[zwkrt]

> If you take those genes and put them into organisms like bacteria and yeast, which normally do not have these proteins, they actually become much more desiccation-tolerant

Well I have a newfound fear of humans creating a bacteria as hard to kill as a tardigrade…

[aetherspawn]

I mean all we need now is to find out how to make a prion that forms TDPs so we can glue it to the outside of COVID-19 in some twisted gain of function research.

[noduerme]

This is such a sad exemplar of where we've gone as a technological society. Thirty years ago, you could have suggested releasing a virus that destroyed cancer, and people would have cheered.

[lm28469]

We don't need humans for that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudomonas_aeruginosa

Eventually we'll get to a point where nothing will work against these

[COGlory]

P. aeruginosa is an incredible organism. Not only is it antibiotic resistant, but it also is starvation resistant. So even when you have antibotics that work, it's often to difficult to get them to all the cells, since cells at the bottom of a biofilm just shut down completely for weeks on end. End the course of antibiotics, and they pop back up and start growing again.

Thankfully, there are major tradeoffs associated with those traits, which makes them not particularly virulent to healthy people.

[justinclift]

The real question is, if these genes are spliced into a human do they awaken post-dessication craving human blood? :)

[seanhunter]

Craving for human blood said to be "within acceptable tolerance". Every technological step forward has it's pros and cons.

[AwaAwa]

This is the purpose of Marketing. Feature, not a bug.

[jryb]

Nature is already doing this experiment, right now, and has been for billions of years. This couldn't cause problems even if we wanted it to.

[vlovich123]

That feels like fatally flawed reasoning. Nature took billions of years to sequester carbon. It’s taken a few hundred to release an amount that’s permanently altered the climate of the Earth.

There’s lots of problems humans can create that “nature” couldn’t precisely because we drastically compress time scales that make adaptation exceedingly difficult.