DARPA’s new defensive bioweapon

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) wants insects to spread genetically modified viruses to save crops. 

Background

According to the DARPA website, The Insect Allies program is “pursuing scalable, readily deployable, and generalizable countermeasures” against potential natural and engineered threats to the food supply with the goals of preserving the U.S. crop system. National security can be quickly jeopardized by naturally occurring threats to the cropping system, including pathogens, drought, flooding, and frost, but especially by threats introduced by state or non-state actors.

Insect Allies seeks to mitigate the impact of these incursions by applying targeted therapies to mature plants with effects that are expressed at relevant timescales—namely, within a single growing season. Such an unprecedented capability would provide an urgently needed alternative to pesticides, selective breeding, slash-and-burn clearing, and quarantine, which are often ineffective against rapidly emerging threats and are not suited to securing mature plants.

Analysis

A US military program dubbed ‘Insect Allies’ could be used as a biological weapon; a group of European scientists warns. The Pentagon’s research arm claims they are intended to defend crops, but doesn’t deny ‘dual-use’ potential.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and the University of Freiburg in Germany, as well as the University of Montpellier, France, have published a critique of the program, dubbed “Insect Allies,” in the October 5 edition of Science.

They argue that “the knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance US agriculture or respond to national emergencies” and therefore the program “may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery,” which would mean a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention.

Dr. Blake Bextine, program manager of Insect Allies, said that DARPA was “not producing biological weapons, and we reject the hypothetical scenario,” though they “accept and agree with concerns about potential dual use of technology.” However, Dr Bextine’s two-page response, released by the DARPA later, did not contain the forceful denial of bioweapons charges. Instead, Dr. Bextine argued the program was intended to “respond rapidly to threats to the food supply” and that it was subject to government regulation and transparency rules.

Nothing could possibly go wrong, Dr. Bextine firmly emphasized, simply because “every performer in the program is required to include at least three independent kill switches in their systems to shut down functionality of the technology.”

DARPA’s insect allies would work by injecting the affected crops with gene-editing viruses intended to target whatever ailment affects them, using CRISPR technology. The researchers, however, point out that this mechanism could also be used to introduce viruses into healthy organisms.

The question is not whether the program can be weaponized; it already has been. DARPA has been one of the major sources of funding for a project to release genetically modified mosquitoes into the wild, armed with a gene-editing virus intended to sterilize the species that transmit malaria. There have been plans to release these GMO mosquitoes in the Florida Keys.

The dispute over Insect Allies comes as Russia has raised concerns about a US biological research facility in Tbilisi, Georgia. A former government minister has recently published online some 100,000 pages of documents about the facility.

The Pentagon, however, rejected Moscow’s concerns as part of “a Russian disinformation campaign directed against the West.”

Counterpoint

DARPA has insisted that the program’s three technical areas—viral manipulation, insect vector optimization, and selective gene therapy in mature plants—layer together to support the goal of rapidly modifying plant traits without the need for extensive infrastructure.

DARPA is also emphasizing on biosafety and biosecurity in this research. All work is conducted inside closed laboratories, greenhouses, or other secured facilities; DARPA is not funding the open release of Insect Allies.

Assessment

Our assessment is that even though DARPA claims that there is no dual-use plan for Insect Allies, its potential as a modified bioweapon cannot be downplayed. Although there are multiple international conventions which outlaw the development or use of bioweapons, there is no guarantee that this technology will be not adopted by violent non-state actors in the near future. We feel that it will be hard to control viruses and insects once they are introduced into the farmers' fields.