Gene Editing—The CRISPR Tool

The technology of CRISPR has emerged as a transformative tool in genome editing, offering precision, efficiency, and accessibility across various sectors, including medicine and agriculture. While its benefits are profound, the potential for misuse poses serious biosecurity challenges. The intensive work done during the COVID-19 pandemic in past years exposed the capabilities of this evolving technology to potential terrorists and increased the capability to realize its objectives to many potential misusers. Thus, using this technique to create bio-weapons becomes a real potential threat. Gene editing, using CRISPR technology and its variants, creates serious concerns and a potential to develop a significant threat in the post-COVID-19 era. This chapter describes the CRISPR capabilities. It further examines how bio-hackers will be able to harness them in order to create a future bio-threat. The chapter highlights the relative ease with which terrorists will be able to engineer pathogens with enhanced harmful traits.