“Drezner, Are You Listening?”
Quoth Adam Weinstein at Current Intelligence, as he explores the science behind “zombie ants.” Yes, you read that right.
You see, for 48 million years, a parasitic fungus called Ophiocordyceps has existed on forest beds, waiting to be picked up by tree-dwelling ants that happen by in their travels…
Weinstein’s article contains various links on how this works and how truly scary it is. But most interestingly ominous are his speculations about the potential weaponization of such bio-agents by nefarious, nefarious humans:
I’m no chemical or biological weapons expert, so if you are, tell me if I’m crazy, please: Can you imagine a future powder solution, not unlike weaponizable anthrax or botulinum agent, that spreads a fungus capable of commandeering a human brain? Could particular strains be developed to direct hosts into this behavior or that: jumping out of windows, refusing to eat, choking strangers out? Could it even be used to turn reasonable, free-thinking individuals into PBIEDs — that is, suicide bombers?… If the fungal mind-control can be a reality, then we’d better go beyond a zombie theory of international relations: We’ll need a zombie biological defence strategy.
Theories of International Politics and Zombies: Revised National Security Edition, edited by Daniel Drezner and Adam Weinstein? Forthcoming Princeton University Press 2012?
Isn’t this the plot of the truly awful M. Night Shyamalan movie The Happening? Maybe Drezner could watch that movie as part of the research?
I think there was a lot of research being done in the sixties under the code name Project Shrooms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_mushroom
Lots of naked peer review as I understand.
Yes, he is crazy. Anyone who sees him should call the folks with the big butterfly nets and straightjackets.
Maybe it has already happened. It sure would explain a lot.
/douglas adams’d
There’s some evidence that there already are infectious agents that can have an effect on cognition. And everybody knows about the Phineas Gage case. Brains are mechanisms and they can be damaged and they can be tweaked. It’s weird, to me, to cast it in terms of our current terrorism mania. The real question is, what will stop governments from deploying loyalty-enforcing brain agents amongst their own people? What will stop corporations from demanding ever-increasing amounts of control over your wetware as a condition of employment?
*Pendantry Alert*
Gage is a bad example. More and more evidence is coming out that the claims of his dramatic personality change were grossly exaggerated or just plain made up by people who wanted in on the excitement. Plus, the guy must have been in a hell of a lot of pain.
See also; Stross, Charlie. Watts, Peter. Egan, Greg.
I read about this fungus years ago. Assume I heard about it years after it was discovered. So assume any experiments in that direction have been considered.
No.
The reason mind control of humans will remain in the realms of fiction is the human brain is just too complex. (YMMV, may not apply to fReichtards and Palindrones.) You can’t take what an organism does to an ant’s motor neurons and scale up to monkey brains. Not saying you couldn’t come up with something that would drive a guy crazy, but there’s plenty of stuff that will do that already. But crazy and capable of carrying out orders? Nahgannahappen.
Complex minds are much more accessible via social and other abstract engines than parasitic micros like the fungi or syphillis or rabies.
SF reference: Vernor Vinge, “Rainbows End”.
You can’t take what an organism does to an ant’s motor neurons and scale up to monkey brains.
You can in a sense. Or at least dog brains: rabies makes its hosts behave in the way most likely to spread the virus – running around salivating and biting other dogs.
Pretty crude effects might not be difficult to achieve. You’re basically talking about inducing mental illness.
For example, downregulating the production of serotonin (or upregulating its reuptake) could cause clinical depression. (Prozac works by inhibiting serotonin reuptake). There are several medical conditions and psychoactive drugs that cause psychosis, so it’s not impossible that you could create an engineered pathogen that did the same thing.
Theoretically, anything you can do with a drug you could do with an engineered pathogen (that produces an analogue to the drug; assuming you can find a biochemical pathway to produce that and splice it into your carrier genome). But drug effects are all pretty crude. Maybe you could make people very suggestible? But you couldn’t then ensure that they were all suggested to do the right thing.
Right, I could go out, poke around in the woods and come back with something that would temporarily radically alter your behavior. But there’s nothing that will create different directed behavior, no matter your method of delivery. (What’s to stop the body from attacking the pathogen?)
But even assuming I cook something up that makes you kill on my command (and kill the person I want you to kill, not me or some random guy), there’s no guarantee it will work on my next zombie. People brains are just too complex.
Right, I could go out, poke around in the woods and come back with something that would temporarily radically alter your behavior
A big stick would probably do it…
Too late, you’re probably already infected:
with Toxoplasmosis. It’s how CATS have taken over humanity.
No BIG problem for a human, but fatal for a mouse, and that’s how the protozoa uses a mouse to get into a cat, where it can reproduce.
..might be a dupe…darn commenting system..
See also:
http://www.edge.org/documents/archive/edge307.html and the interview with Prof. Sapolsky. Towards the end you will get a suggestive story about human risk takers and infection with Toxo.
No shout-out to Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder?
The behavior you’re trying to induce is too complex and specific to be compressed into the crude channel of a parasite’s effect on its host.
What you need is to commandeer the host’s brain to figure out what actions support your purposes and then take them, but that level of subtlety can only be achieved by a memeplex like fanaticism, not the relatively blunt instruments available to drugs or microorganisms.
…At least, I think so. Maybe a very broad predisposition like Altemeyer’s RWA, or a tendency to conspiracy theorize, actually could be engineered through a crude channel. In which case They are probably already among us and Bachmann is Patient Zero.
Our government already urinated away a whole bunch of money and lives with MKULTRA and the Ewan Cameron “Psychic Driving” experiments to come to the apparent conclusion that it’s fairly easy to wreck people but not to program them to carry out complex tasks. Having said that, they also found out that it’s not impossible, just difficult and time-consuming. No fungal short-cuts.
X-Files Did it.
You can make people drunk, or high, or psychotic, but you can’t make them targeted killers. Even depression takes a long, long time to produce suicide.
That said, the biology of parasitic behavior modification is fascinating. There’s a good discussion in Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene. Perhaps, somewhere out there in the universe, brain parasites live glamorous lives through their hosts.
I thought we had this already, but called it “religion” instead of “brain fungus”.
It would explain why so many people whose incomes are less than 7 figures vote Republican.
Cordyceps is awesome. Attenborough featured it on one of his relatively recent documentaries – watch here. Carl Zimmer’s great book, Parasite Rex, has a long section on host control by parasites, including Cordyceps, Toxoplasma Gondii, and the really freaky parasitic barnacle Sacculina, which makes male crabs act like pregnant females to facilitate the dispersion of the next generation of Sacculina.
Way ahead of you – unfortunately, neither of my scenarios panned out – would have made the Beijing Olympics even more spectacular.