A most dangerous game

--Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (Eleventh Edition)

Smallpox was the deadliest of all contagions Shuman diseases, an exquisitely calibrated killer. No other human disease combined such virulence, or deadliness, with such transmissibility, the ease with which a germ can move from host to host. Before smallpox was eradicated from the natural environment, its "hottest" strains killed as many as 50 percent of" the people they infected. Why, then, would anyone seek to create a small pox chimera--a genetically hybrid virus deliberately engineered to increase smallpox's killing power? The virus known as variola would seem to be deadly enough on its own. Why would anyone, even a bioterrorist, want to "improve" it?

The moment the question is asked, the answer seems, unfortunately, self-evident. There is a "logic of developing weapons," according to Ken Alibek, former deputy director of Biopreparat, the "civilian" arm of the biological weapons, or bioweapons, program of the former Soviet Union. Weapons making logic ensures that wherever a weakness exists in a potential weapon--the natural smallpox virus, for instance--weapons makers will do all they can to "correct" it.

From the point of view of a bioweapons maker, natural smallpox has two major shortcomings. First, an outbreak can be stopped through vaccination, the very tool that enabled the disease to be driven out of nature in the first place. Second, other diseases exist that are even more lethal than smallpox: inhalation anthrax and pneumonic plague, for instance, can kill close to 100 percent of the people they infect. If a vaccine-resistant, deadlier smallpox can be engineered by inserting foreign DNA into the virus, without compromising the contagiousness of the natural disease, the resulting chimera would make a truly terrible weapon--a weapon against which, as of now, there is no certain means of defense.

Unfortunately, the means to engineer such a chimera may be closer at hand than most people think. Modern molecular biology, and genetic engineering have opened up diabolical possibilities that make smallpox a more dangerous threat than it ever was in the days before it was driven off the earth. The current smallpox vaccine, once used to eradicate the disease, may offer little protection to anyone against a smallpox chimera. I hasten to add that there is no evidence that anyone, anywhere, has actually produced a genetically modified smallpox capable of overcoming immunity. But the technology, and the knowledge, for doing so exists.

Genetically engineered smallpox has become, as the poet John Donne might have said, a chimera in the brain. The threat of such a chimera is forcing scientists to join new battles on new terrain. In his memoir, Biowarrior, Igor V. Domaradskij, one of the principal designers of the bioweapons program for the former Soviet Union, puts the matter bluntly: "In order to defend oneself one has to be in possession of what one must defend against. Otherwise there is nothing to be done." So, fearing pox chimeras in the hands of rogue scientists or rogue states, Western investigators have gone a fair way towards creating such chimeras themselves. And no one knows whether such purely defensive research is part of the solution or part of the problem.

The genetic engineering of infectious agents for use in bioweapons is nothing new. The Soviet bioweapons program worked for many years with smallpox and other lethal agents, including plague and anthrax. Genetic engineering of such agents began as long ago as 1973, in the shadow of the 1972 Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention, signed by the Soviet Union and by more than a hundred other countries, including the United States. In recent years it has come to light that the Soviets used the treaty as a screen for giving deep cover to what was already an ongoing, secret bioweapons program. In the following decades they would grow the smallpox virus by the ton, learn to dry it, harden it, and prepare it to be packed into refrigerated ballistic missiles designed to preserve the virus during reentry into the atmosphere.

As early as 1971, they tested their initial smallpox weapon by spraying a virulent strain of the virus into the air off Vozrozhdeniye Island, in the Aral Sea. The invisible plume drifted across the water. Nine miles away, Bayan Bisenova, a twenty-four-year-old icthyologist, was working on the deck of a research boat as it sailed through the plume. Bisenova had been vaccinated, but she came down with smallpox anyway, then passed it along to several other people. Eventually nine other people contracted the disease, three of whom had never been vaccinated. All three died of hemorrhagic smallpox, the rarest and deadliest form of the disease. In November 2001, recalling that outbreak in an interview in Moscow News, the old Soviet bioweaponeer General Pyotr Burgasov remarked, "Smallpox! Now that's a real biological weapon!"