In the 2016 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community statement United States Director of National Intelligence, James R. Clapper, named<unk>  as a potential weapon of mass destruction, stating that<unk>  conducted by countries with regulatory or ethical standards "different from Western countries" probably increases the risk of the creation of harmful biological agents or products. According to the statement the broad distribution, low cost, and accelerated pace of development of this technology, its deliberate or unintentional misuse might lead to far-reaching economic and national security implications. For instance technologies such as CRISPR could be used to make "killer mosquitoes" that cause plagues that wipe out staple crops. According to a September 2016 report by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics, the simplicity and low cost of tools to edit the genetic code will allow amateursor "biohackers"to perform their own experiments, posing a potential risk from the release of genetically modified bugs. The review also found that the risks and benefits of modifying a person's<unk> and having those changes pass on to future generationsare so complex that they demand urgent ethical scrutiny. Such modifications might have unintended consequences which could harm not only the child, but also their future children, as the altered gene would be in their sperm or eggs. In 2001 Australian researchers Ronald Jackson and Ian Ramshaw were criticized for publishing a paper in the Journal of Virology that explored the potential control of mice, a major pest in Australia, by infecting them with an altered mousepox virus that would cause infertility as the provided sensitive information could lead to the manufacture of biological weapons by potential bioterrorists who might use the knowledge to create vaccine resistant strains of other pox viruses, such as smallpox, that could affect humans. Furthermore, there are additional concerns about the ecological risks of releasing gene drives into wild populations.
Genome editing
Gene delivery
Hair cloning
Human cloning
Gene doping
Therapeutic gene modulation
Gene therapy
Osseoincorporation