Bacterial infections are generally very treatable though. Even when the bacteria aren't engineered. And especially when they are, because why would you leave any antibiotic resistance in an engineered bacterium?

Bacteria are the scariest when they've had the time to develop resistance to multiple different antibiotics.

Additionally, a bacterium that's engineered to be almost completely harmless evolving into a deadly strain in vivo is fairy unlikely in itself, especially if transcriptional errors can be reduced several orders of magnitude like GGP suggested.

Adding to that the option of hospitalisation or even home isolation to reduce risk of transmission, the risk of this resulting in some huge lethal epidemic must be pretty miniscule.

It's hubris to think we are at a stage where human scientists are so disciplined and knowledgable that we can start patching existing life-forms in such a safe enough way so as to target certain types of cells reliably over time and not others.

Software is essentially a cleanroom in the sense that the environment tends to be deterministic and man-made, and that is still riddled with unexpected accidents. Fortunately we can turn it off, fix the bug, and redeploy and the people involved in that tend to survive.

> Additionally, a bacterium that's engineered to be almost completely harmless evolving into a deadly strain in vivo is fairy unlikely in itself, especially if transcriptional errors can be reduced several orders of magnitude like GGP suggested.

The proposition was to engineer a bacteria that targets and infects a particular type of human cell to kill it. Creating medicines in a vat (like insulin) is different from releasing infectious agents in the wild. I was under the impression that this was obvious, but apparently not.

>It's hubris to think we are at a stage where human scientists are so disciplined and knowledgable that we can start patching existing life-forms in such a safe enough way so as to target certain types of cells reliably over time and not others.

I never said we're at this stage now or even close to it, in fact I explicitly said the opposite:

>>>>Like I said, the technology is very far off from having real world applications like this. At the moment it feels like we're in the analogue of the 40s and 50s for conventional computing. The field is still just inventing the very basic building blocks. It's going to be very limited in use, wildly dangerous(look up mercury delay lines) and unreliable for decades to come

As for comparing creating medicines in a vat to using bacteria as an active treatment, you're the only one making that comparison. The paragraph you responded to wasn't about in vitro drug synthesis at all, so I'm not sure what your point is here. Yes, it's obviously different. I never said otherwise. It's perfectly possible to target bacteria to specific tissues; wild bacteria already do this.

My point was that a bacteria engineered to target a malignant tumour, to be very treatable with antibiotics or bacteriophage, and to have a strongly reduced rate of mutation, is extremely unlikely to evolve into a pandemic, and is likely to be much safer than chemotherapy and radiation.

> My point was that a bacteria engineered to target a malignant tumour, to be very treatable with antibiotics or bacteriophage, and to have a strongly reduced rate of mutation, is extremely unlikely to evolve into a pandemic, and is likely to be much safer than chemotherapy and radiation.

Did you know bacteria have horizontal gene transfer? ie antibiotic resistance isn't just evolved and passed to children ( vertical ), it can be passed to peers horizontally.

It also happens outside bacteria - but bacteria have active mechanisms to enable this - that's how antibiotic resistance spreads - not just from parent to child, but peer to peer like a meme :-).

Safety is a complex topic, and you'd need to consider on a case by case basis - PhD students engineer bacteria every day ( something that had a self imposed ban in the 1970's I think ) - however that's within the context of standard platforms and each and every one should have a risk assessment.

Don't get me wrong, I think it could be done, but there is a Genie and a bottle here and it's best to think twice.

I'd like to see both a kill switch ( beyond antibiotics ) and some sort of growth external dependency - ie they need something you provide to survive as well.