Tournament: greenhill | Round: 1 | Opponent: immaculate heart ss | Judge: andrew halverson
Eliminating CRISPR Patents causes biohacking.
Zettler 19, Patricia J., Christi J. Guerrini, and Jacob S. Sherkow. "Regulating genetic biohacking." Science 365.6448 (2019): 34-36. (Ohio State University Moritz School of Law)Elmer
Genetic biohacking is also potentially subject to U.S. laws that are enforced by private rather than government actors. These may fill some of the gaps in public regulators’ ambit (9). Patent owners, for example, can impose ethical restrictions on licensees, such as the Broad Institute’s licenses for its CRISPR patents to Bayer (formerly Monsanto), with conditions that Bayer avoid research activities that are potentially harmful to public health, including tobacco research and germline editing (10). Such license restrictions can—and should—be used to police commercial manufacturers of genome-editing kits and reagents popular in biohacking communities, just as they have previously been used to prevent activities that pose national security, environmental, or public health risks (11). Even without a license in place, patent owners can enforce restrictions through threats of patent infringement litigation against any recalcitrant biohackers or manufacturers of biohacking products. A similar model was proposed as an attempt to restrict the use of “gene drive technology”—inheritable versions of CRISPR designed to drive a specific allele through generations of a population (12). Beyond patents, people injured by genetic biohacking materials could potentially bring tort law claims against biohackers and component suppliers to seek compensation for their injuries. A person injured while using a DIY CRISPR kit, for example, would likely be able to sue the seller of the kit —a potentially strong deterrent to marketers of unsafe biohacking materials.
Expanded Biohacking risks Bioterrorism.
Wikswo 14, J., S. Hummel, and V. Quaranta. "The Biohacker: A Threat to National Security." CTC Sentinel 7.1 (2014). (a biological physicist at Vanderbilt University. He was born in Lynchburg, Virginia, United States. Wikswo is noted for his work on biomagnetism and cardiac electrophysiology.)Elmer
The ability of non-scientists to create and deploy a biological weapon highlights the emergence of a new threat, the “biohacker.” “Biohacking” is not necessarily malicious and could be as innocent as a beer enthusiast altering yeast to create a better brew. Yet the same technology used by a benign biohacker could easily be transformed into a tool for the disgruntled and disenfranchised12 to modify existing or emerging biological warfare agents and employ them as bioterrorism. A 2005 Washington Post article by Steve Coll and Susan Glasser presciently stated that “one can find on the web how to inject animals, like rats, with pneumonic plague and how to extract microbes from infected blood…and how to dry them so that they can be used with an aerosol delivery system, and thus how to make a biological weapon. If this information is readily available to all, is it possible to keep a determined terrorist from getting his hands on it?”13 This article argues that the biohacker is a real and existing threat by examining evasive biohacking strategies and limitations of current detection methods. The article finds that more active measures are required to stem the growing, long-term threat of modified BW agents employed by individuals. The biohacker is not only a credible threat, but also one that can be checked through improved detection and by disrupting BW agent delivery methods.
Bioterrorism causes Extinction – overcomes any conventional defense.
Walsh 19, Bryan. End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World. Hachette Books, 2019. (Future Correspondent for Axios, Editor of the Science and Technology Publication OneZero, Former Senior and International Editor at Time Magazine, BA from Princeton University)Elmer
I’ve lived through disease outbreaks, and in the previous chapter I showed just how unprepared we are to face a widespread pandemic of flu or another new pathogen like SARS. But a deliberate outbreak caused by an engineered pathogen would be far worse. We would face the same agonizing decisions that must be made during a natural pandemic: whether to ban travel from affected regions, how to keep overburdened hospitals working as the rolls of the sick grew, how to accelerate the development and distribution of vaccines and drugs. To that dire list add the terror that would spread once it became clear that the death and disease in our midst was not the random work of nature, but a deliberate act of malice. We’re scared of disease outbreaks and we’re scared of terrorism—put them together and you have a formula for chaos. As deadly and as disruptive as a conventional bioterror incident would be, an attack that employed existing pathogens could only spread so far, limited by the same laws of evolution that circumscribe natural disease outbreaks. But a virus engineered in a lab to break those laws could spread faster and kill quicker than anything that would emerge out of nature. It can be designed to evade medical countermeasures, frustrating doctors’ attempts to diagnose cases and treat patients. If health officials manage to stamp out the outbreak, it could be reintroduced into the public again and again. It could, with the right mix of genetic traits, even wipe us off the planet, making engineered viruses a genuine existential threat. And such an attack may not even be that difficult to carry out. Thanks to advances in biotechnology that have rapidly reduced the skill level and funding needed to perform gene editing and engineering, what might have once required the work of an army of virologists employed by a nation-state could soon be done by a handful of talented and trained individuals. Or maybe just one. When Melinda Gates was asked at the South by Southwest conference in 2018 to identify what she saw as the biggest threat facing the world over the next decade, she didn’t hesitate: “A bioterrorism event. Definitely.”2 She’s far from alone. In 2016, President Obama’s director of national intelligence James Clapper identified CRISPR as a “weapon of mass destruction,” a category usually reserved for known nightmares like nuclear bombs and chemical weapons. A 2018 report from the National Academies of Sciences concluded that biotechnology had rewritten what was possible in creating new weapons, while also increasing the range of people capable of carrying out such attacks.3 That’s a fatal combination, one that plausibly threatens the future of humanity like nothing else. “The existential threat that would be most available for someone, if they felt like doing something, would be a bioweapon,” said Eric Klien, founder of the Lifeboat Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to helping humanity survive existential risks. “It would not be hard for a small group of people, maybe even just two or three people, to kill a hundred million people using a bioweapon. There are probably a million people currently on the planet who would have the technical knowledge to pull this off. It’s actually surprising that it hasn’t happened yet.”