Biological Warfare With Insects

Oh, I have such a happy feeling that this will go well, and not backfire !

A project funded by a research agency of the US Department of Defense is now giving rise to concerns about being possibly misused for the purpose of biological warfare. The programme called 'Insect Allies' intends for insects to be used for dispersing genetically modified viruses to agricultural plants in fields. These viruses would be engineered so they can alter the chromosomes of plants through 'genome editing'. This would allow for genetic modifications to be implemented quickly and at a large scale on crops that are already growing in fields, such as corn. In the journal Science, scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön and the Institut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier along with legal scholars from the University of Freiburg point out that this type of system could be more easily developed for use as a biological weapon than for the proposed agricultural purpose.


ScienceDaily