Viruses are known to sometimes jump from one species to another, so what is different about how they are encouraged to do so in a lab? Are they doing anything but forcing it to happen faster?
I am not a biologist and this is wild speculation, but I wonder if, when you force pathogens to pass from one host species to another to another to another, are you selecting them not just for making each individual jump, but for being able to jump from any species to any other more easily? You would then end up with a meta-infective virus able to mutate fast enough to spread through the whole animal kingdom and outpace any attempts at vaccination.
Fortunately such a meta virus that can kill everything is probably difficult to produce from the set of amino acids shared in common to life on earth.
(This is essentially what a gray goo scenario is—life on earth is probably not maximally efficient and it is probably possible to build full synthetic organisms on the scale of cells that self replicate with optimized internal components)
Viruses are known to sometimes jump from one species to another, so what is different about how they are encouraged to do so in a lab? Are they doing anything but forcing it to happen faster?
I am not a biologist and this is wild speculation, but I wonder if, when you force pathogens to pass from one host species to another to another to another, are you selecting them not just for making each individual jump, but for being able to jump from any species to any other more easily? You would then end up with a meta-infective virus able to mutate fast enough to spread through the whole animal kingdom and outpace any attempts at vaccination.
They are forcing it to happen a lot faster, yes.
Fortunately such a meta virus that can kill everything is probably difficult to produce from the set of amino acids shared in common to life on earth. (This is essentially what a gray goo scenario is—life on earth is probably not maximally efficient and it is probably possible to build full synthetic organisms on the scale of cells that self replicate with optimized internal components)