The fear of an apocalypse triggered by biotechnology is perhaps the most immediate concern out there: Genetic manipulation, biological weapons, and superdrugs set off the panic response like little else, and the risk seems to be becoming more real by the day. But what would need to happen for the worst-case scenario—a worldwide, man-made biological apocalypse—to actually come to pass?
First, you would need incentive, some benefit tempting enough for the masses to risk the very fibers of their being by introducing manipulated genes into their own systems. You’re probably not going to be game for freebasing possum blood unless you get something pretty cool in return. Free cable, at the least.
Second, you would need contagion, a way for these genes to spread from person to person, or otherwise propagate. While it may suck for you, personally, to have your mind taken over by telepathic heroin, if it doesn’t affect everybody it’s just back-page news.
Finally, you would need lethality: Because, well, it’s just not the apocalypse unless everybody dies.
AS PREVIOUSLY MENTIONED, humanity is not entirely self-destructive. We won’t put ourselves in jeopardy for no reason. And we’re not going to! The good news about the incentive phase of a biotech apocalypse? You’re going to be able to do some pretty cool shit.
• Carnaval
• Naked disco
• Hard-core gay sex with a bunch of other dudes (all the time)
The most alluring field of biotechnology right now is that of athletics, and for good reason: Athletes have been looking for new and undetectable ways to cheat since ancient times, when the very first Olympic wrestler greased himself up before a match. (Greek wrestling, much like its modern contemporary, professional wrestling, was the most socially acceptable way for butch men to get naked and grope each other with lubricant.) And ever since that first naked, cheating man-orgy, we’ve taken a big cue from their example. Genetic experimentation owes a great debt of gratitude to brave, unethical souls like those ancient Greeks, whose modern equivalents are competitors willing to risk shriveled testicles and crippling bacne just for a leg up on the competition.
A chief problem is that of “gene doping.” It’s the biological equivalent of pimping your ride, and it will soup you up in every way short of painting flames on your chest and installing monitors in your ass. In general, the term “gene doping” refers to any modification of the human body through enhanced DNA. It’s used for a variety of therapies, but in the field of professional sports there are some specifically desired uses: Injecting extra copies of naturally occurring genes, like those that create endorphins, might render you essentially immune to pain and fatigue. Or perhaps you’d rather have some extra testosterone, making you larger, stronger, and substantially more entertained by NASCAR. Before the prospect of gene doping, there was simple blood doping: Some athletes prefer injecting themselves with erythropoietin, or EPO, to boost their own red blood cell count. This enables better, faster, stronger oxygenation of the blood and therefore better stamina, fuller lung capacity, and less recovery time. But in the realm of modern science, that’s practically caveman shit. Why, all the way back in 1998, an entire cycling team in the Tour de France was expelled for EPO abuse, despite the fact that it’s nearly impossible to trace, because evidence of almost any kind of gene doping can be explained in other ways: There are disorders, birth defects, or just different genetic profiles that could be responsible for unusual genes, thus allowing any athlete to dismiss accusations of cheating by attributing it to a tragic birth defect that rendered him substantially more awesome than the average man. With gene-doping technology, we’re looking at the same essential effects as blood doping; we’re just going to make them permanent. By altering DNA to increase the production of EPO in athletes’ bodies, they no longer need to inject untraceable superdrugs to up their performance; they’re already producing it. You’ve got little drug cartels up and running in your bloodstream.
If you find yourself struggling to tell the difference, here are Some tips to help you differentiate between the two.
• EPO can also be called “blood doping.”
• ELO can also be called “dope” by people who own BeDazzlers.
• EPO is used to better performance.
• ELO will never be followed by the term “better performance,” unless it’s meant ironically.
• EPO is an illegal substance, and very hard to come by.
• ELO is not yet illegal, and can be found in yard sales across the country in the box marked FREE CRAP, next to broken He-Man toys and a single ski boot.
Consider vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF). It covers the other end of the spectrum from EPO’s stamina-enhancing effects by stimulating the growth of new blood vessels, increasing blood flow, thus improving burst-style muscular strength. Its intended use is for treating muscular diseases, allowing patients with conditions that constrict their blood vessels to regain their muscle mass and, most likely, will eventually wind up helping old white men get boners—because pretty much all drugs end up in that shriveled-boner category. The thing so devious about VEGF is that, even if you manage to track this one, the gene that produces it is delivered to cells in the body in the first place by piggybacking on the common cold virus. So finding modified VEGF genes in the herculean superman who just hurled the Lithuanian swim team out of the coliseum will at best just prove that he had a case of the sniffles at the time. Which, if anything, just makes him look all the more impressive, doesn’t it?
But that’s only for the obsessed athlete, right? How could this possibly benefit the common man?
Well, for one, consider the elderly: Typically regarded as frail and easily knocked around for one’s amusement when you’re desperate to compensate for your microscopic manhood (not that I would know anything about that), their weak constitution is largely due to the natural loss of muscle mass. That’s just genetics, of course, and thanks to advances in biotechnology, there are experimental drugs in testing right now that help restore that lost muscle. They could restore enough, some say, to even equal those levels found in healthy young adults. That’s not just halting one of the worst aspects of aging; it’s turning it backward! The drug is called MK-677, and so far it’s been proven safe, effective, and able to restore up to 20 percent of total muscle mass in the human body. That’s a full fifth of the total human potential, effectively taking senior citizens back to the same overall body strength as a healthy twenty-year-old, according to Michael O. Thorner, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Virginia Health System.
• What’s with this Twitter thing? In my day that was called a sentence.
• Kids will stay off your lawn if you sprinkle it with cayenne pepper. That’ll give ’em something to cry about!
• Why don’t more places, serve rice pudding?
That’s a real thing now: geriatrics with the bodies of twenty-year-olds. That’s not science fiction. It’ll probably be commonly prescribed well within your lifetime if you’re reading this book (because hey, let’s face it, the elderly are probably not the key demographic for a book full of dick jokes about cutting-edge science).
So you’re already one-fifth immortal and possess nigh superhuman stamina just by taking pills, but wait! There’s more!
If you call now, the future will throw in super strength, absolutely free!
These deals are so crazy they’ll stuff and mount their dead mother!
Scientists have discovered that disabling a protein called myostatin can double the overall size of musculature in most mammals. This has only been verifiably proven in mice so far, but theoretically it should work on virtually any mammal. There’s a naturally occurring condition in several species that’s quite similar, where the animal’s myostatin is genetically suppressed. Whippets—those malnourished junkie-looking dog-rats—can suffer from a hypermusculature disease that creates “bully whippets”: Genetic freaks that are gargantuan, absurdly muscled even without exercise, and overall resemble nothing so much as a canine Incredible Hulk. It’s not a debilitating condition, either—that muscle mass is fully functional. Bully whippets have double the strength of their normal counterparts, and as a result can run at double the speed. There’s even been one recorded case of this condition occurring in a human. A German boy was recently diagnosed with the disorder. He’s been monitored from the day it was first discovered he had the condition, and all subsequent tests have verified that he is indeed in perfect health. This means that, theoretically, an artificially induced muscle-doubling disorder should also be entirely safe. Of course, the second professional weight-lifters heard of this development—a procedure that could render them roughly twice the terrifying abominations of nature that they already are—the researchers were swamped with offers to volunteer as test subjects. It’s not like the appeal of strength in a pill is limited to the Buick-resembling man-monster demographic either. Se-Jin Lee, one of the professors at Johns Hopkins University responsible for this discovery, states that every major pharmaceutical company is working on a myostatin blocker for treatment of diseases like muscular dystrophy.
If it’s already being tested medicinally, the demands of the free market (read: anybody who wants totally kickin’ abs for doing absolutely nothing, which, by last count, is everybody) dictate that it will soon be available for more casual usage as well, within just a few years by some estimates.
• Sleep sex (Ambien)
• Impulse gambling (Mirapex)
• Necrotic flesh (Provigil)
• Old-guy boners (Cialis)
If strength doesn’t appeal to you, what about stamina? There are biotech endurance enhancements in the works as well: Scientists at Case Western Reserve University genetically altered mouse embryos to limit the muscle response for burst-style energy. The effect of this was the lessened potential for energy spurts, but massively increased endurance. Some other little side effects were seen, like insatiable hunger, tripled life span, and a tremendously increased libido, along with a “very, very aggressive nature.” In other words, these are furious, untiring, and horny-as-hell mice… possessing a ravenous, unnatural hunger. The researchers, as they did with VEGF, EPO, and MK-667, freely admit that there is also the potential for abuse of this as a performance enhancer in humans, but they do strongly warn that these same potential side effects might affect humans the same as they do mice. So maybe take a rain check on that workout in a pill for now—side effects may be nausea, headache, stiff joints, endless rage, consuming lust, insatiable hunger, and other such general fucking zombification.
So there are zombie pills! Wonderful! But surely you didn’t think that was all?!
No! There’s even more! Science is clinically retarded for deals!
You’ve heard the phrase “in the zone”? The mental, spiritual, and physical state where you feel you can simply do no wrong—from shooting a fine game of pool to breaking world records—being in the zone is the common moniker for what scientists refer to as a “flow state,” a feeling resulting from a dopamine surge accompanied by a few neurochemicals, such as serotonin and norepinephrine, which generally serves to decrease reaction time, and even alter our perception of time itself.
That’s in a pill, too: You’ll be able to be “in the zone” within the decade just by popping some anandamide analogues. Anandamide, first identified back in 2004 by Georgia Tech neuroscientist Arne Dietrich, is the chemical responsible for triggering these flow-state highs and, as you’ve probably learned by now, pretty much any naturally occurring response in the human body can and will be manipulated by science like preteen girls by the Disney Corporation. Picture it: A generation of entirely average people doping up on “in the zone” prescriptions—flipping channels with the mental acuity of a crack athlete, every click executed so perfectly it’s like they’ve stolen God’s fingers. That’s… probably the most that will happen, actually, because human nature doesn’t change. Just taking this drug doesn’t mean you’ll automatically assume an active lifestyle. Why limit the feeling to the athletically gifted, when everybody wants to feel like they’re the best at something—even if that “something” is just the Hundred-Ounce Pee Break or the Triple-Digit Channel Change?
So we’ve established that there are real projects already under way with proven results that give humans everything from effort-free workouts to improved mental faculties. With kickin’ abs, endless stamina, mental acuity, and nigh-spiritual flow states available in pill form in under a decade, it’s not a matter of if you introduce biotech to your system, but how much you can afford and how awesome you want to be that day.
When you consider that we’re the generation that bought the Thighmaster and the Ab Cruncher, it’s safe to say we’ll probably make some room in the budget for buff-untiring-genius-time-manipulator-in-a-pill. And that’s how it starts; the massive incentive for biotech makes it a household name. Soon you won’t think anything of modifying your genetics on the fly, and biotech will be everywhere.
AH, BUT NOW COMES the downside: The contagion period. For nearly every experiment with beneficial discoveries, there’s one with horrific, lethal mistakes. These advances aren’t coming out of thin air; they’re developed in lab animals—mice, for the most part. The beneficial drugs are tested, tweaked, and refined in lab animals, and then, if approved, eventually synthesized for humans. Supposedly, this method ensures that there’s no danger of something unintended crossing over to us from the labs, because the mice and other animals used for experiments are somewhat genetically isolated from us. Even if we do accidentally unleash a plague in the pursuit of the betterment of man, it’ll just wipe out some lab rats with nary a vegan to even shed a tear. But for any failed experiments to actually pose any danger to humanity there would have to be more common genetic markers between the lab animals used in these early testing stages and the common man. Like, say, if mice could shoot human ejaculate or something equally horrifying.
Oh wait, they already do exactly that. Surprise! Science hates you.
• Styrofoam
• The atom bomb
• Roughly 70 percent of this book
This, shall we say, sticky situation (and we probably shouldn’t) all started with researchers at the universities of Pennsylvania and California, who initially just managed to provoke mice into growing viable monkey sperm. While “provoking mice into growing monkey sperm” brings to mind some rather disturbing images of furious primates and sexually antagonized mice, it was all pretty innocent. Perhaps they just wanted to give the internet even more bizarre pornography, or perhaps they were just out to instill some confusing urges in horny rodents for the sake of comedy, but most likely the scientists were hoping to help endangered species by synthesizing sperm on a large scale. That’s what their proposal states is the ultimate goal, anyway, and why lie about something that embarrassing? If it wasn’t true, a more flattering lie than “Professional Rat Molester” should have been easy to come by. So while the researchers in Pennsylvania may have started all of this, it was Canadian researchers hot on their tails (which takes on a rather gross subtext in this instance) who took the concept even further, instilling the ability to produce human proteins in mouse sperm. The Canadian mice now ejaculate human growth hormone—a fact that cannot be doing the tourism industry any favors.
• “Come to Canada, where politeness is a prerequisite!”
• “Visit Canada, we have the Internet now!”
• “Vacation in Canada, our mice cum like people!”
To create this monstrous hybrid of mad science and pornography, the researchers first started by targeting a DNA sequence present only in male sex glands. Once the gene responsible for sperm production was identified, they just spliced in a sequence responsible for human growth hormone… and that was it! Apparently nature’s pretty flexible about this shit. You want mice to come like people?
No problem, says nature!
She’s in a giving mood this millennium. What else you want? Some crocodiles with sonar, maybe a feathered dog, hey—how about some gorillas with scales? Genetic splicing is apparently limited only by your imagination, funding, and willingness to fight off snake apes. The Canadian researchers at least had good reason for their spunk meddling; their process has some impressive potential for the pharmaceutical industry. Insulin is already being “farmed” in animals for human use, but differences in chemical composition results in varying degrees of effectiveness, depending on the animal. By altering these mice to produce genetically identical human insulin in their sperm, the Canadian scientists expect to have a new, completely safe, and entirely effective method for producing high-quality medicine on demand.
Taking a money shot in the veins from Mickey once in a while is a small price to pay for that kind of progress.
But the researchers soon realized that tiny mice have tiny mouse orgasms—not producing a lot of the desired substance—and instead moved on to re-create their experiment in larger animals, eventually settling on boars and cattle, which can produce more than 300 ml of semen up to three times a week on average. Though these HGH experiments are being performed only with semen for the time being (because if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing grossly), eventually the hope is to encode the modified gene sequence so the hormone is produced in more amenable substances like cow’s or goat’s milk…
Or pig urine!
No kidding. That is a specific goal. The researchers involved in these experiments hoped to farm something slightly less horrific than mutant mouse semen (and really, who could blame them?) and so began looking toward replicating the results in other fluids. And either some guy just totally missed the point of this exercise, or else had some really unsettling sexual priorities:
Scientist 1: Does it have to be rat jizz? I mean, sure we’re extracting the pure chemical from the substance, and using the end product isn’t like letting a mouse pop one off into your veins, but it’s still pretty weird. I’m not sure how people will feel about this.
Scientist 2: Well, what if we splice it into a more socially acceptable fluid?
Scientist 1: Yeah, yeah! Like blood or, hell, even milk!
Scientist 2: Or pig piss!
Scientist 1: Yeah, I… wait, what?
Scientist 2: Think about it! You could drink all the pig piss you wanted, and it would even be good for you!
Scientist 1: I hate everything about working with you.
The only potential downside to using something like milk would be the waiting period: Not only would you have to wait until the genetically modified animals reach sexual maturity to begin farming, but you’d have to wait for them to lactate, too. Honestly, though, we as consumers already have to wait that long for normal dairy products, I think we can wait a few extra weeks to avoid mainlining mouse man-batter.
Another key concern of genetic experimentation in general is that of containment viability. Modified genes tend to carry over naturally, after all, and it takes only one pair of star-crossed cow lovers and a broken section of fence to introduce the traits to other cattle. Cattle that have other uses. Cattle that produce milk.
Cattle that you eat.
• Burn everything to ash.
• Consume only products you grow yourself.
• Stop eating meat (this includes bacon).
If this does happen, you would not only have a nearly untraceable dose of pharmaceutical-grade drugs in the food supply, like that aforementioned insulin, but that would also further narrow the gap between those previously isolated laboratory animals and humans. Perhaps this interbreeding leads to medicinally fortified foodstuffs, or perhaps it leads to a Grilled Ham and Insulin sandwich that, while undoubtedly delicious, is unfortunately always served with a heaping side of hypoglycaemic coma. That example is just to illustrate a point, though; the real problem is much larger.
While consuming genetically modified animals won’t alter our own genetic code, the fact that our livestock is now one step closer to humanity opens a gateway to a multitude of diseases and mutations that can cross over between species, not to mention some potential for unforeseen changes to the source animal. So at first you just have lab mice ejaculating human protein, but what if that starts to carry over in reproduction? If just one animal gets out, natural selection would start to take hold. The altered gene might become hereditary, and then we all get to find out exactly what effects a human gene in the mouse population can have. What’s your wager? Is the end result the walking incarnation of hugs, like a real-life Mickey Mouse, or something more akin to the drugged-out psychoses of the Rats of NIMH? Is human growth hormone too obscure a worry to illustrate this danger? Well, try this horror hat on for size and tells me how it fits:
• Foodfoodfoodfood.
• I like climbing!
• I poop where I stand!
German scientists have successfully modified a batch of mice with a human gene for speech. Now, I know what you’re thinking:
“What? Fuck that.”
But it’s true! In an effort to better understand the evolution of human language, they’ve spliced a gene called FOXP2 into some lab mice. Humans with a low FOXP2 count can suffer from anything from speech disorders to cognitive inhibition, and though a relative of this gene is present in all sorts of animals, the strain in humans is entirely unique to our species.
Well, it used to be, anyway.
What did we talk about earlier in this chapter? Remember how amenable nature seems to be to changes in genetic structure? If you want talking mice, nature is probably quite happy to oblige.
There’s actually evidence of change happening already: The enhanced German mice showed drastically increased nerve activity in the language center of their brains, for one. They can’t speak or anything yet—this shit is crazy, not retarded—and even if the language centers were amplified to human levels, that doesn’t mean anything like human speech would develop. But it does mean that they’re now better at communicating with one another. That’s a clear biological improvement. In terms of evolution, that means it’s likely to favor a gene and pass it on to future generations. That’s not idle speculation, either; the scientists in charge of this experiment freely admit that, though this research was initiated just to study the evolution of human speech, it could well give these mice a push down that same evolutionary path.
If there’s one thing we don’t want communicating and coordinating with one another, it’s rodents. Disease-spreading creatures that have already, at least once in history, participated in the near total destruction of the human race, thanks to their role in spreading the Black Death. And that was without boosted language skills and human sperm! Now they can not only jizz disease on your face, but ask you who your daddy is while doing it.
Isn’t progress wonderful?
SOME OF THE WORLD’S most devastating diseases, from the H1N1 “swine flu” to SARS, have made the jump from animal to man naturally. Though transspecies diseases have fortunately been relatively low mortality in recent years, new variants of the flu have historically been potential extinction-level events. Consider the Spanish flu of 1918, whose total estimated death count varies from 30 to 50 million. That’s more fatalities within a year than in most of America’s major wars of the last century. It actually was a kind of swine flu; it jumped from pigs to humans and eventually wiped out the equivalent of a large country. Talk about your rags-to-riches story! We’re now more reliant on livestock than ever, and it’s all conglomerated—roughly 80 percent of America’s beef is currently processed by less than half a dozen companies, and a full third of the entire country’s milk comes from one single solitary company. You can easily see why an outbreak in a food processing factory, in today’s world, could kill on a much larger scale than it could’ve a century ago. Thanks to corporate rule, we not only wear the same brand of T-shirts, buy the same brand of coffee, and watch the same TV shows, but we also share a common pool of food products. And that’s where we drink all of our milk from!
Out of the contagion pool!
• Unchlorinated swingers’ hot tub
• Disused hobo bathhouse
• Office pool on estimated time of coworker’s newborn baby suffering crib death.
According to the above numbers, if a major dairy supply were to be contaminated, there’s a one in three chance that you’d end up drinking it. So here’s a worrying thought: We have security measures at airports and train stations… but how well-protected and monitored are the dairies? Terrorists got pilots’ licenses; I’m betting that they can get jobs as milk skimmers at the competitive rate of three fifty an hour and half a pound of free cheese per meal break.
To make matters worse, not only is there contamination in our food distribution, the actual livestock themselves aren’t much better. Thanks to the overuse of antibiotics in feed animals, superresistant diseases are rapidly on the rise. That cow whose sole purpose in life is to turn its ass into delicious cheeseburgers isn’t exactly going to get primary care; farmers have chosen to mass dose their herds with antibiotics and hope to catch what they can. This not only leads to a reduced efficiency in the cows’ immune systems, but in our species’ as well. That cow’s last meal probably contains those same antibiotics (I mean, what’s he gonna order, steak?) and that makes it your current meal, if you then eat said cow. So human antibiotics have an overall reduction in efficiency because of mass-medicated cattle, and that sucks (fuck you, cows—no wonder we eat you), but Dr. Arjun Srinivasan, an epidemiologist with the CDC, actually thinks that, just considering the sheer amount of antibiotics dumped into the food supply, antibiotic overdose in animals may actually endanger the human race more than any potential overdose in the humans themselves.
But this is all so nebulous: Biotech “affecting the immune systems of cattle” isn’t exactly a sexy apocalypse. So let’s consider the actual effects one of these animal-spread pathogens could take. For example, Toxoplasma gondii. It lives most of its life in rats, but can only mature to adulthood in the belly of a feline. When it’s ready, it causes the host rat to seek out and loiter around cat urine—because where there’s cat piss, there are cats—and, when the rat is inevitably eaten, the parasite is successfully transferred to the feline host. Toxoplasma gondii is an organism that possesses its host and fosters a death wish, because it can thrive only if the host dies. But fuck those rats, anyway. That couldn’t possibly affect you, right?
Well, actually, half of the entire human population is infected with Toxoplasma gondii. Not “throughout history.” Not just “at risk.” But literally and presently fully infected.
Right.
Fucking.
Now.
• They pee on everything.
• They don’t really do tricks.
• They don’t really like you.
• They’re infested with things that infect your brain and drive you insane.
This is particularly bad, because severe cases of toxoplasmosis manifest as full-blown paranoid schizophrenia: voices, delusions, hysteria—the works. Toxoplasmosis is the reason that pregnant women aren’t supposed to handle cat litter, why newborn babies aren’t supposed to be around cats, and though there’s no actual basis to believe it, it certainly goes a long way toward explaining crazy cat-collecting ladies if they’re actually infected by mind-controlling parasites harbored within the cats themselves. Even in minor cases in people whose immune systems aren’t compromised (fifty/fifty chance says that’s you), the majority of infected males suffer from neuroses, guilt, and nervousness from even mild cases, while infected females are more aggressive and outgoing… and have drastically heightened sex drives. That explains why those cat ladies put out so easy, am I right, fellas? Hell yeah! Maybe our parasites can get together and high-five later.
It’s basically a viral parasite that transforms women into ballcrushers and men into pussies. That’s a little unsettling, but hey, gender roles are different in modern times anyway. No harm, no foul. Until you consider that these side effects could be dangerously exploited, because—like it or not—the modern military remains primarily male. Not hard to see the appeal of a biologically engineered toxoplasma used as a weapon—an army of butch Jack Dempsey hard-asses instantly emasculated into nebbish, Woody Allen-style timidity, too insecure about their manhood to order a steak correctly, much less fire eighteen bullets into the face of a rampaging RoboNazi (hey, it’s the future, right? I’m just assuming we’ll fight enemies a little cooler and less ambiguous than “brown people who don’t live on this continent” by then).
And remember, those are mild cases. In addition to schizophrenia, severe cases manifest side effects like blindness, cerebral palsy, severely diminished coordination, and even death. Toxoplasma infections are mostly kept in check by our immune systems, so severe cases are rare. But then, there are any number of reasons why our immune systems might not be up to snuff, from the serious—such as AIDS or chemotherapy—to something as mundane as the flu. With half of the population already harboring gondii parasites, any immune-suppressing assistance at all, and gondii could start wiping us all out.
But as terrible as the severe cases can be, we’re still alive. If we catch it in time, it might not be an apocalyptic-level event, even if superstrains were engineered. But keep in mind that it takes only one mutation for the host roles to change.
If that happens, we could very well become the rats, gestating the parasite until it decides it’s time to move on to something better. So maybe tomorrow’s the day you wake up loving the distinct musk of lion piss, and it’s some lion’s turn to get uncontrollably horny and schizo. Don’t outright dismiss the likelihood of this kind of mutation, either. Consider that with military funding and advances in modern science, it would be a snap to modify a few strands of DNA and let a modified gondii loose. It sure would make the army’s job a lot easier, after all, if all of their enemies inexplicably began loving the smell of recently plucked hand grenades.
But hey, guys, look at the bright side: If there’s a death wish–inspiring parasite living in all of our brains, at least it’s paying the rent in skanks.
So far, we’ve talked about how biotechnology has not only elevated the threat level of the viruses themselves, but also, through our extensive use of agricultural biotechnology, created a mass contaminate pool larger than any in the history of the human race; we all drink from the same watering hole (technically it’s a milk hole, but that’s just pornographic), so let’s move on from the general dangers and really home in on sweet, sweet genocide: In August 2000, a bacterium named Klebsiella pneumoniae (that’s right, in the same genus as that other world-destroying bacteria) was discovered in New York University’s Tisch Hospital. Dr. Roger Wetherbee, a physician there, describes it most succinctly in this excerpt from a New Yorker article:
“It was literally resistant to every meaningful antibiotic that we had.” The microbe was sensitive only to a drug called colistin, which had been developed decades earlier and largely abandoned as a systemic treatment, because it can severely damage the kidneys. “So we had this report, and I looked at it and said to myself, ‘My God, this is an organism that basically we can’t treat.’”
That sounds like dialogue from a bad action movie. Did he dramatically remove his glasses after saying “my God”? Did motherfucking lightning strike when he said “this is an organism that basically we can’t treat”? Thankfully, this episode in New York was the only major outbreak of this strain in the United States. But unfortunately, this particular strain of Klebsiella had refined itself so extensively in the clinical environment—thriving on weak patients, immunizing itself to antibiotics—that it couldn’t even be killed with industrial disinfectants.
Industrial disinfectants are hard core; I think that’s what finally killed John Wayne; I think that’s what finally toppled Communism—hell, that’s probably what killed disco! Though a form of bleach did eventually kill Klebsiella pneumoniae, it was eventually proven resistant to everything from ammonia to phenol. This sounds unkillable, like the goddamn Highlander of bacterium. I think disease just found its first superhero.
• Lattes
• Khaki
• Your grandchildren
• Chicks in shoulder pads
• Paisley
Huge precautions were taken, and hospital staff basically donned biohazard suits and flamethrowers to burn the infected before they could be turned. That hospital should have been more sterile than a Murphy Brown episode, and yet still the bacteria thrived. Patients started getting bloodstream infections from the bacterium, which is the most lethal infection one can get, before hospital staff eventually contained it. By that time, nearly half of all those infected had died. This was in a space as confined as a university hospital, with strict containment procedures and experience in combating the spread of disease. Imagine if this outbreak had occurred anywhere else? With this high a mortality rate, it could have halved the world’s population practically overnight.
Thank God our dairies are so well protected!
But hey, why even develop new microscopic murderers when the classics never go out of style? Scientists found they were recently able to synthesize the polio virus from scratch, presumably in an effort to give us all tiny T-rex arms so we can’t fight back when the government Thought Clerics come a-calling. It’s been theorized that the same process, a rather simple one by all indications, could also be used to synthetically manufacture similar viruses. But any contender would have to have a simple cell structure like polio, so they still can’t do anything too complicated, and at least that’s somewhat consoling… if you stop reading this chapter right now.
Other “simple” viruses in this category include both Ebola and that superlethal Spanish flu from 1918.
That’s already happened, actually. Researchers have already synthesized Ebola. They used something called “reverse genetics” (which is presumably just like regular genetics but practiced only on Opposite Day), and presto!
You’ve done it, scientists!
You’ve re-created one of the scariest viruses on Earth! Now just hand it over to your boss—the unsettling fellow in the iron face mask and velvet cloak who commutes to the job site every day in a floating castle—and I’m sure he’ll be quite responsible with it. He might even promote you!
To an early death.
Shit, are you paying attention, Hollywood? That’s how you write a one-liner.
But that’s not to say this technique needs a full lab of professionals to replicate. No, all that’s needed is a rudimentary set of chemistry tools and the genetic sequence of what you want to replicate. All of that information—the technique, the tools needed, and even the genetic sequence of the Spanish flu—is, like gaping anuses and furries, just waiting to ruin your life forever… on the internet.
• 2 Girls 1 Cup
• A Database of Plagues
• This book
So far, we’ve been talking about accidental by-products or potentially utilized biological weapons, but there’s a far more likely way that the biotech apocalypse could happen: completely on accident.
Australian researchers, in an attempt to control the exploding number of wild mice, engineered a variant of mousepox intended to sterilize the population. But they screwed up and inserted one little extra gene, and what was supposed to be just contagious birth control instead became an amazingly lethal plague, with fatality rates approaching 100 percent. The virus spread like wildfire, and the researchers just barely managed to hold it in check. The truly frightening part, however, was the virus’ remarkable similarities to human smallpox. It just had a much higher mortality rate and a more aggressive rate of infection.
Now, we can play a tiny funeral dirge for Fieval and all his pals later, because the main factor here is the similarity between mousepox and the human equivalent. As it stands, we have nearly no immune response to the smallpox virus—it was virtually wiped from the planet, so there is no cause to vaccinate against it. However, if it were to return right now, researchers estimate the fatality rate at nearly 20 percent. That’s one in five people. And that’s regular smallpox. If this engineered mousepox were to cross over, not only could the fatality rate be around 100 percent, but the virus has proven even more contagious than its traditional counterpart. And worst: We have no vaccine for it. Smallpox could be prevented, but because of that one little altered gene, there would be no established defense against the modified mousepox. The researchers assure us that there is no immediate danger from this super mousepox; though the strains are quite similar, it is still impossible for the virus to bridge that gap between human and mice genetic dissimilarities and endanger humanity.
So we were lucky; the little bit of dissimilarity between our DNA made this virus a nonissue for humans… but this was all well before the Canadians started screwing around with mouse spunk, of course.
We’ve established the impetus to willingly expose ourselves to genetically altered materials; the fact that more and more experimentation is resulting in accidentally created, never-before-seen diseases; and, finally, the existence of a new bridge between humanity and these lab animals that the diseases can use to cross over. I think it’s officially time to start getting scared… and all of that isn’t even factoring in the horrifying and now very real potential for accidental pregnancy via supermouse rape. Hey, it could happen. You might think it pretty unlikely that you’ll be catching a tiny rodent facial anytime in the near future, but remember, thanks to that endurance experiment, some rodents are now very aggressive, hypersexual, freakishly strong, and untiring. Even if they’re not actively out trying to bone humanity, somebody has just significantly upped the odds of you getting caught in a never-ending supermouse orgy.
Right in the path of their deadly plague orgasms.