Posted: Jun 24, 2008, 1:59 PM CST
Six years ago, ideologues like US Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and PNAC Director William Crystal were already discussing genetic weapons. They recommended that the Pentagon consider the possibility for using this type of weapon not only to successfully wage war, but also to reconfigure world politics. According to a PNAC report, genetic weapons could completely change the politics of the entire planet: "cutting-edge biological warfare targeting a certain genotype could turn the reign of terrorism into a politically useful tool."
According to information from PNAC, Israel has also recently begun to work actively on mutagenic weapons. Israel geneticists confirm that Arabs carry a unique gene that no one else in the world has. This gene forms the basis for the Israeli research, believe American experts.
Things look far more frightening, in fact. Genetic weapons could do more than destroy an ethnic group. They could kill according to a person's "usefulness" or "talents." American journalist and bestselling author Thom Hartmann has argued that it would even be possible to kill those with the gene for attention deficit disorder. This means that if you are easily distracted and have a hard time concentrating (there could be other selection criteria as well), you could end up marked for destruction.
We will survive
Fortunately, it is not as easy to create a selective biological weapon as some scientists are claiming. Though it may be possible to create bacteria that multiple only when a person takes a specific medication, the creation of an effective genetic weapon that would not harm the developers themselves seems unrealistic in the foreseeable future.
"It is hard to imagine how a microbe would determine the presence or absence of a certain gene or its structure. Even a researcher armed with the last word in scientific technology has a hard time doing this. It would impossible for bacteria to accomplish such a task," believes Prozorov.
And so on. Even if bacteria could learn how to identify specific genes, how would this information be transformed into infection? That bacteria multiply in the presence of certain antibiotics is clear, but how would information about eye and hair color turn into certain doom for the world's blue-eyed blonds? For this kind of weapon to become a reality, its creators would have to stuff the bacteria with a powerful "computer" to identify genes and at the same time arm them with the means to begin an infection.
There is one more reason why this kind of biological weapon is unlikely to be as effective as the ideologues would wish. As Nazi doctor Josef Mengele put it, "Scratch a Frenchman and find an African." Humanity has existed for many millennia. In the context of all our past tribal and intertribal connections, it is not far from the truth to say that we are all brothers. "Over the many years of human existence, ethnics groups have intermingled to such an extent that the genetic structures determining ethnic identity have blurred and become difficult to recognize," notes Prozorov