Superweapon against hunger— or deadly genetic Trojan horse?

Like mosquitoes, aphids have a proboscis. They use it to suck the juices from plants and inject saliva to prevent the plant from repairing the damage. And in a manner similar to mosquitoes, aphids often infect their host with viruses. The Insect Allies project seeks to take advantage of this process: It’s the first scientific program to purposefully breed viruses (as well as their vectors) so that they can be disseminated to alter the genetic material of plants and animals. The technology is already being used to protect greenhouse plants from pests. Will mosquitoes someday be found to have a useful purpose as well?

Anyone who rides the Underground subway system in London is likely to encounter a very sneaky predator: Culex pipiens molestus, a relative of the common mosquito found above ground. The tiny insects emerge from the darkness of the tunnels to bite victims as they wait on the platforms or ride the subway trains. The London Underground mosquito emerged as a highly specialized aggressor while the world’s oldest subway system was being constructed. When the Underground opened in 1883 and the tunnels were sealed off from the surface, the mosquitoes that became trapped underground stopped their hibernating and changed the profile of their victims: commuters instead of birds. Meanwhile, the exact same phenomenon has been found in other subway systems (Spain, Portugal, Tokyo, New York) that have a similar underground climate. A disturbing side effect: The underground aliens are also spreading the tropical and subtropical diseases West Nile Virus and Rift Valley Fever to the cities of the North. While most victims recover, in recent years West Nile Virus has been killing around 130 people each year on average in the United States.

The new mosquito subspecies has managed to adapt so efficiently to its subterranean environment that there are now genetic differences between the Culex pipiens molestus that live along London’s Bakerloo Line and the mosquitoes on the Victoria Line— evidently the tiny pests seldom make use of the opportunity to change lines at Oxford Circus. Thus in a matter of a few decades, nature has created a new subspecies so distinct that it can no longer interbreed with other kinds of mosquitoes.

Now imagine that researchers are doing the same thing but with a sense of purpose: In the lab, they would be breeding the assassins as well as the weapons required to attack a clearly defined victim. That’s one of the basic concepts of the Insect Allies project being conducted by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The officially stated goal is to develop strains of aphids that can inoculate plants against unanticipated risks, like pests and extreme weather.

But is that all? The research agency DARPA is not a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture but rather of the Department of Defense, and it is no rinky-dink outfit—its proposed budget for 2020 is about $3.5 billion. Previous accomplishments since the agency was established in 1958 have included development of the Stealth Bomber, GPS, the predecessor of the Internet, and the defoliant chemical Agent Orange that was used during the Vietnam War. “We want to make sure we ensure food security,” says DARPA program manager for Insect Allies Blake Bextine, “because food security is national security.”

However, why do it the hard way? Couldn’t the same goal be achieved with the use of the kind of high-tech seeds that are already on the market?

It’s simply a question of efficiency, in Bextine’s opinion: A variety of corn that’s resistant to the corn borer moth grows slower and remains smaller because it requires a certain amount of energy to produce the proteins that give it resistance. So if a farmer could use insects and viruses to switch on a gene for resistance only when it is really needed, the plant would grow more efficiently the rest of the time.

It might seem as though the same protection could be delivered more easily by use of conventional means, such as crop dusters and sprayers— the same methods that are used to spread weed-killing chemicals. But Insect Allies is focusing on insects. And insects are generally known to do as they like: only attacking plants of their choosing or moving on to a neighbor’s field at the drop of a hat. Doesn’t that run incalculable risks? DARPA thinks not. And after all, they argue, not every farmer has access to industrial aids like crop dusters and sprayers, even in a high-tech country like the United States.

“THE METHOD CAN BE SIMPLIFIED SO IT CAN BE USED AS A WEAPON.”

A number of independent scientists see Insect Allies as synonymous with insect assassins: “For example, some genes could be rendered inoperable, which is often easier than optimizing them. And so it is not even necessary to further develop the method—it is sufficient to simplify it in order to use it as a weapon,” says Guy Reeves of Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology. Thus what was promising to be a bumper crop could suddenly become a total crop failure, orchestrated inconspicuously behind the scenes—or even yield an epidemic to devastate the civilian population of a military opponent.

So is this DARPA program simply a camouflaged attempt to develop internationally outlawed biological weapons? Such a strategy shouldn’t be possible, given the fact that the U.S. is a signatory to the Biological Weapons Convention that had come into force in 1975. And to implement the Convention, Congress passed the Biological Weapons Anti-terrorism Act of 1989. President George H. W. Bush decided that the proposed verification protocol suited national interests, so he signed it into law in May of 1990.