spaf@purdue.edu
Date: Wed, 15 Mar 2017 15:29:40 -0400
In 1982, Frank Herbert wrote The White Plague, a novel about how a person creates a genetically-engineered disease that targets only women. He intends it to only affect Ireland, but of course it gets out and sweeps the world. The novel describes some of the consequences. Although not as compelling as Dune, Herbert manages to conjure up a believable set of consequences of a species threatened with extinction.
I remember reading it and thinking it was implausible (at the time), but that the difficulty in targeting a particular subset of the population is likely to be a problem. Given some of the genetic diversity and distribution we don't fully understand, and the ability of many pathogens to undergo change, any targeted microbe might well end up killing far more than the attacker intends.
Bugs in the bug could well spell our doom.