This is an essay that Tessa Alexanian and I published in Asimov Press a couple of months ago. Its aim is to introduce the basic challenges and context around the problem of screening DNA.
"In May 1995, a few weeks after the doomsday cult Shinrikyo Aum released sarin gas in the Tokyo subway—killing 13 people and injuring 5,500 more—two Ohio police officers knocked on Larry Wayne Harris’s door. Harris was a trained microbiologist and a former member of the white supremacist Aryan Nations group. The officers held a search warrant for one of the deadliest organisms in history: Yersinia pestis, the bacteria that causes bubonic plague.
A concerned employee at a laboratory supply company had called the Centers for Disease Control, or CDC, after fielding repeated calls from Harris asking when his samples of plague would arrive in the mail. When the CDC contacted Harris to ask about the plague samples, Harris claimed that he was doing research for the CIA to stop an “imminent invasion from Iraq of super-germ-carrying rats.” In the end, falsely asserting that he was working with the CIA was the only illegal thing Harris did—amounting to wire and mail fraud."
There is also cause for hope.
Even given these potential threats, for the time being, there is cause for hope. Immense progress has been made in synthesis screening in just the last five years. Two years ago, our hypothetical bioinformatician would likely have had to develop her own screening pipeline, as only one third-party screening tool was then available...
For those interested in contributing to a solution, we'll be posting some updated project ideas shortly.
