On Monday, May 7, 2012 9:52:16 AM UTC-4, Jason Bobe wrote:
On Sunday, May 6, 2012 6:04:55 PM UTC-4, Avery wrote:I am amused that people think that personalized medicine is too expensive/unreasonable, but making a supervirus is a walk in the park.Yeah, I agree. This line of reasoning seems common and somewhat odd.In this case though, I think the line of reasoning is a little different: assume that at some point in the future, we have cheap, personalized, and therapeutic (oncolytic in this case) viruses; then we would also have cheap, personalized, and harmful/criminal/terroristic (?) viruses as well. Marc's bailiwick is around "future crimes" after all.
And, there certainly is a lot (and will continue to be) a lot of worry about designer pathogens. Reading this morning in The Atlantic, Nick Bostrom identifies this future threat as one of the most worrisome:
What technology, or potential technology, worries you the most?Bostrom: Well, I can mention a few. In the nearer term I think various developments in biotechnology and synthetic biology are quite disconcerting. We are gaining the ability to create designer pathogens and there are these blueprints of various disease organisms that are in the public domain---you can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus from the Internet. So far the ordinary person will only have a digital representation of it on their computer screen, but we're also developing better and better DNA synthesis machines, which are machines that can take one of these digital blueprints as an input, and then print out the actual RNA string or DNA string. Soon they will become powerful enough that they can actually print out these kinds of viruses. So already there you have a kind of predictable risk, and then once you can start modifying these organisms in certain kinds of ways, there is a whole additional frontier of danger that you can foresee.
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