Nitroglycerin can either alleviate heart cardiovascular disease symptoms or it can go boom. What's your point? Almost every technology is dual use if you put your mind to it.
What's the risk of lab leak? Is it impossible? Can these particles go airborne? If someone used them maliciously would anyone even figure it out? I think these are valid questions. As just one example China have been working on biological weapons [1] that can target people specific genetic characteristics and they even brag about it Col. Goo Ji Wei [2]. For all I know this could be another project to make dual-purpose weapons that can target specific groups of people. Another name for dual-purpose biological weapons is Precision Medicine [3]. Some of these weapons get funding in the name of curing diseases as part of civil-military fusion or dual-use biology.
I think most would agree that most countries would prefer not to use nukes. On the other hand there have absoutely been examples of nations committing ethnic cleansing. If China have indeed put billions into this type of research then everyone should probably also have a balance of power as well but I guess I am hoping that balance of power is created in a real legit lab with many real layers of protection and we take it more seriously than nuclear weapons.
So I suppose my point could be summed up as, Has everyone involved on this project been working in a lab that has made it near impossible for this to be abused and have all these people gone through exhaustive background and psychological testing and re-testing?
They are indeed valid questions, and the lack of actually answering the question says that they didn't know the answer but couldn't resist chiming in with a glib response.
I think you might be over estimating how effective these technologies are. Even in the most controlled circumstances, the amount of actual specific editing which occurs is probably quite low. Off target edits are likely also occuring. The focus for gene editing currently is on terminal and generally low quality of life diseases, as the low efficacy and high risk are more acceptable. We are many years out from robust and stable editing using a delivery system like this in an ideal clinic environment. Weaponizing this technology in any meaningful way is not something we probably will have to worry about in our life time. The paper is not open access so we can't know for sure what exactly they did, but it is in mice and seems to have a florescant read out, which suggests a rather crude edit (did we chop up the gene enough to turn the lights off).
We have things in the air all around us that are small, stay floating in droplets well, contagious, and self-replicating (viruses).
We know how to make things that are lethal in incredibly small doses.
Compare to this, which is not likely to stay in the air well, not self-replicating, and not-contagious, and would require larger doses for lethality.
Sure, we should be careful with any new technology, but the options to weaponize this or to have unexpected bystander externalities seems really small compared to other established technologies and risks we bear.
> What's the risk of lab leak?
I think you are latching onto the whole Sars-Cov2 concept here, but it is really a completely different situation. These lipid nanoparticles are highly unstable and require freezing, careful handling, etc. They include no amount of self replication machinery (nor any coded instructions for said machinery). There is nothing to "leak" per say. I am confident that the paper includes the specific formulations of lipids used, as well as the sequence of the payload (were it open access we could confirm).
> Can these particles go airborne?
Again, "go airborne" is a common fear with viruses. Can they mutate and gain some new function allowing them to be infectious via a new pathway. These lipid particles wont "go airborne" because they don't reproduce, they are under 0 evolutionary pressure and carry a minimal payload. It like asking if the COVID vaccine could mutate and go airborne. One could certainly spray some of these particles in the air, they will land on the nearest surface and likely break or degrade along the way. You could probably spray them on your arm and it would not result in any editing.
> If someone used them maliciously would anyone even figure it out?
If someone were able to successfully deploy a targeted genetic weapon with adverse side effects, it would likely take some time to figure out, but we absolutely have the ability and technology to figure it out today. The result would be a brand new variant in the population which has never been seen before, that looks like a CRISPR edit and is making a bunch of people of one country sick.
> Has everyone involved on this project been working in a lab that has made it near impossible for this to be abused and have all these people gone through exhaustive background and psychological testing and re-testing?
Almost certainly not. You are setting a bar pretty high for people doing pretty basic research in mice. I think we should probably setup this level of testing for all our police, military, elected officials, etc.
Citation 3 is the only one worth engaging with, and it answers most of these questions in the summary. Basically the tech is nowhere near ready (despite what some PLA general wants to pretend), and even if it was the actual targeting of a specific population is not even feasible given population genetics.
It is very okay to question the risk-benefit analysis of technologies while also understanding that they can be forces for good and evil.
For instance, Hacker News often discusses issues of privacy, asking whether new methods of finding bad actors could be misused to persecute responsible actors. It is totally fine to say "Is this good thing worthwhile if it could also cause this bad thing?"
