How can a terrorist group link a biological plague to a specific genetic signature?
A domestic terrorist organization has come to light due to recent terror attacks that they claim responsibility for. This group has developed a biological weaponized plague that attacks the nervous system of an individual. If released, it has the potential to kill millions. The terrorists blame a particular ethnic group for what it sees as the nation's social and economic woes, and seeks to commit genocide by spreading this plague in the name of national defense. The intent is to only make this minority group susceptible to this weapon, killing them off while leaving everyone else they see as worthy unscathed.
All populations are genetically diverse, and racial categories are based on subjective evaluations of traits. All humans share the same genes, which exist in a variety of alternative forms called alleles. The relationship between ancestry, genetic makeup, and phenotype are so complex. This makes it difficult for this group to limit the effects of this virus to one group in particular without killing anyone outside of it.
This subgroup ethnicity is made up of around 16 million people out of a country of 1.5 billion. These people are free citizens who can come and go as they please. The terrorists are hoping to kill as many as possible in their country, but also hopes that infected people who travel abroad will infect others of their race as a secondary objective. How can these terrorists develop this weapon in a way that it would exclusively target one group of people only? Would this be possible with advanced tech?
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/140184. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
1 answer
Genetic genealogy testing can already identify people as belonging to various minority ethnic groups.
Some are better than others. For example, Ashkenazi (generally, Jews with Eastern and Central European ancestry within the last couple hundred years) DNA markers are fairly robust and show up as expected in pretty much everyone who tests who is at least 25% Ashkenazi (Sephardic and non-European Jewish populations are harder, in part because Sephardic Jews moved around even more than other Jews but mostly because of the lack of reference populations, though that shouldn't be an issue in 10-20 years, or maybe 5).
This level of accuracy requires:
- A large (and accurate) reference population (these are people who have 4 grandparents all belonging to the group, and preferably documented for older generations as well).
- Some level of endogamy (marriage takes place within the group, no matter how widespread it is) is needed or you get genetic drift and blurred boundaries.
- A specific and unchanging (for most) definition of the group (in other words, don't use a country because country's boundaries change dramatically).
- A group with an ethnic identity (it doesn't matter if outsiders call it an ethnic group or not). So you can't identify "Muslims" or "immigrants" or "farmers."
- Some intermarriage (and conversion) is okay because children will be identified as half or quarter, etc, but it won't work in a population with large amounts of intermarriage over time.
It makes no difference if the group's members are commonly mistaken for members of other groups (particularly large overarching groups).
Basically, it doesn't matter what your politics about race or ethnicity are. What matters is that you have a group that almost entirely only had children with other members of the group for a few hundred years.
Then you use tech that does not exist yet to track either these markers in people in real time (so the weapon determines "yea" or "nay" on a particular target) or to attach itself to everyone it meets then do the testing in situ.
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