The Dangers of Genomic Information

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If an environmental extremist movement or a frightening anonymous source on the inner net were to say, hello world, i am going to inflict a devastating pandemic unless you meet my demand ands, it would be laughed off. That totally changes when a genom that the world would not have known otherwise is definitively blessed and public ized by a brilliant scientific group as being that thing. The creation of this credibility empowers so many more people then quoo, just the 30 thousand people who could act on it to do awful things in the world. Yes, i'm actually at least as afraid of non state actors, but even just individuals, mentally ill or otherwise.

In this episode of the podcast, Rob Reid and Kevin Esvelt discuss USAID’s new “Deep VZN” program, which aims to discover new pandemic-grade viruses and publish their genomes to the world. Esvelt estimates that there are currently around 30,000 people who could then easily build them.

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