The Perfect Soldier: Special Operations, Commandos, and the Future of Us Warfare by James F. Dunnigan
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Dirty Little Secrets
Genetic Engineering for Hire
by James Dunnigan
November 26, 2005
Discussion Board on this DLS topic
Now you can outsource your genetic engineering jobs, and get any gene
modified quickly and cheaply (under two dollars per base pair). As pioneering
genetic engineering firm Blue Heron (http://www.blueheronbio.com/) puts it,
they can synthesize any gene with 100 percent accuracy. Blue Heron’s GeneMaker
an automated gene synthesis system that has already created thousands of
accurate genes.
For over a decade, the Genetic Engineering community has been developing better
and cheaper tools for genetic engineering, making the technology
available to anyone, for just about anything. Blue Heron has refused orders
that required the creation of a bio-engineered human disease. One such request
was from a gentleman in Saudi Arabia.
It’s inevitable that this technology will become even more widespread in the
future. That’s because genetic engineering is a big, and very profitable,
business. Most people only read about the anti-genetic engineering groups, but
that lot have already lost their war against the growth of genetic
engineering.
Of course, people said the same thing, over half a century ago, about the
technology that was used to create chemical weapons. In all that time, only one
terrorist group (the Japanese Aum Shinrikyo) has managed to create chemical
weapons and use them in terrorist attacks. The Aum Shinrikyo nerve gas attacks
in 1995 killed perhaps twenty people in at least two attacks before the
Japanese terrorists were shut down.
Bio engineered diseases are another matter, because their effects are less
predictable than with chemical weapons. For example, an Islamic terrorist
releasing a bio-engineered disease would probably end up killing more Moslems
(because most of them are poor and have less access to medical care than Infidels).
However much that might dissuade terrorists from using such biological weapons,
the capability of getting such weapons into the hands of terrorist fanatics is
now a possibility.
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