A new technology in which insects are used to genetically modify crops could be converted into a dangerous, and possibly illegal, bioweapon, alleges a Science Policy Forum report released today. Naturally, the organization leading the research says it’s doing nothing of the sort.The report is a response to a ongoing research program funded by the
U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Dubbed “
Insect Allies,” the idea is to create more resilient crops to help farmers deal with climate change, drought, frost, floods, salinity, and disease. But instead of modifying seeds in a lab, farmers would send fleets of insects into their crops, where the genetically modified bugs would do their work, “
infecting” the plants with a special virus that passes along the new resilience genes.
For Horizontal Environmental Genetic Alteration Agents (HEGAAs) to work, a lab-developed genetic modification needs to be inserted into the chromosome of a target organism. And that’s where the insects come in. The system would utilize leafhoppers, whiteflies, and aphids genetically altered in the lab using CRISPR, or some other gene-editing system, to carry an infectious virus to pre-existing crops.
Needless to say, there are concerns about how this technology might be used—especially in consideration of its primary funder, namely DARPA, and by extension, the Pentagon.... “It is our opinion that the knowledge to be gained from this program appears very limited in its capacity to enhance U.S. agriculture or respond to national emergencies,” write the authors in the new Policy Forum. Instead, they say, “the program may be widely perceived as an effort to develop biological agents for hostile purposes and their means of delivery, which—if true—would constitute a breach of the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC).”
The Policy Forum piece also notes how transgenic virus-infected and genetically altered food crops could, conceivably, be made available to national or international markets, and that no regulatory framework exists to handle this.
But it’s the “secondary intention” alluded to by DARPA that’s raising the most serious flags—the use of HEGAAs as a defensive response to threats. As DARPA explained at the onset of the project, emphasis ours:... National security can be quickly jeopardized by naturally occurring threats to the crop 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.
The authors of the new report interpret this as “an intention to develop a means of delivery of HEGAAs for offensive purposes,” such as engaging in biological warfare against. The introduction of this technology, the authors argue, would herald the advent of an entirely new class of biological, insect-dispatched weapons that could conceivably be used to introduce various deleterious characteristics. The authors further warn that this technology could motivate rival nations to develop similar programs.
Darpa disagrees. ... These traits will be expressed for a limited duration, after which time the plants will return to their original state, according to Bextine. Also, insects could be engineered such that they’d die after just one day.