I’m somewhat worried about this virus-immune bacterium outcompeting regular life because it can drop all the anti-viral adaptations.
It’s a conceptually simple find/replace on functionally identical codons, which should make the bacterium immune to all viruses barring something like 60000 specific viral mutations happening at once.
Viruses cause massive selection pressure:
“The rate of viral infection in the oceans stands at 1 × 10^23 infections per second, and these infections remove 20–40% of all bacterial cells each day.”—https://www.nature.com/articles/nrmicro2644 (could not find good figures for land, plausibly they are a fair bit lower, but still likely high enough to be a huge deal)
without them I expect evolution to be able to come up with all sorts of ways to make it much better at all the other parts of life.
A big part of my model is that a large part of the reason we have species diversity is that the more successful a species is the bigger a target it is for viral infection, removing that feedback loop entirely while at the same time giving a particular species a huge boost by letting it drop all sorts of systems developed to prevent viruses killing it seems very risky.
This is fundamentally different from anything evolution has ever or could reasonably cook up, since it removes a set of the basic codons in a way which requires foresight (the replacement of each of the huge number of low-use codons has no value independently, and the removal of the ability to process those low-use codons (i.e. removing the relevant tRNA) is reliably fatal before all the instances are replaced).
To clarify: I don’t think this is an x-risk, but it could wreak the biosphere in a way which would cause all sorts of problems.
They do claim to be trying to avoid it being able to survive in the wild:
For safety, they also changed genes to make the bacterium dependent on a synthetic amino acid supplied in its nutrient broth. That synthetic molecule does not exist in nature, so the bacterium would die if it ever escaped the lab.
Which is only mildly reassuring if this thing is going to be grown at scale, as the article suggests, since there is (I think?) potential for that modification to be reversed by mutation, given enough attempts and the fact that a modification that makes the cell die if it does not run into a certain amino acid seems like it should be selected against if that amino acid is ever scarce.
[...] several experiments involving 100 billion or more cells and lasting up to 20 days did not reveal a single microbe capable of surviving in the absence of the artificial supplement.
I’m somewhat worried about this virus-immune bacterium outcompeting regular life because it can drop all the anti-viral adaptations.
It’s a conceptually simple find/replace on functionally identical codons, which should make the bacterium immune to all viruses barring something like 60000 specific viral mutations happening at once.
Viruses cause massive selection pressure:
without them I expect evolution to be able to come up with all sorts of ways to make it much better at all the other parts of life.
A big part of my model is that a large part of the reason we have species diversity is that the more successful a species is the bigger a target it is for viral infection, removing that feedback loop entirely while at the same time giving a particular species a huge boost by letting it drop all sorts of systems developed to prevent viruses killing it seems very risky.
This is fundamentally different from anything evolution has ever or could reasonably cook up, since it removes a set of the basic codons in a way which requires foresight (the replacement of each of the huge number of low-use codons has no value independently, and the removal of the ability to process those low-use codons (i.e. removing the relevant tRNA) is reliably fatal before all the instances are replaced).
To clarify: I don’t think this is an x-risk, but it could wreak the biosphere in a way which would cause all sorts of problems.
They do claim to be trying to avoid it being able to survive in the wild:
Which is only mildly reassuring if this thing is going to be grown at scale, as the article suggests, since there is (I think?) potential for that modification to be reversed by mutation, given enough attempts and the fact that a modification that makes the cell die if it does not run into a certain amino acid seems like it should be selected against if that amino acid is ever scarce.
Followed up the containment procedure, and the tests seem inadequate to bet the biosphere on: