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Assumes interest and some biology. Education, not medical advice.
13K views9 years ago11 recommendations
How the body worksEvidence and public healthGenetics and genomicsPublic health and policy
John Sotos explains how emerging gene-editing technologies could allow malicious actors to exploit genetic vulnerabilities and target specific human populations.
operating system (and set of application programs) built on the digital molecules DNA and RNA. The genome has thousands of publicly documented, unpatchable security vulnerabilities, previously called "genetic diseases." Because emerging DNA/RNA technologies, including CRISPR-Cas9 and especially those arising from the Cancer Moonshot program, will create straightforward methods to digitally reprogram the genome in free-living humans, malicious exploitation of genomic vulnerabilities will soon be possible on a wide scale. This presentation shows the breathtaking potential for such hacks, most notably the exquisite targeting precision that the genome supports — in effect, population, and time — spanning annoyance to organized crime to civilization-ending pandemics far worse than Ebola. Because humans are poor at responding to less-than-immediate threats, and because there is no marketplace demand for defensive technologies on the DNA/RNA platform, the hacker community has an important role to play in devising thought-experiments to convince policy makers to initiate defensive works, before offensive hacks can be deployed in the wild. Hackers can literally save the world... from ourselves.What people say. Recommended as a terrifying and illuminating explanation of the biosecurity risks of gene editing and the importance of genomic privacy.
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