Had a thought that with increased understanding of the metabolic interactions in biological systems, we likely will be able to generate compounds which disrupt the metabolic cascade in only a single person (or at least a really compact phenotype, maybe family?) and the odds of it being detected are almost non-existent because the effect group is so limited we’d have no idea what to look for. Good bye Polonium, hello compound P215924.
Or even deeper into chaos land, imagine a viral load which bound only to cells expressing specific proteins, e.g. those for “schizophrenia/autism” and effected the same metabolic disruption. We could be an autocrat away from a 1900’s style eugenics massacre of everyone with those traits… for the good of all.
Leveling up even more, imagine a world war 3 fought not by nuclear weapons, but by viral payloads genetically matched to clinal traits or some other dumb racial construct.
The most depressing thing about these ideas is that they’ve largely already happened, and that we still champion the concept of mutually assured destruction as a requirement for peace. We have not just the propensity to unleash this kind of horror, but commit enormous resources to ensure our ability to do so.
The glint of damocles sword should scare the shit out of us, instead we make a sport out of saber rattling.