Biohazard

As with all peptides, it was hard to obtain enough for useful experimentation. Genetic engineering solved this problem: scientists could synthesize the genes that code for the production of myelin toxin, reproduce them artificially in the lab, and insert them into bacterial cells. If a bacterial strain compatible with myelin toxin could be found, the transplanted genes would multiply along with the bacteria. The project was full of possibility, but the stigma placed on genetic research since the days of Stalin and Lysenko made government support unlikely.

The biologists enlisted the help of Yury Ovchinnikov, who was just then beginning the political crusade that would lead to the founding of Biopreparat. Ovchinnikov immediately recognized the weapons potential of this research. With his colleagues, he drafted a paper calling for the revival of toxin weapons development and sent it to the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party.

The paper noted that recent genetic engineering techniques developed in the West made it possible to produce cloned genes as efficiently as bacterial cultures. The apparatchiks couldn't have understood the science, but they were impressed by the caliber of the men who had drafted the proposal. Rem Petrov, a leading immunologist and regulatory peptide expert, now vice president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was one of its principal authors. The scientists' final argument was irresistible: weapons based on compounds produced in the human body were not prohibited by the Biological Weapons Convention. Funding for Bonfire was quickly approved. Myelin toxin genes created at the Soviet Academy were sent to Obolensk, where research began.

If all went as planned, the Soviet Union would soon have a new weapon, and Russian scientists would at last be able to participate openly in the biotechnological revolution that was sweeping the world.

Genetic engineering arose partly in response to one of the most disheartening developments in modern medicine. Less than twenty years after the discovery of powerful antibiotics, an alarming miniber of bacteria had discovered a way to outwit them. In an example of nature's own talent for genetic engineering, countless disease-causing microorganisms had spontaneously formed a resistance to the wonder drugs of the 1930s and 1940s.

Antibiotics do not always kill bacteria; sometimes they simply inhibit their growth, allowing the body's disease protection system to overwhelm them. One of the principal differences between our cells and those of bacteria is the presence of a rigid cell wall that protects the bacteria from hostile environments. Most antibacterial agents attack or infiltrate this membrane. Bacitracin, for instance, inhibits the movement of proteins from the cytoplasm to the cell wall, blocking its regeneration. Penicillin and cephalosporins prevent the cell wall from forming, killing the bacteria by leaving it exposed to osmosis. Aminoglycosides, including streptomycin and gentimicin, kill bacteria by binding to their ribosomes and blocking protein synthesis. Erythromycin and tetracyline act in much the same way.

Some antibiotics block or interfere with the bacteria's formation of compounds necessary for growth and reproduction. In the 1930s scientists found that when certain chemical dyes containing sulphur were added to bacterial cultures, the bacteria reproduced at dramatically slower rates. Sulfonamides or sulfa drugs virtually eliminated the threat of pneumonia in Britain after 1935. Subsequent researchers discovered how to inhibit bacterial growth with fungi or molds that could be bred in the laboratory. One of the most effective of these molds was penicillium.

By the 1940s dozens of antibacterial agents were available to physicians for the treatment of diseases ranging from diphtheria to plague, typhus, and tuberculosis. Yet within a few years, some of them began to lose their efficacy as resistant strains of old diseases emerged.

In 1946 the American biologists Joshua Lederberg and Edward Tatum identified one cause of antibiotic resistance and, in the process, created the foundation for the modern science of genetic engineering. Microbes appeared to "learn" resistance to new threats by borrowing genes from one another. When the scientists mixed strains of two microorganisms together, a spontaneous transfer of genetic material occurred. Tatum, Lederberg, and George Beadle won the Nobel Prize in 1958 for demonstrating that biochemical reactions in microbes were controlled by genes.