Liam Shaw in Sidecar:
Between 1346 and 1353, the Black Death, caused by the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis, killed around 50 per cent of Europe’s population. The acute demographic shock not only reduced inequality but destabilized the economic order, which some argue contributed to the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Almost seven centuries later, Covid-19 was orders of magnitude less deadly, killing around 1 per cent of those it infected. But it still paralysed the patterns of everyday life, came close to overwhelming healthcare systems and caused the largest peacetime contraction in the global economy since the 1930s. The threat posed by most pathogens has been weakened by technological advances: vaccines, modern sanitation and antibiotics. Yet technology has also expanded the scope for novel threats to be deliberately engineered.
Successive breakthroughs include, in 2002, the de novo synthesis of a functional poliovirus from a published genome sequence; in the 2010s, the introduction of the CRISPR-Cas9 toolkit for gene editing; and most recently, artificial intelligence models, trained on a multitude of scientific papers and protocols, which can act as tutors for would-be ‘biohackers’ to create mutant organisms. Despite public fears, a genetically engineered pandemic has not yet materialized. Claims that Covid-19 was designed with nefarious intent are far-fetched. Although the initial cluster of infections in Wuhan could conceivably have arisen from a lab leak of a virus under investigation in the city’s Institute of Virology, rather than a pure zoonotic transfer in nature, it does not follow that the causative pathogen SARS-CoV-2 was deliberately modified: genetic comparisons show it to be unremarkable when compared to similar natural viruses circulating in bat populations. Moreover, SARS-CoV-2 was, in context, a mild pathogen. It killed at a rate at least 10 times higher than seasonal influenza, but lower than its close relatives SARS (around 10 per cent) or MERS (above 30 per cent). But what might ensue if the natural proclivities of a microbial pathogen were to be enhanced by genetic manipulation?
More here.
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