the] Midwest and see thousands of square miles planted with exactly
the same variety of maize. And that means, using what one knows of the maize genome,
and of this particular variety of maize, it might
be possible to develop a chemical agent that will
affect one variety of maize, but not another. Or
a particular virus might be able to be engineered
so it is able to infect on particular strain of maize
or rice or whatever, but not others. And so this does raise at least the theoretical possibility,
that one could tailor chemical or biological weapons
to attack varieties of domestic crops or animals
that were used in certain parts of the world and
yet these chemicals or infectious agents would be
harmless or much less harmful to other varieties.
FTW: Then...the
mere fact that there are companies out there looking
to spread a particular strain or species of maize,
rice, whatever, and really the doing in of indigenous
or farmer-developed crop could actually make it easier
for genomic weapons?
Wheelis: Yes, for
sure. One of the most robust defenses against genotype
specific weapons is a considerable amount of genetic
heterogeneity. And in many parts of the developing world there are
many different varieties of crops, often grown very
close to each other. So you can find different land
races of maize, for instance, in Mexico, grown only a few kilometers apart. Yet they’re remarkably
different strains of maize. And so that kind of genetic heterogeneity in which
over a large geographic area there are many different
varieties of the same crop, sometimes several varieties
cultivated together on the same plot of land, makes
those crops quite resistant to any kind of genetic
specificity of a weapon.
In contrast, in
the developed world, we commonly plant very large
acreages, at very high densities, of identical, not
just similar, but identical genotypes of whatever
crop we’re talking about. And so that makes this high density, low genetic diversity
monoculture quite vulnerable to this kind of attack,
whereas the lower density, intercropped, genetically
variable agriculture of much of the developing world
is not so susceptible to this.
Thus, ironically, it is the United
States, a major agricultural producer,
and the world’s biotech leader and superpower that
could be devastated by a genetically specific agricultural
bioattack.
But Monsanto is also targeting the
developing world. Dr. Harry B. Collins, Vice President
for Technology Transfer at Delta and Pine Land Co., now
owned by Monsanto, said in 1998, "The centuries old practice
of farmer-saved seed is really a gross disadvantage to
Third World farmers who inadvertently become locked into
obsolete varieties because of their taking the "easy
road" and not planting newer, more productive varieties."66
Modern chemical dependent farming
is anything but an "easy road" for farmers of the developing
world. Dependence on chemical inputs has raised the cost
of farming in the Global South with devastating consequences.
Radiojournalist Sputnik Kilambi has covered the suicides
of farmers in India:
Between 1997 and the end
of 2000, in just the single district of Anantapur
in Andhra Pradesh, 1,826 people, mainly
farmers, committed suicide. Most of the deaths were
debt-related. Rising input costs, falling grain and
oil seed prices, closures by banks, all policy-driven
measures, crushed them. ... Small and marginal farmers
of Anantapur have no other option. The
region is a monocrop area and suffers from inadequate
irrigation.... Ironically, says K. Gopal, it is the younger
farmers, who in principle are open to modernization,
that are most liable to commit suicide. "They’re very
enterprising, risk-taking farmers. They’re willing
to go in for modern agricultural practices, with a
view to increase ease, to increase profitability. They
go in for modern agricultural practices; they even
go in for the use of insecticides, for the use of good
quality seeds. What this shows is that modern farming
does not have any validity for the small and marginal
farmer kind of situation in which we are faced. The
technology is not relevant; the profitability is not
relevant; the liability is not valid."
For K. Gopal it
is clear that the Andhra Pradesh government wants the farmers to get
out of farming, to make way for the brave new world
of corporate and industrialized farming. The Israelis
have set up such a model in [an] area where the farmers
grow exotic items like gerkins and baby corn for
the urban middle and upper classes. The old relationship
between farmer and land has been totally destroyed....67
Corporate farming is
doomed to failure as the End of the Age of Oil makes the petrochemically-derived
pesticides and fertilizers on which it is dependent
uneconomical and, inevitably, unavailable. But if,
in the meantime, indigenous farmers and farming practices,
including seed saving and cultivating genetically diverse
crops, are destroyed, we may not need to develop "ethno-bombs" to
destroy the only race genome researchers say there
is: the human race.
Conclusion:
It's not the knowledge; it's
what we do with it.
With genetic research having a potential for beneficial
use, the question is not whether to conduct the research,
but how and to what end. The "how" is extremely important
to indigenous and other minority populations who have
been exploited by white Western science for centuries.
On February 19, 1995, representatives of 17 indigenous organizations meeting
in Phoenix, Arizona, issued a "Declaration
of Indigenous Peoples of the Western Hemisphere Regarding
the Human Genome Diversity Project."68 The
document opposes the Human Genome Diversity Project,
condemns the patenting of genetic materials and demands "an
immediate moratorium on collections and/or patenting
of genetic materials from indigenous persons and communities
by any scientific project, health organization governments,
Independent agencies, or individual researchers." 69 The
document reaffirmed "that indigenous peoples have the
fundamental rights to deny access to, refuse to participate
in, or to allow removal or appropriation by external
scientific projects of any genetic materials."70 Indigenous
concerns are well founded, especially in light of the
shameful history of white scientific practice that
has indigenous people still struggling to reclaim sacred
artifacts and the very bones of their ancestors from
museum shelves.
But even this document, so strongly opposed to genetic
research on indigenous people, sounds a contradictory
note. "We demand that scientific endeavors and resources
be prioritized to support and improve social, economic
and environmental conditions of indigenous peoples
in their environments, thereby improving health conditions
and raising the overall quality of life." Among the Pima Indians of Arizona, for example, 50% of people between the ages of 30 and 64 have
diabetes.71 What if genetic research could
find the cause and even a treatment for the high incidence
of diabetes among American Indians and Alaska Natives?
The question "To what end?" concerns us all. What
if Israel, which apparently is researching genetic difference
between Jews and Arabs to develop an ethnic weapon, altered its foreign
policy to embrace the genetic research that links the
two peoples? 72
The
U.S. Department of Energy is doing research within the
Human Genome Project on chromosomes 5, 16 and 19.
DOE says, "Particular genes of interest are those mediating
individual susceptibilities to environmental toxins
and ionizing radiation." 73
Is
DOE looking to refine dosage levels for radiation treatments
for cancer, or is it trying to figure out how many people
will survive strikes with tactical nuclear weapons?
Even
a cursory survey of the scientific literature in genetics
indicates scientific interest in the genetic differences
within and between peoples. In addition to possible medical
applications of this research, there are other intriguing
questions, about historical human migration patterns
and the distribution and relationships of languages,
for example, which should be of no military interest.
But research that does turn up differences in the genetics
of socially defined ethic groups is open to abuse, in
all likelihood by governments, even if the scientists
doing that research intended no such thing. The way to
prevent such abuse is to strengthen the moral repugnance
biological, chemical and genetic weapons and to create
legal means to enforce the Biological and Toxin Weapons
Convention and the Chemical Weapons Convention. Right
now, the political and ethical dialogues are simply not
keeping up with the pace of scientific advancements in
genome research. Dr. Wheelis of U.C. Davis says:
[M]y
sense is that the United
States, some time ago,
decided that chemical and biological weapons, and possibly
even nuclear weapons were going to be proliferating
worldwide. And that current arms control
regimes had been unsuccessful in preventing that and
that additional international negotiations didn’t look
to hold out much hope for actually restraining weapons
proliferation. Now I personally disagree with that.
But I think that’s the position that many in the United
States government have
come to. They’ve concluded that there’s clear evidence
of chemical and biological weapons proliferation in
the world. That the biological weapons convention,
the chemical weapons convention haven’t prevented that,
that protocol for the biological weapons convention
didn’t seem to have much promise to them as a tool
to increase the safeguards against proliferation. And
so I think the United States is
in more of a responsive than a preventative mode. I
think we basically decided prevention of proliferation
has failed; it’s going to happen anyway; there’s not
much we can do about it. And so we should
go into a mode in which we respond."74
But the conventions have no teeth because the United States keeps resisting all efforts to give them any. Dr.
Barbara Hatch Rosenberg has written:
Since the BWC came into
force in 1975, biotechnology has progressed rapidly,
its military potential has not gone unnoticed, and
suspicions have multiplied. Anxious to increase transparency and ensure compliance
with the Convention, the state parties in 1986 adopted
an annual information exchange as a Confidence Building Measure (CBM). The ineffectiveness of this 'politically-binding]
measure led the parties in 1991 to initiate the process
of developing a legally-binding Protocol to monitor
compliance. Ten years later this process became stalemated
over the implacable opposition of the Bush Administration to any legally-binding instrument.75
If the United States will not legally commit itself to compliance with
the Convention, on what legal, moral, or rational basis
can it go to war against Iraq or any other nation claiming that the other nation
is creating chemical or biological weapons?
_______________________
Kellia Ramares earned a B.A. in
economics degree, with honors, from Fordham University in New
York in
1977. She also earned a law degree from Indiana University-Bloomington in
1980. She has been a reporter for KPFA-FM
in Berkeley, CA for
nearly four years. There, her specialty is toxics
reporting. Kellia is also an Associate
Producer for WINGS - Women's International News Gathering Service,
a Contributing Editor for OnlineJournal.com and a
reporter for Free Speech Radio News, which is heard
in over 50 stations throughout the United States.
Kellia’s latest project is R.I.S.E. - Radio Internet
Story Exchange, an Internet-based public affairs
program. The R.I.S.E. website is http://www.rise4news.net.
ENDNOTES
52. (www.ornl.gov/hgmis).
53. (http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/elsi/elsi.html).
54. (Ibid.)
55. (Ibid.)
56. (http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/elsi/minorities.html)
57. (http://www.genomecenter.howard.edu/intro.htm)
58. (Ibid.)
59. (Wheelis, Dr. Mark, "Agricultural
Biowarfare and Bioterrorism," Edmonds Institute Occasional
Paper, 2000).
60. (Ibid.)
61. (Ibid.)
62. (Chrisafis, Angelique, "Devastation in the wake
of foot and mouth: Farmers count epidemic's cost as
last 'infected status' areas are downgraded." The Guardian,
December 1, 2001)
63. (Steinbrecher, Ricarda A, and Mooney, Pat Roy, "Terminator
Technology: The Threat to World Food Security," The
Ecologist, Vol. 8 No. 5, September/October 1998, p.
277).
64. (Tokar, Brian. "Monsanto: A Checkered History," The Ecologist,
Vol. 8 No. 5, September/October 1998, p. 259)
65. (Ibid.)
66. (Steinbrecher and Mooney, op.cit. p. 277)
67. (Kilambi, Sputnik, "Thousands of farmers commit suicide
in India," Free Speech Radio News, December
27, 2001).
68. (http://www.indians.org/welker/genome.htm).
69. (Ibid.)
70. (Ibid.)
71. ("Diabetes in American Indians and Alaska Natives Fact Sheet ," National
Diabetes Information Clearinghouse, National Institute
of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases, NIH
Publication No. 99-4551, April 1999.)
72. (Larkin, Marilynn. "Jewish-Arab
affinities are gene-deep." Lancet. 355 (2000);
Kraft, Dina. "Palestinians, Jews Linked in Gene
Study."Chicago Sun Times. 10 May 2000, late sports
final ed.: 39.; Hammer, M.F., et al. "Jewish and
Middle Eastern non-Jewish Populations Share a Common
Pool of Y Chromosome Biallelic Haplotypes." Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences. 97 (2000): 6769-74.
These are among many articles, mostly scientific, on
the subject of genetics and identity at http://www.bioethics.umn.edu/genetics_and_identity/biblio.html)
73. (U.S. Department of Energy, "Research Abstracts
from the DOE Genome Contractor-Grantee Workshop IX " January
27-31, 2002 Oakland, CA. http://www.ornl.gov/hgmis/publicat/02santa/index.html)
74.
(Phone interview, January 2003)
75.
(Rosenberg, op.cit. p. 1).
Why is President Bush, "Poppy" Bush (and Prescott Bush)
part of this Secret Society? Is this driving U.S. Policy?
