Is the U.S. Army's "Insect Alliance" biomodeling program an agricultural project or a biological weapon?

Source: Global Times

Editor's note: The global food crisis triggered by the Russian-Ukrainian conflict has sounded the alarm for all countries in the world, and with the superposition of climate change, environmental pollution, and the reduction of available arable land, it is foreseeable that in the next few decades, food security will become a key issue that has aroused widespread global concern. Recently, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the United States has established a biological laboratory in Ukraine to study the characteristics of the spread of dangerous diseases, which is essentially developing biological weapons. Russia's investigation has also raised widespread concerns among many people: Is the U.S. military's attempt to use insects to spread genetically modified viruses to crops in the field a biological weapon of war? Will such weapons ultimately be used to artificially create a food crisis in order to serve U.S. military objectives? In an interview with the Global Times, several experts said that a project launched by the US military called the "Insect Alliance" is turning such concerns into reality. Foreign scientific and legal circles also pointed out that the relevant experiments of the US military are tantamount to opening a "Pandora's box".

What is the intention of the US military to participate in the "Insect Alliance"

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is a U.S. Department of Defense research organization specializing in the research and development of high-tech for military use. On the agency's official website, there is a biomodeling program called the "Insect Alliance". The program claims to be seeking scalable, easily deployable and scalable countermeasures to address natural and bioengineered factors that pose a potential threat to the U.S. food supply, and the program aims to protect U.S. crop systems. The plan states that biological threats, including pathogens, droughts, floods, frosts, and especially some national or non-state actors, can disrupt U.S. crop systems and rapidly jeopardize U.S. national security. The Insect Alliance program seeks to mitigate the impact of these threats by applying targeted therapies to mature crops.

The DARPA website introduces the page of the "Insect Alliance" project.

To that end, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency envisions that insects can be used to cope with crop losses in unexpected situations. For example, in the event of a drought, natural disease, or a surprise attack by biological weapons, major U.S. crops such as corn or wheat can carry genetically engineered viruses for rapid deployment, which can be genetically modified over a single growing season to quickly protect crops. According to previous reports, the Insect Alliance program has provided grants to four research institutions, including cornell University's Boyce Thompson Institute, Pennsylvania State University, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas at Austin.

However, the plan, which was packaged as a "disaster prevention and increase production", has been controversial since its publication. The well-known American academic journal "Science" has published a special article called "Agricultural Research, or a New Biological Weapon System?" The article questions the U.S. Department of Defense's plan. Scientists and legal scholars in the paper point out that the Insect Alliance program is tantamount to opening a "Pandora's box" because the program's attempts "may be widely recognized as an effort to develop a biologics developed against hostile countries and their delivery tools."

The Washington Post quoted one of the article's authors, Gey Reeves, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Germany, as bluntly opposed: "The defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's program could easily be weaponized rather than developed into a biological system conceived within a controllable range for agricultural development purposes." ”

The current plan envisages three species of insects that are good at spreading disease as "allies," namely aphids, leafhoppers and whitefly. Because in nature, these three types of insects often transmit viruses between plants. In gene editing, the program has also made some progress, including the use of relatively inexpensive and simple "clustered regularly spaced short palindrome repeats" technology, which allows researchers to develop customized viruses and achieve specific goals in infected plants. This engineered virus can "turn on or off" certain genes in plants. For example, genes that control how fast plants grow have the potential to play a role in severe droughts. In the program, genetically modified viruses carried by insects are called "horizontal environmental genetic modifiers" that are able to infect crops directly in the field and chromosome edit them.

Violation of the Biological Weapons Convention?

Since its publication, the "Insect Alliance" program has been branded as a "biological weapon" by Western scholars, triggering a big discussion in western academic circles and media about whether the plan violates the United Nations Biological Weapons Convention.

Agricultural Research, or a New Biological Weapon System? In an interview with The Washington Post, One of the authors of the article, Warnecky, a professor of international law at the University of Freiburg, said that the Insect Alliance is likely to violate the Biological Weapons Convention because the program runs the risk of being deemed incompatible with peaceful purposes, and that "in international law, the decisive factor in determining whether a study is a biological weapon is whether a biological research project fully serves peaceful purposes." The Biological Weapons Convention requires all Parties not to develop, produce, stockpile or acquire microbial agents, toxins and their weapons other than for peaceful purposes under any circumstances," according to Warnecki, the use of insects as vectors for the transmission of viruses is a typical biological weapon under the Convention. This is especially true considering that this technique can be easily used in biological warfare.

In addition, Warnergie believes that the use of insects as a key element of this program is particularly worrisome, as insects can be secretly deployed by malicious people at a smaller cost. "We believe the rationale provided by the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency for peaceful purposes is untenable. For example, why do they choose insects to perform genetic modifications to crops? There could be other ways to resist natural disasters. ”

Guy Reeves argues that the key to the success of the Insect Alliance program is that insects can transmit "horizontal environmental genetic modifiers" to plants on a large scale, which may lead to the spread of insects to the land where non-GMO crops are grown, and "almost the world can control its spread." Guy Reeves said.

"This technology is talking about massively releasing genetically modified viruses through insects," Grigory Cablenick, an ethicist at the Hastings Center Institute for Bioethics in New York who works on genetic modification, said in an interview with The Associated Press that the Insect Alliance's technology could ultimately be disruptive. Kebnick questioned how to keep the insects that carry the virus under control, "when you talk about very small and even microscopic organisms – you will find that once they are introduced into the farmland, it is almost impossible to be removed".

For the warnings raised by foreign media and foreign scholars, domestic experts also believe that from a scientific point of view, this is by no means alarmist. Zhang Jie, deputy director of the Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said in an interview with the Global Times reporter that the use of insects to carry harmful bacteria and viruses, thereby attacking crops and causing a food crisis, this possibility not only exists, but also has a lot of room for maneuvering. Zhang Jie said that in reality, rice and wheat are targeted pests, such as rice planthoppers and wheat aphids, which can carry different viruses and infect rice or wheat, resulting in huge losses. "There are so many examples of this, and it would be fatal if insects were transformed into a biological weapon, because until now, the viruses of crops have been difficult to control." Once the infection shows symptoms, it is almost impossible to save. Moreover, the virus will continue to mutate, and the prevention and control work will be even more difficult. Zhang Jie added.

The "Insect Alliance" project is still ongoing, and project leader Blake Bextin said in an interview with The Washington Post that the project has previously reached a milestone in proving that aphids can infect mature corn plants with a modified virus that contains a gene that produces fluorescence.

The technology is dangerous once weaponized

Zhou Huanbin, a researcher at the Institute of Plant Protection of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, told the Global Times that when genetic editing of crops, some principles must be followed, one of which is to minimize the risk of uncontrolled spread of gene-edited crops, and to ensure that endogenous genes are modified to a minimum extent, and the exogenous DNA related to the tool is completely eliminated.

In the face of all the doubts, Blake Bextin, head of the Insect Alliance, responded that the plan was purely for peaceful purposes, had been reviewed by the U.S. government agency responsible for agricultural security, and included multiple layers of safeguards in the research agreement, including comprehensive control of insects.

"I don't think the public has to worry, and the international community doesn't need to worry," Blake Bakerstin said. But he also acknowledged that the new technologies involved in the "Insect Alliance" may have "dual uses" because, theoretically, these new technologies can be used for both defensive and offensive purposes. But he said that this is true of almost all advanced technologies. "I think that whenever a new, revolutionary technology is developed, it is possible to have the dual effect of offense and defense. But that's not what we're doing. We focus on positive purposes and hope to ensure food security in the United States," argued Black Bextin.

He also said that there are multiple conservation measures that many scholars are worried about whether the technology will get out of control and have unexpected ecological effects. The program does not target the germ cells of plants and therefore does not lead to changes in the plant's genetic traits. The goal of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is to find a way to make temporary, beneficial improvements to plants during a single growing season.

But this claim has been met with the book Agricultural Research, or a New Biological Weapon System? The dissertation of a group of five authors, who point out on their website, said that the first scientific publication funded by the Insect Alliance in 2020 showed that mature plants mediated by the technique of "clustered regular interval short palindrome repeats" underwent heritable changes in their chromosomes, which contradicted the explanations of Blake Bextin and his team members.

Earlier this year, at PubMed, the National Center for Biotechnology Information's medical literature platform at the National Library of Medicine, an evaluation paper by three scholars from the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna, Austria, Kevin Pfeiffer, Johannes Fries, and Bernd Guise, bluntly pointed out that the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Project's "Insect Alliance" program has sparked scientific debate on related issues, the most prevalent of which is the dual-use of the program. In addition to peaceful applications, the technology provides a blueprint for potential biological weapons. The combination of virus-induced genetic modifications to crops in the field using genetic insect vectors is more risky than any genetically modified organism used to date.

Although the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is silent about the military uses of the Insect Alliance, in the eyes of military experts, this agricultural project led by the U.S. Defense Research Agency is undoubtedly a biological weapon. Military expert Song Zhongping said in an interview with the Global Times reporter that the "Insect Alliance" is a typical form of biological weapons, using insects to carry a certain virus to achieve the transformation of plant genes, the purpose is to reduce crop production in the target countries, artificially create a food crisis in these countries, and then lose independence in the field of food, and rely on US food exports, including genetically modified food, which is part of biological warfare.

Song Zhongping believes that the United States really needs to explain why insects are used as a carrier in this study, especially considering that when these insects are used as research objects, the corresponding viral genes can be quietly injected into the crops of the other country and change the genes of the crops. "It's not difficult to understand why the United States will set up biological laboratories around some rival countries, because only by setting up biological laboratories in these places can we ensure the localization of organisms, such as the localization of insects, for example, you can't take american insect varieties to Russia's neighboring countries and then release them to Russia, so it is easy to see the flaws." Therefore, this research in the United States is the 'Pandora's Box', and once opened, it will inevitably cause a domino effect and lead to a series of disasters," Song Zhongping said.