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Power Trip
The Ender
New breakthroughs in gene editing will lead to incredible rewards — and risks we can barely contemplate
This is the last installment of “Privatizing the Apocalypse”, a four-part essay published throughout October. Read the previous installments here — Part 1: “The 50/50 Murder,” Part 2: “Deterrence — and the Undeterrable,” and Part 3: “The Deadly Gamble on Super A.I.”
A noxious strain of H5N1 flu started killing people in 2003. It ranks among history’s most lethal viruses. But one of its cousins is much more famous. Popularly known as swine flu, that cousin is also rightly feared. But at its worst, H5N1 is three thousand times more likely to kill those it infects. Not three thousand percent more (which would be plenty bad) but three thousand times more.
The World Health Organization has shown this strain kills a devastating 60 percent of those it strikes. That’s more deadly than Ebola, and almost all cancers. And of course, wayyyyy more (a technical term) than swine flu, which inflicts an almost genial death rate of just 0.02 percent. But for all its foibles, H5N1 has one trait I think we can all get behind: It’s not very contagious at all amongst humans.
Outside of the lab, that is.
Yet, that is.
A flu strain’s transmissibility, i.e. its ability to easily move from person to person, lies in its genes. In 2011, researchers in Wisconsin and Holland looked hard at the relatively non-infectious H5N1 genome and (for lack of a better word) fixed it. This gave them mutant H5N1 strains which are every bit as deadly as the original flavor — but also highly contagious. Like, dare to have it all!
An arm of the revered journal Science said a strain like this could “change world history if it were set free,” by triggering a pandemic “quite possibly with many millions of deaths.” The chair of the U.S. National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, Paul Keim, said, “I can’t think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one.” He added, “I don’t think anthrax is scary at all compared to this.” And I’ll add that Keim is an anthrax expert.
There’s an optimistic way of viewing this, and let’s start there. Creating this…
