Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by greggman | Hacker News Reader

First off let me say I'm 100% for this tech because IMO there's no way to stop progress. You can't control 7+ billion people.

That said, the first thing that came to my mind when they mentioned putting the CRISPR engine in new cells so they make more of the same and spread kind of like a virus... They mentioned they tried it and it worked first time. So, unless I'm missing something, it's only a short matter of time before some disgruntled person could try to destroy the world's food supply or cause many other large scale issues.

Maybe that's harder than it sounds but it just seemed like a crazy amount of power for any one person with access to the tech to have. And, unlike nukes there's really no way to prevent this power from getting stronger, easier, and more accessible. Nukes you need the fuel. This you mostly just need the knowledge.

Sorry I'm not suggesting any course of action. It's just I believe we won't make it past The Great Filter because as tech progresses it gets easier and easier for a single person to destroy the world. Embedding the CRISPR engine so it spreads seemed like a step in that direction.

We have the technology to prevent it. Its not an "unstoppable genetic super-weapon". https://phys.org/news/2016-12-anti-crispr-gene.html

This is also true for many domains. Space travel for instance... in just a few hundred years, it'll be relatively easy for a disgruntled individual to trigger a nontrivial sized piece of space debris to hurl towards a major city. Once we begin harnessing asteroids to mine them in earth orbit, Someone could eventually alter its orbit to destroy a city or worse..

The clock is ticking, and we might not make it

> to trigger a nontrivial sized piece of space debris to hurl towards a major city

How?

Also, maybe with personal space travel, comes an extension of the usual 'air'-space.

That said, 9/11 shows how both easy, and how hard something like this might be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_drive

Just a little time reading about this is sobering. There is certainly the potential for profound nefarious acts. However, also consider that you could have 'gene drive warfare' in which you release constructs that attempt to override the malicious ones.

Ultimately, while doing something like this is within reach of most moderately talented graduate students in molecular biology (and perhaps some remarkable amateurs), it does require a fair bit of infrastructure. Doing this as a 'black ops' project would require you to get together a good deal of laboratory equipment - especially things like Sanger sequencers - and oligonucleotides that are reasonably tractable. At least for now.

One possible solution to the crazy person scenario is the use of counter gene drives. I think they discussed this in this podcast or elsewhere, but the idea is that if a species has a particular gene drive inserted, then you can create a new member of that species with a second gene drive that deletes the first and/or writes over the original CRISPR'd gene sequence.

> there's no way to stop progress. You can't control 7+ billion people.

How does this fare for bio-weapons?

It's more correct to say you can't control 7+ billion people now. A few WMD attacks later, maybe the incentive to find ways to do so will come about.

>"it's only a short matter of time before some disgruntled person could try to destroy the world's food supply or cause many other large scale issues."

You've been fooled by hype. There is a big marketing effort behind CRISPR for some reason, watch out.

Are you suggesting this is not possible or that it is simply unlikely. From my point of view it seems like an inevitability.

If it happens it will have nothing to do with CRISPR.

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