[ctrw]

This has been going on for 100m years. I doubt we are in any urgent danger.

[2four2]

So have mass extinction events.

[mikewarot]

  "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."
  
  Albert Allen Bartlett

If there is even a 0.001% chance of an organism with this artificially tacked on to it getting in to the wild, the experiment is not worth anything to be potentially learned from it.

It could cause our starvation well before we could respond effectively.

[ctrw]

If the exponent is so small that it's not reached 1 in 100,000,000 years we're safe until humanity goes extinct.