Sure, thousands of people on campus would be sniffling, but the Secret Service probably wouldn’t think anything was amiss. The only person in the world with this DNA sequence was the president of the United States, who was scheduled to speak at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government later that week.
This secondary sequence would trigger a fast-acting neuro-destructive disease that produced memory loss and, eventually, death. This would change when the virus crossed paths with cells containing a very specific DNA sequence, a sequence that would act as a molecular key to unlock secondary functions that were not so benign. These particles would spread around campus in an exponentially growing chain reaction that was-other than the mild fever and some sneezing-absolutely harmless.
Later that night, Samantha had a slight fever and was shedding billions of virus particles. Some party drug-all she got, it seemed, was the flu. By the time Samantha finished dressing, the tab had started to dissolve, and a few strands of foreign genetic material had entered the cells of her nasal mucosa.
Thinking it contained a new synthetic psychedelic she had ordered online, she slipped a tablet into her left nostril that evening, then walked over to her closet. Two days later, Samantha, a sophomore majoring in government at Harvard University, received the package. Three days after that, a package of 10‑milligram, fast-dissolving microtablets was dropped in a FedEx envelope and handed to a courier. Less than a minute later, an Icelandic synthesis start‑up won the contract to turn the 5,984-base-pair blueprint into actual genetic material. His design was quickly forwarded to a thriving Shanghai-based online bio-marketplace. But this time the winner, GeneGenie27, was actually human-a 20-year-old Columbia University undergrad with a knack for virology. Within 12 hours, 243 designs were submitted, most by these computerized expert systems. These algorithms were getting quite good, now winning nearly a third of the challenges. So people just got to work, as did the automated computer programs that had been written to “auto-evolve” new designs. Written in SBOL, an open-source language popular with the synthetic-biology crowd, it seemed like a standard vaccine request. The design specification itself raised no red flags. Later, 99Virions’ log files would show that Cap’n Capsid’s IP address originated in Panama, although this was likely a fake. Plus, Capsid was offering $500 for the winning design, not a bad sum for a few hours’ work. Cap’n Capsid might have been some consultant to the pharmaceutical industry, and his challenge just another attempt to understand the radically shifting R&D landscape-really, he could have been anyone-but the problem was interesting nonetheless. So, in November of 2016, when a first-time visitor with the handle Cap’n Capsid posted a challenge on the viral-design site 99Virions, no alarms sounded his was just one of the 100 or so design requests submitted that day. No international body had yet been created to watch over them. What people did with these bio-designs was anybody’s guess. Diagnostic agents, vaccines, antimicrobials, even designer psychoactive drugs-all appeared on the menu. Soon enough, these sites were flooded with requests that went far beyond cancer. With some retooling, they were ideal vehicles for gene delivery. Medically speaking, it all made perfect sense: Nature had done eons of excellent design work on viruses. By early 2015, as personalized gene therapies for end-stage cancer became medicine’s cutting edge, virus-design Web sites began appearing, where people could upload information about their disease and virologists could post designs for a customized cure. In 2008, casual DNA-design competitions with small prizes arose then in 2011, with the launch of GE’s $100 million breast-cancer challenge, the field moved on to serious contests. With the fundamental tools of genetic manipulation-tools that had cost millions of dollars not 10 years earlier-dropping precipitously in price, the crowd-sourced design of biological agents was just the next logical step. Pretty soon, the hunt for extraterrestrial life, the development of self-driving cars, and the folding of enzymes into novel proteins were being done this way. Initially, we crowd-sourced the design of T‑shirts () and the writing of encyclopedias (), but before long the trend started making inroads into the harder sciences. It began innocuously, in the early 2000s, when businesses started to realize that highly skilled jobs formerly performed in-house, by a single employee, could more efficiently be crowd-sourced to a larger group of people via the Internet.
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