The Bacterial Edit Kit is very dangerous. The sale should be controlled. Imagine if they edit the gene of a bacterium and we get a new pandemic? Only ultra-safe labs should handle this.
No it isn't. It's a harmless bog standard strain of E. Coli used in every biology lab everywhere. Just making the edits in the 8 week course with all of the right materials supplied is not guaranteed. To design a set of dangerous genes would be very difficult and getting someone to manufacture the plasmids would probably set off some alarm bells. The companies that make these things aren't just blindly producing and shipping anything you ask for, and making those plasmids requires a really sophisticated lab. These kits are totally harmless and inline with what you might do in an intro course in college.
They are just adding plasmids with benign things, e.g. a florescent protein. These are a huge burden for the cell and are strongly selected against, they constantly spontaneously revert to the unengineered variant. It’s conceivable that you could add a plasmid to confer some dangerous capabilities to a bacteria, but it wouldn’t happen by accident, and it would not be easy. You would need to iterate a huge number of trials and designs to get a chance of one doing anything.
A malicious actor operating at scale with a lot of resources would be required, and simple educational kits like this would not be useful to them anyways. This is almost like saying educational kits for schools that contain tiny amounts of benign radioactive ore should be illegal because they could in principle contribute material for an atom bomb…
I've no idea about biotech, but it's not as if this kit has some molecular factory that can build you arbitrary DNA strands. As far as I know, there is no magic cauldron where you can throw eye of newt for adenine, toe of frog for cytosine and so on, and it would spew out a flask of plasmids built to your spec.
And that E.Coli strain... I believe I may have more dangerous stuff in my lower intestine.
ch4s3|3 years ago
UniverseHacker|3 years ago
A malicious actor operating at scale with a lot of resources would be required, and simple educational kits like this would not be useful to them anyways. This is almost like saying educational kits for schools that contain tiny amounts of benign radioactive ore should be illegal because they could in principle contribute material for an atom bomb…
drdaeman|3 years ago
And that E.Coli strain... I believe I may have more dangerous stuff in my lower intestine.