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Comment by salimmadjd | Hacker News Reader

CRISPR is a biological weapon!

Yes, this is something that is mostly not talked about. CRISPR is a virus engineered to attack and penetrate human cells and modify its DNA. It can be used for good. But at the same time the technology is becoming so easy accessible that it can be used to create a virus capable of whipping out the people. Or put a dormant gene in there that gradually kills people.

Up to 80% of people have Oral Herpes by some estimates. Imagine a virus like that could be engineered and spread quietly that in 10-20 years cause a worldwide cancer.

My point is, CRISPR can be used for nefarious activities. It's inevitable! So we need to create an antidote for it to prevent unwanted viruses that might one day be created by CRISPR.

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The term is "dual-use technology". [1] There are many. And in general users of those technologies are precisely those most keenly aware of it.

In particular, the gene driver really is only of interest in organisms with very rapid generational turnover. It 'rapidly' speeds the propagation of a mutation over sexual transmission proportional to the generation time. This works for mosquitos. It makes no sense to use a gene-driver on a human population. A virus itself is, well, virulent - they need no help from CRISPR to get there.

Further, there are always exceptions/antidotes/alternatives in biology. In fact the recent discovery of some (useful) Cas9 inhibitors was predicated on the idea that there are organisms out there that have CRISPR systems in them that are themselves flanked by excision sites. By all rights they should not be able to have both the CRISPR system and have that system be marked for destruction - but they did - simultaneously. So they went searching, and they found the inhibitor in those organisms. And there are many more out there. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology

[2] http://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31683-X

What would be the advantage of killing people in 10-20 years versus killing them right now?

I mean, smallpox has been synthesized, and it spreads fast, has pretty high mortality rate, and hardly anyone is vaccinated against it any more.

I can't think of any military (or even terrorist) reason why you'd want that kind of delayed mortality, but maybe I'm overlooking something.

Could happen by accident too

For genocide.

Okay, still not seeing why you would rather they be dead 20 years from now instead of right now.

What I learned from the video game "Pandemic 2" is that the longer your disease remains undetected, the more widely it can spread; if you're asymptomatic and apparently harmless, you may be able to infect every human before you activate the bad side effects. (Which is the goal of that game.)

In other words, any sign of symptoms would cause Madagascar to remain the last place inhibited by humans since they would close their ports/airports real quick

It's always Madagascar. Always.

Hard to identify that it was a deliberate act.

Wouldn't the modified virus need to have a selective advantage to outcompete the normal oral herpes virus? (And since viruses don't reproduce sexually, you can't use a gene drive.)

I was trying to make a point a virus can be "benign" like herpes and silently spread effecting a large population. You don't need a selective advantage as the virus is not competing for scarce amount of resources. You can have herpes and still spread common cold.

Not with a gene drive, that's the whole idea behknd it AFAIK. A gene drive copies itself and the payload to 100% of the host's offspring. So, as long as a host is able to reproduce (which granted has lots of implications) it will spread the payload. This accelerates the spreading of a gene tremendously, covering the whole population in just a few generations.

I'm talking about (the impossibility of) a gene drive for virus replication, not a human gene drive delivered by a virus.

The medical community just needs to have better crispr systems than the few nefarious actors.

It does seem likely that an arms race will likely occur.

CRISPR is not a virus. It does not come with a delivery mechanism.

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