ARGUMENT: Designer pathogensThe Genetic Engineering Genie Is Out of the Bottle

Published 15 September 2020

Usually good for a conspiracy theory or two, President Donald Trump has suggested that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Scientists have now conclusively proved that the virus was not designed in a lab, but Vivek Wadhwa writes that if “genetic engineering wasn’t behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. With COVID-19 bringing Western economies to their knees, all the world’s dictators now know that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles.”

Usually good for a conspiracy theory or two, President Donald Trump has suggested that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Its release could conceivably have involved an accident, but the pathogen isn’t the mishmash of known viruses that one would expect from something designed in a lab, as a research report in Nature Medicine conclusively lays out. “If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness,” the researchers said.

But if charging that COVID-19 was an engineered virus was a typical Trumpian assertion – typical in that it was not supported by the facts — the next pandemic, Vivek Wadhwa writes in Foreign Policy, could well be bioengineered in someone’s garage using cheap and widely available technology.

[I]f genetic engineering wasn’t behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. With COVID-19 bringing Western economies to their knees, all the world’s dictators now know that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles. What’s even more worrying is that it no longer takes a sprawling government lab to engineer a virus. Thanks to a technological revolution in genetic engineering, all the tools needed to create a virus have become so cheap, simple, and readily available that any rogue scientist or college-age biohacker can use them, creating an even greater threat. Experiments that could once only have been carried out behind the protected walls of government and corporate labs can now practically be done on the kitchen table with equipment found on Amazon. Genetic engineering—with all its potential for good and bad—has become democratized.

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If experimenting with DNA once required years of experience, sophisticated labs, and millions of dollars, CRISPR has changed all that… Very little of this research is limited by regulations, largely because regulators don’t yet understand what has suddenly become possible.

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There really is no turning back to correct the mistakes of the past. The genie cannot be put back in the bottle. We must treat the coronavirus pandemic as a full dress rehearsal of what is to come—unfortunately, that includes not only viruses that erupt from nature, but also those that will be deliberately engineered by humans. We must learn very quickly to build the same types of types of defenses that our computers have against their invaders. The good that might ultimately come from this is the cure for all disease. The bad is just about too terrible to think about.