[Analemma_]

Note that when the popular press worries about the destructive potential of "CRISPR", they don't mean CRISPR specifically. They're using the word as a stand-in for the general trend of the exponentially decreasing cost of genome sequencing and editing techniques which probably, eventually, will reach the level where they can be done by teenage hackers. And that is something that requires concern and attention, even if I don't think it merits panic.

I think you are much too sanguine about this, which I've noticed is a tendency among programmers in general. We're used to a world where bugs always have fixes, and can be patched and the fix spread worldwide instantly, for free. None of these things are true in epidemiology, and it causes us to make really bad metaphors that don't apply in this world. For starters, "responsible disclosure is good" and "security-by-obscurity is bad" are obvious truisms in software but not even remotely true in epidemiology.

> viruses have already had DNA editing machinery for millennia, search up retroviruses.

But viruses are subject to evolutionary pressure that puts a ceiling on how bad they can be. Most of the worst human viruses have a "pick two" of 1) airborne 2) highly infectious 3) fatal, because a virus with all 3 burns itself out and can't survive. Engineered organisms do not have this ceiling.

[rubatuga]

To be fair, we do have examples of some superbugs, such as the Spanish Flu in the 1910s, where an influenza virus managed to wipe out a significant portion of the world. It would be considered by most to be airborne, infectious, and fatal. Maybe my optimism results from the fact that a supervirus has never been engineered (which I agree is fallacious), but I don’t think CRISPR, a research technique, even begins to encroach on the topic of genetically engineered superbugs.