Designer pathogensPox on everybody’s house
It was not so long ago that a NIH scientist stumbled across smallpox vials in a cold-storage room — and it was not during a time of increased concern for synthetic biology. Pandora Report notes that from CRISPR babies to garage DIY biohacking kits, it seems like the last few years have been inundated with synbio conversations.
It was not so long ago that a NIH scientist stumbled across smallpox vials in a cold-storage room — and it was not during a time of increased concern for synthetic biology. Pandora Report notes that from CRISPR babies to garage DIY biohacking kits, it seems like the last few years have been inundated with synbio conversations.
Throw in the horsepox synthesis experiment in 2017 and you have got quite a heated conversation about the potential for synthetic biology to bring back some pretty horrible diseases we’d like to forget.
David Kushner writes in Wired that:
The trio published their findings in the scientific journal PLOS One in January 2018—and the blowback was swift and brutal. Critics accused Evans and Noyce of opening a Pandora’s box that could send humanity back to the dark ages of disease. The Washington Post’s editorial board wrote that ‘the study could give terrorists or rogue states a recipe to reconstitute the smallpox virus.’ Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, denounced the research on National Public Radio: ‘Anything that lowers the bar for creating smallpox in the world is a dangerous path.’ Gregory Koblentz, director of the biodefense program at George Mason University, warned in the journal Health Security that the synthesis of horsepox ‘takes the world one step closer to the reemergence of smallpox as a threat to global health security’.
Kushner says that the fallout of this research brought forth more concerns regarding smallpox defense, if we should destroy the samples, and the safety of synthetic biology. Sure, DARPA has launched Safe Genes and Ginkgo Bioworks is helping to improve screening tools, but “even these automated checks can’t prevent determined buyers from obtaining samples through less scrupulous vendors on the black market. As with computer viruses, new strains appear from the ether before society is aware they exist. The same is true for trying to keep ahead of potentially lethal synthetic DNA.”
— Read more in David Kushner, “Synthetic Biology Could Bring a Pox on Us All, Wired (29 March 2019)
