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I think you're missing the point. Assuming you have a communicable bioweapon which is somehow able to target based on genetics, and assuming the rest of the wo
by eesmith 3y ago
I think you're missing the point.
Assuming you have a communicable bioweapon which is somehow able to target based on genetics, and assuming the rest of the world isn't able to defend against it, that still leaves the very tricky question of finding a genetic basis which characterizes any of those three categories in a way which is sufficiently effective.
Do you really believe there is way to identify "Christians" based on genetics?
"Incapacitating a sufficient number of a group" is NOT enough. You also need specificity.
What genetic markers indicate "American"? Sure, if you target something simple like "has a Y chromosome" you might take out about 50% of the US population, which is likely a sufficient number, but you'll do equal damage to your own population.
How would a bioweapon meaningfully target "Hispanics"? The term is definitely not based in genetics. If some villagers from a German town emigrated to Argentina and others from the same village emigrated to Canada, then according to the US the descendants of the first group are just as Hispanic as Black Spanish-speaking Cubans, while the descendants of the second group are "white".
But, okay, you've figured something out. Now how do you prevent your bioweapon from mutating the specificity away? You've added a lot of machinery to the organism which must be preserved perfectly even though that machinery isn't required in order to reproduce.
The more failsafes you put in, the bulkier the organism and/or the fewer genetic markers you can target.
Clearly you should be promoting DEI as a way to increase group robustness against future bioweapons. ;)
- Filligree 3y agoI don’t think you really need to solve those problems to cause trouble. You just need to think you have.
- eesmith 3y agoJust because you think you can create a bioweapon doesn't mean it causes trouble. And as I wrote, this sort of bioweapon won't be possible until we've effectively cured cancer, and likely also developed methods which can easily identify and stop it.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoA secret skunkworks approach could facilitate genetic inventions that don't get passed into the general knowledge base. It would be difficult making discoveries that all of the other biologists working in society miss, but is remotely plausible.
- eesmith 3y agoYeah, no. That does not seem plausible at all. Again, the technology would be able to cure cancer. Do you really think all those employees - who know that their friends and family could be cured of their cancer - would be willing to keep mum of the cure?
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoIt depends on how isolated they are kept from each other's work. It's not as if we don't already have decent cancer therapeutic technologies in the pipeline.
- eesmith 3y agoWe do not have broad-spectrum anti-cancer therapeutics, much less ones which are based on self-reproducing communicable organisms that target the cancer's DNA. If I'm wrong, what are you thinking of?
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoTherapeutics which prompt the endogenous immune system to recognize the cancer cells as something to attack. I believe this is the basis of mRNA cancer therapeutics? I believe they are targeted for individual cancers and possibly individual people, but given the speed in which they can be made this doesn't seem like a major future hurdle. Throw one into a gene therapy vector and it could conceivably reproduce itself (though that seems like a bad idea for a cancer therapeutic anyway).
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoI'm really curious what, and how, these commenters think a genetic bioweapon would target. Cell-surface receptors seem the easy target, but as we've seen with COVID, and the more general swine and avian flus passing to humans, specificity changes. And cell surface receptors aren't that specific for any ethnicity, so expect a nuclear response from the survivors (both from your target and from the others states who had affected citizens). If targeting proteins or regulatory regions of DNA, how? Are you going to try to CRISPR it? This may be effective in quiescent or senescent cells. But I think even quiescent cells have some DNA repair pathways. At best such targeting may speed up the aging process and cause some cancers. Are you going to integrate a toxic gene at a specific chromosomal locus? Maybe that would work. You'd need a very efficient gene therapy approach to do it though.
- jacquesm 3y agoYou are thinking in entirely the wrong direction.
- anonymouskimmer 3y agoI mentioned three different directions, it's not surprising I've missed one.
- jacquesm 3y agoThat's ok, I get it: I have the exact same thing when I'm too focused on a problem. And then a week later or so it's like a light bulb going off and I feel very silly for having missed the obvious. But let's not give people ideas here, this is pretty dangerous territory and I don't think HN should turn into a cookbook for miscreants.