Genetically engineered pathogens

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Canastenard
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Genetically engineered pathogens

Post by Canastenard »

A common criticism of improved genetic engineering technologies is that a side effect of making them easier would be to give the ability for terrorists to make engineered pathogens relatively easily, which could possibly make up for the benefits of the technology such as improved medecine and vegan ways to produce animal proteins.

Sometimes it is presented as a threat to humanity, but I'm pretty sure the larger the scope would be the harder it would to engineer such a pathogen. It wouldn't be hugely difficult to insert a gene coding for a toxin in a widely spreading bacterium, but carefully crafting a pathogen so it could be unstoppable and wipe out most humans on Earth with a low chance of failure sounds like the kind of project that would need the coordinated work of a lot of highly skilled biologists in a dedicated laboratory. It probably wouldn't be impossible to make such a lab and hiring those biologists, but wiping out humanity with it would be another thing since it would probably still need to deployed strategically, which would basically imply a big conspiracy of terrosists traveling the world to deploy this pathogen in different countries to make quarantines impossible. If not a global one, then it probably has the potential to cause a local health disaster at the scale of a big country. Maybe an exception could be a virus that's undetectable and highly infectious but doesn't harm its host for a few years until it suddenly becomes lethal, which could have the potential to turn everyone into time bombs, but such a virus would probably need a lot of testing to be made, and assuming it is done on unsuspecting civilians as something that's both terrorism and testing then it would give other scientists ways to prepare for it.

While a carefully engineered virus could be a large scale disaster, I think the most notable negative consequences will come from less high-tech labs, with terrosists creating new pathogens less elaborate than the kind I described above but still threatening, for example by simply adding a gene coding for a toxin in an otherwise harmless rapidly spreading bacterium. It would increase the amount of pathogens to be worried about, but individually they will probably not be much more threatening than natural epidemics such as ebola, making the danger coming not from particularly powerful pathogens but a higher amount of them.

Now I think banning new gene editing technologies is useless, just because it's banned doesn't mean ill-intended governments or terrorist organizations will abstain from using them, in other words it exists so that can of worms has already been opened, so how to regulate the technology to make sure ill-intended people don't get access to it? Surely its market would be tightly regulated so it isn't sold to anyone and only research and breeding labs get access to it, but there's no guarantee that ill-intended people wouldn't get access to it; I'm pretty sure some nutty radicalized islamists would remain silent about their intentions then abuse the technology once they've gotten past the regulations hurdles.

So will new gene editing technologies (most notably Cas9) do more good than harm? Its benefits include a bigger amount of great applications from gene editing as well as a more fair market (previous gene editing technologies were highly costly and hardly accessible outside of really big companies) but the increased ease of it also comes with higher accessibility for ill-intended people and it opens the practical possibility of making new pathogens more deadly than anything we've come accross in human history.
Last edited by Canastenard on Fri Apr 20, 2018 2:22 am, edited 1 time in total.
Appeal to nature: the strange belief that what is perceived as "natural" is necessarily safer, more effective or morally superior compared to what isn't.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Genetically engineered pathogens

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Most people educated and intelligent enough to make use of something like this wouldn't be inclined to terrorism.
Terrorism is usually pretty low tech.

The bigger concern might be the fringe of anti-natalists who want to destroy all life on Earth; they're crazy, but not all of them are uneducated.

As you said, I don't think it would be practical to deploy something like that... hopefully they'd realize that and thus not try it, since anything short of perfect success would be harmful even in most of their views.
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Re: Genetically engineered pathogens

Post by Red »

Hello @ThomasStokes, you should make an intro post.
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brimstoneSalad
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Re: Genetically engineered pathogens

Post by brimstoneSalad »

Red wrote: Thu May 10, 2018 8:33 am Hello @ThomasStokes, you should make an intro post.
It was a spammer, there was a "write my essay" link in the post.

I re-enabled the extension that blocks links. Figured out why it wasn't working.
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