What is the Risk of a Genetically Engineered “Superbug”?
There is experimental evidence that it is possible to use genetic engineering to increase the lethality of preexisting pathogens, such as mousepox or anthrax, to enable them to do even more damage than they would without modifications. It has also proved possible to resurrect viruses that have been frozen for almost a hundred years, as was done recently with the 1918 Spanish flu virus, which killed 50-100 million people worldwide in 1918-1919, more than twice the deaths of World War I, which immediately preceded the pandemic. Besides being recreated and used to infect test animals, all of which contracted severe disease and many of which died, the entire genome of the virus has been sequenced and published on the Internet for anybody to download. The wisdom of such a move was criticized by technologists Ray Kurzweil and Bill Joy in the New York Times. “Superbug” in the context of this article refers to the possibility of an engineered biowarfare or bioterrorism agent. Another meaning f
