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DARPA are doing a heck of a lot with CRISPR, and as you can imagine for both defense and offence angles. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-militar

by socmag 10y ago

DARPA are doing a heck of a lot with CRISPR, and as you can imagine for both defense and offence angles. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-military-preps-for-gene-drives-run-amok/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-military-prep... This whole video is great btw, where Arati Prabhakar spins through CRISPR, Gene Drive and a heck of a lot more in a presentation at UW. https://youtu.be/ZHipS0-1ykE?t=2812 https://youtu.be/ZHipS0-1ykE?t=2812

dv_dt 10y ago
We can barely evaluate the effects of genetic changes within a single living organism - probably pretty well with focused pinpointed areas, but with the overall single living organism we can probably evaluate very little. It seems sheer folly to claim that any such system would be 'safe' exposed to a wide range of external parameters of virus, bacteria, immune systems, regular replication errors, irradiance or chemical mutagens, etc.. that we can barely enumerate thoroughly, let alone assess the interactions.
- socmag 10y ago
  Quite. This road seems a much bigger existential risk than any AI holocaust scenario I can imagine. It's very scary stuff and everyone in the field seems to be brimming with glee at how easy it all is. Just consider that the very mundane HeLa cell line alone managed to jump continents and invade the most stringent safety precautions at dozens of labs. At least they are pretty benign. Now imagine a nice mosquito delivery vehicle with payload strapped on that nobody has a real clue what it is capable of. I shudder to think. A lot of people talking about how to re-establish the baseline and that it's not a big deal and nobody should worry. I get that there are very many wonderful things that can come from this as well, but on the other hand the research is going very fast and this is one area we should be exercising extreme caution.

by socmag 10y ago

dv_dt 10y ago

We can barely evaluate the effects of genetic changes within a single living organism - probably pretty well with focused pinpointed areas, but with the overall single living organism we can probably evaluate very little. It seems sheer folly to claim that any such system would be 'safe' exposed to a wide range of external parameters of virus, bacteria, immune systems, regular replication errors, irradiance or chemical mutagens, etc.. that we can barely enumerate thoroughly, let alone assess the interactions.

socmag 10y ago
Quite. This road seems a much bigger existential risk than any AI holocaust scenario I can imagine. It's very scary stuff and everyone in the field seems to be brimming with glee at how easy it all is. Just consider that the very mundane HeLa cell line alone managed to jump continents and invade the most stringent safety precautions at dozens of labs. At least they are pretty benign. Now imagine a nice mosquito delivery vehicle with payload strapped on that nobody has a real clue what it is capable of. I shudder to think. A lot of people talking about how to re-establish the baseline and that it's not a big deal and nobody should worry. I get that there are very many wonderful things that can come from this as well, but on the other hand the research is going very fast and this is one area we should be exercising extreme caution.