The business projections are extremely optimistic, from the chart they use. Prior to and including this year, there's one rate of growth. After this year, it seems to about double. If that's based on something besides wish and hope, that's very concerning.

I once consulted on a team of scientists developing novel pathogen detection for a fortune 500 company, and some of the questions that occurred to me as I read the descriptions of the several companies you provide were unsettling. How do you test pathogen detection systems? Where do you get snippets of DNA of organisms that are useful as agents of biological warfare? There's really only one way to do these things. Recently I considered buying some used equipment from labs that were either closing sites, or upgrading to newer devices. When I noted that they wouldn't sell the equipment unless you signed a document stating you would not use the equipment for products intended for human use, I refrained from bidding on any of it, despite very good prices.

Whole PCR systems were selling for $25. That's a tenth of the price of normal used equipment. I think some of it remained unsold. God only knows what the concerns about products for human use were based on, but I am apprised that NASA cannot even contemplate missions today that involve landing probes in places that potentially could harbor extraterrestrial life, because they cannot eliminate all contaminating life from their probes, and if there wasn't life there before NASA landed a probe, there would be afterwards.

The use of imagery from Dr. Strangelove was a sublime choice. Some of the most memorable moments of cinema for me, two of which you included specifically here, come from that film. I don't know how anyone could watch Slim Pickens ride a nuke while waving his cowboy hat like he was at a rodeo and not be scarred for life. It well illustrates how folks in this industry are not typical mentally of the rest of us. If they were, they wouldn't be so cheery about the prospect for growth in the CBRN industry.

I have to say I was deeply affected by two lines you wrote here.

"A hostile planet full of emerging markets and outstanding business opportunities just waiting to be exploited awaits our captains of industry. These mega-corporations are going to make a 'killing' from an increasingly hostile planet. You and I, well we just live here."

It reminds me that CRISPR is in the wild, and anybody and everybody can use it today. While people get more worked up about individual use, it is the employees of inhuman employers - corporations - that most concern me. Recently new research came to light in which Rhesus monkeys were altered by adding human mental functions to them in China. More than a decade ago some furor erupted when Australian researchers reported adding human fetal brain cells to mice. These are not chimerae that ordinary people would create.

Only inhuman corporations do such things. It is these sources of mad scientists that most concern me. They have the funding, the staff, and the business interest in such research. The original Blade Runner is a good warning about the devilish details of such business interests. The macabre 'toys' in the lab of the genetic designer's chess partner could not be more direct a caution that such research will constitute crimes against humanity at some point.

But that only matters to humanity.

Thanks!