It shouldn't be easy to buy synthetic DNA fragments to recreate the 1918 flu virus

Kevin Esvelt · 8 May 2024

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The tools that make biology powerful for medicine are the same tools that make it dangerous, so the benefits and the misuse risk cannot be separated.

Their wordsOur experiment demonstrates that the immense potential benefits of biotechnology are profoundly vulnerable to misuse.

Also said by Jacob Trefethen

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Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Ordering the synthetic DNA needed to rebuild the 1918 influenza virus is surprisingly easy, even from companies that screen customers' orders.

Their wordsIt should be hard — exceedingly hard — to obtain the synthetic DNA needed to recreate the virus that caused the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic without authorization. But my lab found that it’s surprisingly easy, even when ordering gene fragments from companies that check customers’ orders to detect hazardous sequences.
Our reading
The tools that make biology powerful for medicine are the same tools that make it dangerous, so the benefits and the misuse risk cannot be separated.

Their wordsOur experiment demonstrates that the immense potential benefits of biotechnology are profoundly vulnerable to misuse.
Our reading
The genome sequences of pandemic viruses and the protocols for building them from synthetic DNA are already freely available online.

Their wordsBoth the genome sequences of pandemic viruses and step-by-step protocols to make infectious samples from synthetic DNA are now freely available online.
Our reading
Every synthetic DNA order should be screened for hazardous sequences and shipped only to researchers whose work a biosafety authority has approved.

Their wordsThat makes it essential to ensure that all synthetic DNA orders are screened to determine whether they contain hazardous sequences, which should be shipped only to legitimate researchers whose work has been approved by a biosafety authority.

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