Worrying about wrong threat weakens U.S. bioterrorism preparedness

natural selection. “It’s not like a stereo system where you can just turn the volume up or down,” says evolutionary biologist Paul Ewald of the University of Louisville. He points out that ratcheting up innate immunity might turn the body against itself, producing such autoimmune diseases as lupus or multiple sclerosis. Besides, if innate immunity could really wipe out all infections, why hasn’t it already done so? Why did we evolve the second system of acquired, or specific, immunity at all if innate immunity could completely protect us from disease?

There is much ongoing research into innate-immunity enhancement but little data to support it. The scientist most prominently associated with the idea is Ken Alibek, a bioweapons designer who defected from the Soviet Union in 1992 and for years peddled an immunity-boosting nostrum on his commercial website. Harry Whelan, professor of neurology and pediatrics at the Medical College of Wisconsin and lead author of a 2005 article backing this approach in the Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology, cites Alibek as one of the “experts” consulted for the article. Orent writes that Whelan and his coauthors reviewed a host of research projects testing how various chemical compounds boosted innate immune activity, but they reported no data on how well these compounds worked in preventing disease and death.

Charles Hackett of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases offers some evidence that limited stimulation of innate immunity can provide some advantages. He points to various vaccine adjuvants, or boosters, that prompt innate immunity to turn on acquired immunity more quickly. Hackett acknowledges, though, that this is not the same thing as enhancing general innate immunity. “Innate immunity is an area that’s evolved over millenniums and is very clever,” he told Orent. “If you want to [enhance] it, you really have to understand it better than we understand it now.”

“Artificial germs remain an illusion,” Orent concludes. “Venter, like scientists before him, has not made a new germ. He used a genome map to re-create an old one. Similarly, despite all the interest in enhanced innate immunity, no one has been able to show that the approach works. The wreckage of Project Bioshield shows that the one-bug-one-drug approach is a failure. But by banking on the possibility of boosting innate immunity, the U.S. biodefense leviathan could well be, once again, staggering in the wrong direction.”

Wendy Orent is the author of Plague: The Mysterious Past and Terrifying Future of the World’s Most Dangerous Disease