> How would you target "Christians" or "Americans" or "Hispanics"?
You don’t need to have a 1:1 mapping in order to be effective. Incapacitating a sufficient number of a group is enough.
Similarly, such a bioweapon in an assassination context doesn’t need to only kill the target or go unnoticed. It’s enough that it is a disease or irritant that a particular individual is susceptible to.
Assuming you have a communicable bioweapon which is somehow able to target based on genetics, and assuming the rest of the world isn't able to defend against it, that still leaves the very tricky question of finding a genetic basis which characterizes any of those three categories in a way which is sufficiently effective.
Do you really believe there is way to identify "Christians" based on genetics?
"Incapacitating a sufficient number of a group" is NOT enough. You also need specificity.
What genetic markers indicate "American"? Sure, if you target something simple like "has a Y chromosome" you might take out about 50% of the US population, which is likely a sufficient number, but you'll do equal damage to your own population.
How would a bioweapon meaningfully target "Hispanics"? The term is definitely not based in genetics. If some villagers from a German town emigrated to Argentina and others from the same village emigrated to Canada, then according to the US the descendants of the first group are just as Hispanic as Black Spanish-speaking Cubans, while the descendants of the second group are "white".
But, okay, you've figured something out. Now how do you prevent your bioweapon from mutating the specificity away? You've added a lot of machinery to the organism which must be preserved perfectly even though that machinery isn't required in order to reproduce.
The more failsafes you put in, the bulkier the organism and/or the fewer genetic markers you can target.
Clearly you should be promoting DEI as a way to increase group robustness against future bioweapons. ;)
I'm really curious what, and how, these commenters think a genetic bioweapon would target. Cell-surface receptors seem the easy target, but as we've seen with COVID, and the more general swine and avian flus passing to humans, specificity changes. And cell surface receptors aren't that specific for any ethnicity, so expect a nuclear response from the survivors (both from your target and from the others states who had affected citizens).
If targeting proteins or regulatory regions of DNA, how? Are you going to try to CRISPR it? This may be effective in quiescent or senescent cells. But I think even quiescent cells have some DNA repair pathways. At best such targeting may speed up the aging process and cause some cancers.
Are you going to integrate a toxic gene at a specific chromosomal locus? Maybe that would work. You'd need a very efficient gene therapy approach to do it though.
That's ok, I get it: I have the exact same thing when I'm too focused on a problem. And then a week later or so it's like a light bulb going off and I feel very silly for having missed the obvious. But let's not give people ideas here, this is pretty dangerous territory and I don't think HN should turn into a cookbook for miscreants.
Just because you think you can create a bioweapon doesn't mean it causes trouble.
And as I wrote, this sort of bioweapon won't be possible until we've effectively cured cancer, and likely also developed methods which can easily identify and stop it.
A secret skunkworks approach could facilitate genetic inventions that don't get passed into the general knowledge base. It would be difficult making discoveries that all of the other biologists working in society miss, but is remotely plausible.
Again, the technology would be able to cure cancer. Do you really think all those employees - who know that their friends and family could be cured of their cancer - would be willing to keep mum of the cure?
It depends on how isolated they are kept from each other's work. It's not as if we don't already have decent cancer therapeutic technologies in the pipeline.
We do not have broad-spectrum anti-cancer therapeutics, much less ones which are based on self-reproducing communicable organisms that target the cancer's DNA.
Therapeutics which prompt the endogenous immune system to recognize the cancer cells as something to attack. I believe this is the basis of mRNA cancer therapeutics? I believe they are targeted for individual cancers and possibly individual people, but given the speed in which they can be made this doesn't seem like a major future hurdle.
Throw one into a gene therapy vector and it could conceivably reproduce itself (though that seems like a bad idea for a cancer therapeutic anyway).
"I believe" and "conceivably" do not make good evidence that something is in the pipeline.
mRNA cancer therapeutics do not target nuclear DNA. They do not enter the nucleus and they produce proteins to trigger an immune response against the targeted disease, not against the DNA of the targeted disease.
You're misinterpreting my initial objection. Skunkworkers would care less about the personal ramifications of keeping technology which could be used to cure cancer secret if there are already viable full-cure treatments for all of the cancers they or their family members may plausibly come down with.
Again, technology isn't in a vacuum. You really can't predict what medicine will be like in 100 years.
If there are already viable full-cure treatments for all those cancers then why aren't there viable full-cure treatments for this sort of bioweapon?
Feeling ill? Sequence all the organisms in your blood, spot the unexpected ones, develop a vaccine/phage against it, and poof - all better.
Sure, you can construct movie plot scenarios to do anything. In a movie, our hero can use a lighter to ignite the leaking fuel trail from a jet plane taking off and cause it to blow Up. That doesn't mean it's likely or even feasible.
> If there are already viable full-cure treatments for all those cancers then why aren't there viable full-cure treatments for this sort of bioweapon?
Plenty of possibilities. A cancer is ultimately a mutated genome in a viable cell gone awry. Even with contagious cancers (like the one killing the Tasmanian Devils) you're still ultimately dealing with an infectious eukaryotic cell of basically the same species type as the organism, and our mammalian immune systems are already used to targeting our own cells gone awry. Viruses, satellite viruses, prokaryotes, other eukaryotes, edited out, and whatever I'm forgetting will require a diversity of approaches (unless someone invents pico-scale teleportation).
I don't disagree with what you're saying I'm just saying that the skunkworkers may not care about one method of treating their family members if other methods exist and work well.
We don't have even one method and we have many Nobel prizes to go until we get one, so I again state this is all science fantasy only fit for a movie or other fictional story.
> Again, the technology would be able to cure cancer.
That's your strawman. But I can - easily, at that - imagine a POC that would be specific enough to kill a single human with a very high degree of success given some meta data about them and a sample of their DNA. I'm for obvious reasons not going to expand on that here because we have too many idiots in this world but the fact that you can't imagine such things doesn't mean that others can not.
So what? Movie plot scenarios do not need to reflect reality.
I can easily imagine hopping on the next Pan Am rocket service to Luna City.
I can easily imagine using a space laser to kill that same human.
I can easily imagine taking a bridge from Key West to Cuba.
I can easily imagine taking a pill to regrow an amputated leg.
Just because you can easily imagine a POC doesn't mean it's doable in our lifetimes.
What are you going to target in the DNA? Is it a single short sequence or multiple markers across the genome? How does the bioweapon sequence that DNA to find it? How does that then trigger the appropriate biological response? How do you prevent mutations? What infectious organism will you use? How do you know the target isn't already immune to that infection?
Even if you expand on one or two of these in convincing detail (congrats on your future Nobel Prize, by the way), that's still not enough for the idiots in the world to make a usable weapon.
You don’t need to have a 1:1 mapping in order to be effective. Incapacitating a sufficient number of a group is enough.
Similarly, such a bioweapon in an assassination context doesn’t need to only kill the target or go unnoticed. It’s enough that it is a disease or irritant that a particular individual is susceptible to.