Lis­ten:
One seg­ment

This broad­cast high­lights aspects of the poten­tial appli­ca­tion of genet­ic engi­neer­ing to bio­log­i­cal war­fare. The seg­ment begins with dis­cus­sion of a fore­cast by the British Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion that genet­i­cal­ly engi­neered, “eth­nic cleans­ing weapons” would become a real­i­ty with­in ten years. Tak­ing advan­tage of genet­ic dif­fer­ences between dif­fer­ent eth­nic groups, such weapons could make geno­cide more fea­si­ble than ever before. Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, the BMA warned that such research would be dif­fi­cult to dis­tin­guish from “legit­i­mate” sci­en­tif­ic study. Equal­ly ter­ri­fy­ing is a project being under­tak­en by Amer­i­can sci­en­tists involv­ing the syn­the­sis of liv­ing cells from scratch. Bio-tech­nol­o­gy of this type could facil­i­tate the devel­op­ment of dead­ly bio­log­i­cal war­fare weapons by ter­ror­ist groups. Oth­er points of dis­cus­sion include: a pro­pos­al to cat­a­log the genes of poten­tial bio­log­i­cal ter­ror weapons; the alleged “dis­cov­ery” of the African Chim­panzee gen­e­sis of AIDS (an extreme­ly unlike­ly pos­si­bil­i­ty) and the recent dis­clo­sure that peo­ple of African extrac­tion have a genet­ic muta­tion that makes them more sus­cep­ti­ble to AIDS, while peo­ple of Euro­pean extrac­tion have a muta­tion that makes them less so. This last point of dis­cus­sion sug­gests that the BMA’s fore­cast of the devel­op­ment of “eth­no-spe­cif­ic” bio­log­i­cal war­fare weapons may be clos­er than they sug­gest.