Pentagon bugs study stirs bioweapon fears

Insect army purely peaceful, it says

The Pentagon is studying whether insects can be enlisted to combat crop loss during agricultural emergencies. The bugs would carry genetically engineered viruses that could be deployed rapidly if critical crops such as corn or wheat became vulnerable to a drought, a natural blight or a sudden attack by a biological weapon.

The concept envisions the viruses making genetic modifications that protect the plants immediately, during a single growing season.

The program, funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has a warm and fuzzy name: "Insect Allies." But some critics find the whole thing creepy.

A team of skeptical scientists and legal scholars published an article in the latest edition of the journal Science arguing that the Insect Allies program opens a Pandora's box and involves technology that "may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery." A website created by the critics puts their objection more bluntly: "The DARPA program is easily weaponized."

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's program manager for Insect Allies, Blake Bextine, pushed back on the Science article, saying the program is solely for peaceful purposes, has been reviewed by government agencies responsible for agricultural safety and has multiple layers of safeguards built into the research protocols, including total containment of the insects.

"I don't think that the public needs to be worried. I don't think that the international community needs to be worried," Bextine said.

He acknowledged that Insect Allies involves new technologies that potentially could be "dual use" -- deployed, in theory, for either defensive or offensive purposes. But that's true for almost any advanced technology, he said.

"I think anytime you're developing a new and revolutionary technology, there is that potential for dual-use capability. But that is not what we are doing. We are delivering positive traits to plants. We're focused on that positive goal. We want to make sure we ensure food security, because food security is national security in our eyes," Bextine said.

The program envisions three types of pestiferous insects as allies: aphids, leafhoppers and whiteflies. In nature these bugs routinely spread viruses among plants. Recent advances in gene editing, including the relatively cheap and simple system known as CRISPR (for clustered regularly interspaced palindromic repeats), could allow researchers to customize viruses to achieve a specific goal in the infected plant. The engineered virus could switch on or off certain genes that, for example, control a plant's growth rate, which could be useful during a drought.

Bextine said there are multiple layers of protection to ensure that this technology does not have unintended ecological effects. He also said the program is not targeting the germline cells of plants and thus would not lead to heritable traits. The goal is to find a way to make a temporary, beneficial modification to plants in a single growing season.

The research may never bear fruit. That's the norm for most Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency projects. The agency, famous for its key role in laying the foundation for the Internet half a century ago, typically funds research with a low probability of success but a potentially huge pay-off.

The authors of the Science paper contend that Insect Allies could be interpreted as a violation of an international treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention. They do not go so far as to claim that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has nefarious motives. They have said that if observers see the program as having offensive military applications that could undermine adherence to the biological weapons treaty.

"We argue that there is the risk that the program is seen as not justified by peaceful purposes," said co-author Silja Voeneky, a professor of international law at the University of Freiburg in Germany.

She said the use of insects is particularly alarming because insects could be deployed cheaply and surreptitiously by malevolent actors.

"In our opinion the justifications are not clear enough. For example, why do they use insects? They could use spraying systems," Voeneky said. "To use insects as a vector to spread diseases is a classical bioweapon."

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