What If Someone Uses This DIY CRISPR Kit To Make Mutant Bacteria? (vice.com)

Josiah Zayner, a research fellow at NASA Ames Research Center, is running an Indiegogo campaign to make DIY gene editing kits that use the CRISPR technique to modify DNA. The campaign has already exceeded its goal, and he points out an article at Motherboard noting the controversy surrounding cheap, DIY genetic modification. Quoting:The kits won't going to allow people to genetically modify humans, but Zayner is still getting some heat for the project. One medical doctor emailed him with "grave concerns" about putting the technology in the hands of lay people. "Reprogramming bacteria or fungi could have serious ramifications, such as inadvertent or intended multi-drug resistance, faster multiplication, toxin production, and persisting potency when aerosolized," the doctor wrote. ... There is no legal framework surrounding this at-home work, unless it results in a product to be distributed, said Todd Kuiken, a senior program associate with the Synthetic Biology Project at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. "Who actually uses kits like these and what they are using them for will determine if any of these products they make would be regulated or not," he said.

Comments

Re:Questions?

[josiah.zayner]

PS. I am the NASA Scientist.Creator of the kits.

Way Over-Hyped

[Anonymous Coward]

The ferret research that was redacted a few years back was scarier in all honesty. CRISPR is a powerful tool but synbio isn't easy - even when you know enough to do things it is typically because you have seen and have access to other things you copy from. CRISPR is just a much more reliable copy/paste function (whereas before you might have done the equivalent of copying a block of text and pasting it only to have ever Nth letter randomly swapped for another one, with a value of N very very low.) If someone wanted to make a powerful biological agent it would be far easier to house a bunch of animals in crappy conditions until something vile came from it than it would be to genetically engineer something new. Even if you did create a completely new organism comprised of genetic components of the most horrible things known to man it likely wouldn't do anything - bugs have been evolving alongside animals for a very long time and are every bit as precisely adapted to infecting things as animals are to resisting them. The notion of hacking together something dangerous from scratch or even via biological plagiarism enhanced via CRISPR is absurd. The more advanced synbio people take ridiculously long amounts of time to do things like make glowing yogurt and that is only a single very simple and straightforward copy/paste operation.

Not that new

[JBMcB]

It's been around for about a decade.

Probably a non-issue for the foreseeable future in any case. Even the people who *really* know what they are doing have a hard time getting the modifications to propagate, much less do anything at all.