Weaponized Plants: Pentagon's Synthetic Organisms Could "Militarize the Environment"

http://themindunleashed.com/2017/06/weaponized-plants-pentagons-synthetic-organisms-militarize-environment.html

Weaponized Plants: Pentagon's Synthetic Organisms Could "Militarize the Environment"

• Jun 3, 2017
  

Although the idea of a fugitive being specifically targeted by intelligent synthetic biology is a particularly far-fetched scenario, fully engineered, synthetic ecosystems weaponized against people are something the Pentagon is actually working on.
DARPA is flirting with creating environments where every organism is engineered to perform biological tasks, from creating chemicals to being weaponized. The trees, moss, grass, insects, bacteria, and soil of an ecosystem could be engineered to release toxins on people, or put people to sleep until the state’s forces arrive, or perform any function they can engineer an organism to do.
Of course they present these ideas to the pubic promising prosperity, suggesting there will be industrial applications for organisms creating fuel, materials, and things that would be useful, but that’s never how it ends up when DARPA creates something.
They are mostly talking about using bacteria to create different chemicals. They discuss engineering insects to give genes to plants and alter them. A headline from Slate reads “DARPA’s Synthetic Biology Initiatives Could Militarize the Environment.” Reading from that article: