Obama’s Science Advisors Are Worried About Future CRISPR Terrorism
By Daniel Oberhaus,
VICE Motherboard
| 11. 21. 2016
Last week the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), which consists of 18 scientists and policy experts in various disciplines, issued a letter to President Obama on the potential emergence of new forms of bioterrorism.
“While the ongoing growth of biotechnology is a great boon for society, it also holds serious potential for destructive use by both states and technically-competent individuals with access to modern laboratory facilities,” the PCAST members wrote. “Molecular biologists, microbiologists, and virologists can look ahead and anticipate that the nature of biological threats will change substantially over the coming years. The U.S. Government’s past ways of thinking and organizing to meet biological threats need to change to reflect and address this rapidly-developing landscape.”
As detailed in the letter, the US approach to biological threats for the last two decades has focused on a “dangerous subset of known human and agricultural pathogens.” The legislation outlining these threats dates back to 2002, and while the field of biotechnology has significantly changed in the last 14 years, the laws have not kept up with new developments.... see more
Related Articles
By Fiona Harvey, The Guardian | 01.06.2021
By Sharon Begley, STAT | 01.06.2021
Biologists tend not to discuss experimental results on a handful of cells and a single solitary mouse — too preliminary, too sketchy. David Liu of the Broad Institute therefore had no plans to present such findings, which he’d peeked at...
By Emily Mullin, Future Human | 01.05.2021
Every day in the United States, 17 people die waiting for a lifesaving organ transplant. To address this crisis, one biotech company is turning to an unlikely source: pigs. Maryland-based United Therapeutics says it plans to begin transplanting organs from...
The last couple of weeks have given us some remarkable stories – ludicrous, thought-provoking or both – from around the world. Some of these takes are so scorching hot that they self-combust.
For instance, it has recently been proved, or demonstrated, or at least asserted, that women can benefit from hanging around powerful men. Hey, it must be scientificalish, it was published in Nature Communications* (on November 17, with open access), under this title:
The association between early career...