Declared at an international level, the Geneva Protocol in 1925 incredibly impacted the stance with which major powers view the use of bioterrorism. There is in a sense the fear of unpredictable spread during warfare, and easy accessibility would create a war without clear opponents – that those who have produced biological agents may be able to keep their identities concealed, or even the identity of the mutation’s agent.
I was particularly interested in the CRISPR method, which is more or less a gene editing toolkit that uses an engineered bacterial protein Cas9 to manipulate RNA to target certain DNA sequences. Several critics claim that the creation of a “gene drive” goes too far, and after reviewing other articles about CRISPR, I found that a modified mushroom and type of corn have passed under the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, making them the first Cas9 crops. The reasoning is that CRISPR does not qualify under regulations, which calls to question the rate at which innovation is growing and the rate at which legislation passes to critically eye innovation. While there are critics calling CRISPR products “hidden GMOs”, there is also the belief that trying to regulate CRISPR will then hurt technological growth.
The greatest fear is not just the proliferation of bio-warfare in a target area and its unpredictability to spread; even more so, if there exist gene-editing toolkits with easy accessibility like CRISPR, this leaves room for adaptation by threatening states – states not within the Geneva Protocol or any form of multilateral agreement. And even more so, products to battle sickle-cell could mutate on their own – the unpredictability of changing a DNA sequence is hazardous, especially since CRISPR still does not take into account certain ribosomes and other microorganisms which could affect the DNA sequence. From my research, there do not exist studies of the long-term effects of CRISPR on DNA sequences, especially with exposure to the carcinogens of someone’s day-to-day.
While there is fear of over-regulating the potential innovations of CRISPR and similar engineering programs, the inability to tell between a modified organism (among other modes of CRISPR’s influence) makes me believe that it would be better to regulate the gene drive; that the government should recognize these new products – perhaps not as GMOs – but with some label and way of tagging CRISPR-linked products. Though the tag may stigmatize the application of CRISPR, it would certainly act as a precautionary. — Lucas