Opinion: Covid-19 is scary. Could a rogue scientist use CRISPR to conjure another pandemic?

STAT March 26, 2020
Neal Baer

Uncertainty breeds panic. As Covid-19 spreads across the planet, stock markets have crashed in response to the economic impact this virus will wreak on the global economy and cities around the world are shutting down.

We shouldn’t really be surprised by SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus. We’ve seen this scenario play out before with Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). In his book “Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic,” David Quammen warned us years ago about the dangers of animal viruses jumping into humans. It was only a matter of time, he wrote, that our destruction of forests and jungles would put us in contact with bats and other wild species that harbor viruses...

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