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Think of all the trouble that computer hackers cause. Now imagine what DNA hackers could do.
In the future, DNA hackers won’t sneak viruses into your laptop and crash websites. Instead, they’ll sneak viruses into your body and crash you, and maybe billions of other people, too. They’ll do this by designing DNA sequences that code for new, never-before-seen, living viruses that spread from person to person as easily as measles, and that kill (or sicken) as inevitability as rabies.
Truly monstrous hackers will ensure your doctor cannot help you fight the virus, by engineering it so that off-the-self medicines and vaccines are ineffective. Medical science, caught flat-footed, will have only weeks to develop, test, produce, and distribute new vaccines and medicines before the exponential spread of the virus collapses social order world-wide. (Witness last year’s penetrating anxieties when just two people caught Ebola inside the U.S.)
With today’s science, engineering an Armageddon virus may still be impossible. But the progress of DNA technology in the 40 years since its invention has been spectacular and is accelerating...
