Putin's poo tin and other excrement espionage
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Five months into the war in Ukraine, Vladimir Putin is under even more scrutiny than ever before. It’s been known for a while that the Russian ruler is somewhat paranoid about his health, or more importantly, keeping it a private matter. Rumours of his deteriorating condition make headline news; one day he has cancer, the next it’s a brain tumour, Parkinson’s disease or early-stage dementia. His posture, his gait, his puffy face, his unexplained absences - everything is being analysed not only by the public but also by spies from some of the most powerful nations in the world.
So it shouldn’t come as much of a shock to hear that Putin is also fastidious about something else: his faeces. Reports came out earlier this month that he takes his own toilet with him on his travels, and his security detail are tasked with packing up his number twos and storing it in a special suitcase - a literal poo tin, if you will - so that it can be disposed of on Russian soil and not fall into the hands of an enemy state.
However, there is a precedent for his poo paranoia. In the 1940s, another Russian leader had a fascination with foreign faeces. It’s reported that Stalin’s secret police had a special department for sequestering stools, and went so far as to install tailor-made toilets for the visit of the Chinese leader Mao Zedong that delivered the dung to hidden containers where they could be shipped to a lab for analysis. Of course, genetic analysis was not nearly as advanced in the 1940s as it is today, so the information they could gather was somewhat questionable. According to one former Soviet agent, levels of tryptophan could determine whether a person was calm and approachable, whereas low levels of potassium might indicate a nervous disposition or insomnia.
Nowadays, we might poo-poo those claims, but excrement can be extremely revealing nonetheless. The most straightforward information it can provide, other than your fibre-intake, is what medications you may be taking, which could of course reveal any number of health issues. Stool samples are also routinely used to diagnose gastrointestinal illnesses, from infections to bowel cancer. But beyond that, Putin’s poos could easily be used to gather enough DNA to sequence his entire genome. But what could foreign spies actually do with the leader’s genome?
First, let’s look at the outlandish ideas. The plot of the latest James Bond film, No Time To Die, revolves around a personalised programmable bioweapon based on someone's DNA. That’s certainly beyond the bounds of our current abilities, and anyone who has worked in a genetics lab will know that reality of gene technology is a long way from what is presented in the film.
But this far-fetched scenario isn’t completely out of the bounds of possibility, at least one day. We live in a world where scientists are already starting to create personalised medicines, such as immune cells programmed to seek out and destroy cancer cells based on their genetic makeup. A personalised bioweapon is certainly feasible, but it would be extremely expensive not to mention difficult to make, and there’s no guarantee that it would actually work.
Beyond the realm of what’s currently science fiction, there are other things to worry about if someone gets their hands on your DNA, such as uncovering information about your health. It's important to remember that our genes are not our destiny: there are fairly few situations where carrying a particular genetic alteration is a 100% guarantee that you will develop a particular disease. In most cases in most cases the genetic variations in our own personal genome give a greater or lesser influence on our risk of a wide range of health conditions and so having access to someone’s DNA would not give you a definitive readout of their health. But it would still tell you information about their risks, sensitivities to certain drugs, and other information that they are entitled to keep private.
The more concerning application is the ability to track down family connections through DNA, whether close or distant. For many people who have got into this kind of genetic genealogy through direct-to-consumer genetic testing services such as 23andMe, the ability to identify far flung relatives has been a gift. But the same kind of technique has been used by detectives to track down the relatives of criminals, most famously in the recent Golden State Killer case where police found a murderer by identifying one of their relatives through a public DNA database.
DNA analysis can also throw up surprises that tear families apart - for example when the man you have called dad all your life turns out not to be your biological father, or revealing secret children conceived outside of seemingly faithful partnerships. Murderous relatives and infidelities are the kind of information that could be very useful to an unscrupulous state looking to blackmail powerful politicians. And to get a little more sci-fi again, it is possible to make copies of someone’s DNA and deposit it at a crime scene, or anywhere else, to make it look like they were there – another potentially powerful technique for manipulating the truth.
Of course, it doesn’t take stolen stools to gather someone’s DNA. There’s a rapidly growing interest in researching environmental DNA, that’s DNA that you collect after it’s been shed into the environment rather than collecting it from the individual themselves. This could be a snotty tissue, a glass you drank from or a hair that you left behind. Perhaps more worryingly for world leaders, there have even been successful studies looking at collecting DNA from the air you breathe out.
There’s an unconfirmed report that the presidents of the United States have people sweeping up after them, making sure dirty tissues, glasses they’ve drunk from, and even surfaces they’ve touched don’t leave any DNA behind. French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz apparently refused to take a PCR test for Covid in order to meet Putin before his invasion of Ukraine, because they didn’t trust the Russians with their genomic information, leading to the infamous pictures Vladimir Putin socially distancing himself with a series of increasingly long tables. And according to secret documents released by WikiLeaks, the then-Secretary-of-State Hilary Clinton requested American spies to collect the DNA of foreign leaders key members of the United Nations.
But before you start to get paranoid that someone might be after your genes for nefarious purposes, this kind of ‘DNA theft’ is a crime in the UK and some other places including certain U.S. states and Australia (with the exception of its use in law enforcement). And these rules would certainly also apply to the PCR testing services here in the UK where we have very strict controls on the collection and use of genetic and other data related to our health. So unless you’re planning on becoming the leader of one of the biggest superpowers in the world, you can feel safe to poo without protection.
