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Amanullah Syed
The Genetic Engineering Genie Is Out of the Bottle - https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/11/crispr-pandemic-gene-editing-virus//
FiAmanillah!
Usually good for a conspiracy theory or two, U.S. President Donald Trump has suggested that the virus causing COVID-19 was either intentionally engineered or resulted from a lab accident at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China. Its release could conceivably have involved an accident, but the pathogen isn’t the mishmash of known viruses that one would expect from something designed in a lab, as a research report in Nature Medicine conclusively lays out. “If someone were seeking to engineer a new coronavirus as a pathogen, they would have constructed it from the backbone of a virus known to cause illness,” the researchers said.
But if genetic engineering wasn’t behind this pandemic, it could very well unleash the next one. With COVID-19 bringing Western economies to their knees, all the world’s dictators now know that pathogens can be as destructive as nuclear missiles. What’s even more worrying is that it no longer takes a sprawling government lab to engineer a virus. Thanks to a technological revolution in genetic engineering, all the tools needed to create a virus have become so cheap, simple, and readily available that any rogue scientist or college-age biohacker can use them, creating an even greater threat. Experiments that could once only have been carried out behind the protected walls of government and corporate labs can now practically be done on the kitchen table with equipment found on Amazon. Genetic engineering—with all its potential for good and bad—has become democratized.
To design a virus, a bio researcher’s first step is to obtain the genetic information of an existing pathogen—such as one of the coronaviruses that cause the common cold—which could then be altered to create something more dangerous. In the 1970s, the first genetic sequencing of a bacterium, Escherichia coli, took weeks of effort and cost millions of dollars just to determine its 5,836 base pairs, the building blocks of genetic information. Today, sequencing the 3,000,000,000 base pairs that make up the human genome, which dictates the construction and maintenance of a human being, can be done in a few hours for about $1000 in the United States. Xun Xu, the CEO of Chinese genomics research company BGI Group, told me by email that he expects to offer full human-genome sequencing in supermarkets and online for about $290 by the end of this year.
The next step in engineering a virus is to modify the genome of the existing pathogen to change its effects. One technology in particular makes it almost as easy to engineer life forms as it is to edit Microsoft Word documents. CRISPR gene editing, developed only a few years ago, deploys the same natural mechanism that bacteria use to trim pieces of genetic information from one genome and insert it into another. This mechanism, which bacteria developed over millennia to defend themselves from viruses, has been turned into a cheap, simple, and fast way to edit the DNA of any organism in the lab.