Chemo/radiation only kills the patients it was given to ( not entirely true - if the treatment caused mutations in the germline and the patient subsequently had children, the effects of the treatment might be passed on - but still very limited ).
Bacteria are the scariest when they've had the time to develop resistance to multiple different antibiotics.
Additionally, a bacterium that's engineered to be almost completely harmless evolving into a deadly strain in vivo is fairy unlikely in itself, especially if transcriptional errors can be reduced several orders of magnitude like GGP suggested.
Adding to that the option of hospitalisation or even home isolation to reduce risk of transmission, the risk of this resulting in some huge lethal epidemic must be pretty miniscule.
Software is essentially a cleanroom in the sense that the environment tends to be deterministic and man-made, and that is still riddled with unexpected accidents. Fortunately we can turn it off, fix the bug, and redeploy and the people involved in that tend to survive.
> Additionally, a bacterium that's engineered to be almost completely harmless evolving into a deadly strain in vivo is fairy unlikely in itself, especially if transcriptional errors can be reduced several orders of magnitude like GGP suggested.
The proposition was to engineer a bacteria that targets and infects a particular type of human cell to kill it. Creating medicines in a vat (like insulin) is different from releasing infectious agents in the wild. I was under the impression that this was obvious, but apparently not.
I never said we're at this stage now or even close to it, in fact I explicitly said the opposite:
>>>>Like I said, the technology is very far off from having real world applications like this. At the moment it feels like we're in the analogue of the 40s and 50s for conventional computing. The field is still just inventing the very basic building blocks. It's going to be very limited in use, wildly dangerous(look up mercury delay lines) and unreliable for decades to come
As for comparing creating medicines in a vat to using bacteria as an active treatment, you're the only one making that comparison. The paragraph you responded to wasn't about in vitro drug synthesis at all, so I'm not sure what your point is here. Yes, it's obviously different. I never said otherwise. It's perfectly possible to target bacteria to specific tissues; wild bacteria already do this.
My point was that a bacteria engineered to target a malignant tumour, to be very treatable with antibiotics or bacteriophage, and to have a strongly reduced rate of mutation, is extremely unlikely to evolve into a pandemic, and is likely to be much safer than chemotherapy and radiation.
