Emerging biotech risks extinction if not properly regulated.

The increasing power of technology could produce novel existential threats to humankind. One technology is synthetic biology. Humans, like all species, are vulnerable to bacteria and viruses. When lethality and communicability align, pandemics can be catastrophic, such as the plague that struck Europe in 1341–1347 (“Black Death”), killing between 30 and 50 percent of the population; the influenza virus in 1918–1921 (“Spanish Flu”) that killed between 50 and 100 million people, potentially more than World War I and II combined; or smallpox in the Americas, which contributed to the collapse of the Aztec and Incan civilizations during the Spanish “Conquista.” Yet natural selection mitigates the existential risks of pandemics, since lethality and communicability tend to work against each other—the more lethal a pathogen, the more likely it will kill its host, giving it less opportunity to spread (Rees 2003; Posner 2004).

However, advances in synthetic biology could make it possible for humans to design pathogens to increase the destruction capacity of pandemics. The ability to take the genetic blueprints of pathogens and manipulate them to increase virulence opens up the possibility of “designer viruses” that are both highly communicable and lethal (Leslie 1996; Rees 2003; Posner 2004; Torres 2017). In theory, a pathogen could be designed to be highly contagious, but with a slow incubation period to maximize the time for its spread and minimize the possibility of detection, and then overcome the human immune system and exploit the absence of defenses from vaccinations or antibiotics (Rees 2003, 50–7; Posner 2004, 75–6). The “gain-of-function” research to make pathogens more virulent is indicative of the danger (Selgelid 2016). One controversial experiment in 2012 involved the genetic alteration of H5N1 avian influenza to be transmissible by air between ferrets (Herfst et al. 2012), which one virologist described as “probably one of the most dangerous viruses you can make” (Enserink 2011). In another experiment in 2017, researchers reconstituted the horsepox virus from DNA ordered by mail, which one virologist explained, “If it’s possible with horsepox, it’s possible with smallpox” (Kupferschmidt 2017). While synthetic biology could bring enormous benefits, bioengineered pathogens could pose an existential threat to humanity.