Super bugs are NOT at all easy to design. And there's plenty of natural super bugs like swine flu, etc. that come around every year.
The worst case scenario is something like the 1918 flu, but it's not 1918 anymore and we can deal with viruses like that a lot better.
This is a claim that you have yet to back up with anything beyond general hand-waving.
> Super bugs are NOT at all easy to design. And there's plenty of natural super bugs like swine flu, etc. that come around every year.
To cause significant damage a biohacker would not need to actually design the super bug, she would just need to design some interesting sequence that has a novel and unfortunate interaction with the human immune system. Poor lab procedure (like deciding that the sequence did nothing and dumping the results down the drain) could easily introduce this sequence into the wild where other bacteria could pick it up.
The difference between hacking code and hacking biology is that broken code goes nowhere. Nothing it out there picking up the bits you delete and recombining it with existing code to see if the result gives its progeny any advantage. This is not the case with tinkering with biological systems.
Much like Fermat, the time I care to devote to correcting people who are wrong on the internet is too small to contain the full argument which would go beyond hand waving.
Here's a bit more hand waving: Immune systems are complex and dynamic system designed to deal with unknown and novel agents. That's why simply coming up with something new, is not nearly enough. 99.99% of new mutations are deleterious. And the 0.001% that might be something? Like I said, just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout.
Dumping things down the drain does not make bacteria pick them up. You can dump MRSA down the drain all day long, it won't make the bacteria in there antibiotic resistant. Because there is no free lunch, even beneficial mutations are metabolically expensive, and that's why if you dump MRSA in the sewer, over time even they would lose their own antibiotic resistance. Without antibiotics they would be out competed by Staph. which doesn't waste resources on antibiotic resistance.
The difference between hacking code and hacking biology is that with code one single bit can cause the whole system to crash or behave in wildly unpredictable ways. Biology on the other hand is extremely robust.
Suffice it to say we agree to disagree.
Let's try to imagine all of the worst-case scenarios for what might have happened if Woz instead created a monumental fuck-up. I can't really come up with much beyond him losing several grand and going back to work at HP. Let's try that same exercise for some hypothetical person who imagines himself to be the Woz of DNA...
> Suffice it to say, I think the risks are worth it and regulation is a blunt weapon which eliminates most of the bad AND the good.
Given some of the potential risks involved, the good would have to be pretty big and explained pretty well to the lay public before you will ever get past some deep-seated fears of what the potential downsides are to this endeavor.