Oh Great- DIY gene editing kits available to the public!

For sure. Electronics has changed the world, but nothing like what biology and genetic manipulation will do in the next hundred years. Some of it will be great, and some won't.

"Some experts worry that the DIY ethos of Zayner?s work could open the doors to irresponsible bioengineering that could allow unqualified or malicious people to create deadly new pathogens with the potential to seriously harm human communities."

This has been worrying me for several years. It's a toss-up between nuclear war on the one hand and anarchist virus-builders on the other as to which way the human race ends. Viruses are among the simplest forms of life on the planet and potentially the most deadly. Some kook with ill- intent getting their sweaty hands on a gene machine could end up killing millions. :(

I read this story 35 years ago. I wonder how much simpler it would be to do now.

Worry more that such as bitrex, rickman and bloggs might replicate themselves >:-} ...Jim Thompson

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There's nothing simple about viruses, and they aren't - technically speakin g - a form of life, since they don't reproduce themselves, but hijack the r eproductive machinery of life-forms that can reproduce.

Evolution has been experimenting for the past few billion years and hasn't come up with a virus that could kill everything.

An "anarchist" virus-builder might come up with something as lethal as the Spanish flu, which killed three to five percent of the world population

Something like the AIDS virus, where the victim can infect others for a lon g time before they are obviously sick, would be a better candidate for kill ing everybody, but that would be a slow enough process to pretty much guara ntee some survivors.

And "anarchist" in this context is merely a newspaper term meaning "terrori st".

Real anarcho-syndicalists (like Noam Chomsky and Melanie Klein) wouldn't ha ve anything to do with such a venture, but the Daily Mail - where Cursitor Doom gets a lot of his misinformation - isn't going to confuse their reader s with more information than they think they can process.

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Jim Thompson believes that he has replicated himself, when what he means is that his grandchildren are burdened by a quarter of his genetic defects.

Human cloning may be theoretically possible, but it doesn't seem to have ha ppened yet.

Here's another one I read 20 years before that even!

-- This message may be freely reproduced without limit or charge only via the Usenet protocol. Reproduction in whole or part through other protocols, whether for profit or not, is conditional upon a charge of GBP10.00 per reproduction. Publication in this manner via non-Usenet protocols constitutes acceptance of this condition.

n the

Here's a candidate mentality

What a 'delightful' old lady! Nature's a great chemist, but the human can now do better. You have a lot of fentanyl deaths in the US lately. IIRC that stuff, which is entirely man-made, is 50 times stronger than heroin. Now the genie is out of the bottle and complex molecules found in nature can be synthesized into something much more powerful, the limits of human stupidity can really be tested. And believe me they will be!

I wonder what he thinks that means? It does take only 2mgm of fentanyl to g ive the same effect as 100 mgm of heroin, but the drug isn't actually more potent at the receptor it locks onto - it's just a lot more fat soluble tha t heroin and delivers higher concentrations in the lipid-rich nervous tissu e, with less wasted on the rest of the body.

Cursitor Doom is silly enough to think that any complex molecule found in n ature could be tweaked into something "fifty times more powerful".

Most of that kind of molecule works by fitting into a particular site in th e human nervous system, and it works because it fits well. It isn't going t o get any more powerful if it fits better.

Somebody who gets his ideas from the Daily Mail and Russia Today isn't goin g to have the background knowledge to realise quite how foolish that propos ition is, nor know enough to realise quite how idiotic he looks in making t he claim.

Sorry, i LOVE the way my LEVIS look...

Not all anarchists are violent