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Biotechnology risk is a form of existential risk that could come from biological sources, such as genetically engineered biological agents. The origin of such a high-consequence pathogen could be a deliberate release , an accidental release, or a naturally occurring event.
A chapter on biotechnology and biosecurity was published in Nick Bostrom's 2008 anthology Global Catastrophic Risks, which covered risks including as viral agents. Since then, new technologies like CRISPR and gene drives have been introduced.
While the ability to deliberately engineer pathogens has been constrained to high-end labs run by top researchers, the technology to achieve this is rapidly becoming cheaper and more widespread. Such examples include the diminishing cost of sequencing the human genome , the accumulation of large datasets of genetic information, the discovery of gene drives, and the discovery of CRISPR. Biotechnology risk is therefore a credible explanation for the Fermi paradox.