How synthetic biology could wipe out humanity -- and how we can stop it

So there's about
seven and a half billion of us.

The World Health Organization tells us
that 300 million of us are depressed,

and about 800,000 people
take their lives every year.

A tiny subset of them choose
a profoundly nihilistic route,

which is they die in the act
of killing as many people as possible.

These are some famous recent examples.

And here's a less famous one.
It happened about nine weeks ago.

If you don't remember it,

it's because there's
a lot of this going on.

Wikipedia just last year
counted 323 mass shootings

in my home country, the United States.

Not all of those shooters were suicidal,

not all of them were maximizing
their death tolls,

but many, many were.

An important question becomes,
what limits do these people have?

Take the Vegas shooter.

He slaughtered 58 people.

Did he stop there because he'd had enough?

No, and we know this because
he shot and injured another 422 people

who he surely would have
preferred to kill.

We have no reason to think
he would have stopped 4,200.

In fact, with somebody this nihilistic,
he may well have gladly killed us all.

We don't know.

What we do know is this:

when suicidal murderers really go all in,

technology is the force multiplier.

Here's an example.

Several years back, there was a rash
of 10 mass school attacks in China

carried out with things
like knives and hammers and cleavers

because guns are really hard to get there.

By macabre coincidence, this last attack

occurred just hours before
the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut.

But that one American attack
killed roughly the same number of victims

as the 10 Chinese attacks combined.

So we can fairly say,
knife terrible, gun way worse,

and airplane massively worse,

as pilot Andreas Lubitz showed
when he forced 149 people

to join him in his suicide

smashing a plane into the French Alps.

And there are other examples of this.

And I'm afraid there are far more deadly
weapons in our near future than airplanes,

ones not made of meetal.

So let's consider the apocalyptic dynamics

that will ensue

if suicidal mass murder hitches a ride

on a rapidly advancing field

that for the most part
holds boundless promise for society.

Somewhere out there in the world,
there's a tiny group of people

who would attempt, however ineptly,

to kill us all if they
could just figure out how.

The Vegas shooter may or may not
have been one of them,

but with seven and a half billion of us,

this is a non-zero population.

There's plenty of suicidal
nihilists out there.

We've already seen that.

There's people with severe mood disorders
that they can't even control.

There are people who have just suffered
deranging traumas, etc. etc.

As for the corollary group,

its size was simply zero forever

until the Cold War,

when suddenly the leaders
of two global alliances

attained the ability to blow up the world.

The number of people
with actual doomsday buttons

has stayed fairly stable since then,

but I'm afraid it's about to grow,

and not just to three.

This is going off the charts.

I mean, it's going to look
like a tech business plan.

(Laughter)

And the reason is,

we're in the era
of exponential technologies,

which routinely
take eternal impossibilities

and make them the actual superpowers
of one or two living geniuses

and -- this is the big part --

then diffuse those powers
to more or less everybody.

Now, here's a benign example.

If you wanted to play checkers
with a computer in 1952,

you literally had to be that guy,

then commandeer one of the world's
19 copies of that computer,

then used your Nobel-adjacent brain
to teach it checkers.

That was the bar.

Today, you just need to know someone
who knows someone who owns a telephone,

because computing
is an exponential technology.

So is synthetic biology,

which I'll now refer to as synbio,

and in 2011, a couple of researchers
did something every bit as ingenious

and unprecedented as the checkers trick

with H5N1 flu.

This is a train that kills
up to 60 percent of the people it infects,

more than ebola,

but it is so uncontagious

that it's killed fewer
than 50 people since 2015.

So these researchers edited H5N1's genome

and made it every bit as deadly,
but also wildly contagious.

The news arm of one of
the world's top two scientific journals

said if this thing got out,
it would likely cause a pandemic

with perhaps millions of deaths,

and Dr. Paul Keim said

he could not think of an organism
as scary as this,

which is the last thing
I personally want to hear

from the chairman of the National
Science Advisory Board on Biosecurity.

And by the way, Dr. Keim also said this --

["I don't think anthrax
is scary at all compared to this."]

and he's also one of these.

[Anthrax expert]
(Laughter)

Now, the good news about the 2011 biohack

is that the people who did it
didn't mean us any harm.

They're virologists.

They believe they were advancing science.

The bad news is that technology
does not freeze in place,

and over the next few decades,

their feat will become trivially easy.

In fact, it's already way easier,
because as we learned yesterday morning,

just two years after they did their work,

the CRISPR system was harnessed
for genome editing.

This was a radical breakthrough
that makes gene editing massively easier,

so easy that CRISPR
is now taught in high schools.

And this stuff is moving
quicker than computing.

That slow, stodgy white line up there?

That's Moore's Law.

That shows us how quickly
computing is getting cheaper.

That steep, crazy fun green line,

that shows us how quickly
genetic sequencing is getting cheaper.

Now, gene editing
and synthesis and sequencing,

they're different disciplines,
but they're tightly related,

and they're all moving
in these headlong rates,

and the keys to the kingdom
are these tiny, tiny data files.

That is an excerpt of H5N1's genome.

The whole thing can fit
on just a few pages.

And yeah, don't worry, you can Google this
as soon as you get home.

It's all over the internet, right?

And the part that made it contagious

could well fit on a single post-it note,

and once a genius

makes a data file,

any idiot can copy it,

distribute it worldwide,

or print it.

And I don't mean print it on this,

but soon enough on this.

So let's imagine a scenario.

Let's say it's 2026,
to pick an arbitrary year,

and a brilliant virologist,
hoping to advance science

and better understand pandemics,

designs a new bug.

It's as contagious as chicken pox,

it's as deadly as ebola,

and it incubates for months and months
before causing an outbreak,

so the whole world can be infected
before the first sign of trouble.

Then, her university gets hacked,
and of course this is not science fiction.

In fact, just one recent US indictment

documents the hacking
of over 300 universities.

So that file with the bug's genome on it

spreads to the internet's dark corners,

and once a file is out there,
it never comes back.

Just ask anybody who runs
a movie studio or a music label.

So now maybe in 2026,

it would take a true genius
like our virologist

to make the actual living critter,

but 15 years later,

it may just take a DNA printer
you can find in any high school.

And if not? Give it a couple of decades.

So, a quick aside.

Remember this slide here?

Turn your attention to these two words.

If somebody tries this,

and is only 0.1 percent effective,
eight million people die.

That's 2,500 9/11s.