Uncontrolled Replication

Biological Dominoes Await Their Prime Mover

Sometime around 1995, a mutation occurred in someone’s pet Florida crayfish in an aquarium in Germany.

The mutation enabled females to reproduce through parthenogenesis — eggs fertilising without sperm. This occurs rarely in some reptiles when no mate is available, but had never been seen in crayfish.

A new species of crayfish was created, one in which all individuals share identical DNA. This clonal capability appears to have emerged from two different crayfish species being placed in a tank together.

Presumably the human caretaker, startled by a tank of rapidly multiplying clones, dumped them into a waterway. They have since spread across Europe as a highly invasive species, eating everything in their path. A single individual can produce an entire colony, and they have now reached Japan and Madagascar. Soon they will colonise practically every corner of the world.

This was an exceedingly unlikely accident of hybridisation in captivity. But it would be relatively trivial for someone to perform similar edits to other, more disruptive species on purpose.

Why would someone do that? People have been writing clever computer viruses for sociopathic ego validation for decades. More recently, for profit.

Advances in Synthetic Biology now make the creation of nuisance species accessible to poorly-trained ‘script kiddies’.

Today, hospitals and hotels are regularly locked down by cyber highwaymen who demand cryptocurrency to decrypt files. Soon, bio highwaymen will create chaotic problems and sell the solution — a gene-drive terminator — shaking down farmers and local governments.

Biological problems are uniquely self-perpetuating: regardless of human intervention, they gather momentum on their own.

Tracking and mitigating such developments is essential to preserving our ecosystems. Failure could constitute an existential risk to humanity, let alone to the countless other species we share the planet with.

We urgently need international biosecurity institutions with the resources and mandate to protect us from these emerging threats.