It's hubris to think we are at a stage where human scientists are so disciplined and knowledgable that we can start patching existing life-forms in such a safe enough way so as to target certain types of cells reliably over time and not others.
Software is essentially a cleanroom in the sense that the environment tends to be deterministic and man-made, and that is still riddled with unexpected accidents. Fortunately we can turn it off, fix the bug, and redeploy and the people involved in that tend to survive.
> Additionally, a bacterium that's engineered to be almost completely harmless evolving into a deadly strain in vivo is fairy unlikely in itself, especially if transcriptional errors can be reduced several orders of magnitude like GGP suggested.
The proposition was to engineer a bacteria that targets and infects a particular type of human cell to kill it. Creating medicines in a vat (like insulin) is different from releasing infectious agents in the wild. I was under the impression that this was obvious, but apparently not.
Software is essentially a cleanroom in the sense that the environment tends to be deterministic and man-made, and that is still riddled with unexpected accidents. Fortunately we can turn it off, fix the bug, and redeploy and the people involved in that tend to survive.
> Additionally, a bacterium that's engineered to be almost completely harmless evolving into a deadly strain in vivo is fairy unlikely in itself, especially if transcriptional errors can be reduced several orders of magnitude like GGP suggested.
The proposition was to engineer a bacteria that targets and infects a particular type of human cell to kill it. Creating medicines in a vat (like insulin) is different from releasing infectious agents in the wild. I was under the impression that this was obvious, but apparently not.