Not that important, but I'm curious, is the IGI  (Jennifer Doudna's team) Facebook page closed to all comments?   Or just closed to my comments?   

https://www.facebook.com/igisci/

If it's just me, that makes sense.    If it's closed to all comments, one might wonders why one would use a social networking platform to prohibit social networking?   

The article suggests, "This service is for anyone who is seriously interested in working on mitigating catastrophic biological risks, like the risk of an engineered pandemic."

It's great that there are skilled people addressing this threat, and it seems very likely they will be able to make a constructive contribution which reduces the risk of an engineered pandemic which threatens civilization itself.  The question I hope we are asking would be, is reducing the risk of an an engineered pandemic sufficient?  

The key issue with genetic engineering, or any technology, seems to be the scale of the power involved.   A simple example can help illustrate the issue of scale...

In WWII we threw conventional explosives at each other with  wild abandon all over the planet.   But because conventional explosives are of limited scale, and don't have the power to collapse the system as a whole, we could make this mistake, clean up the mess, try to learn the lessons, and continue on with further progress.  This is the paradigm which defines the past.

If we have a WWIII with nuclear weapons then cleaning up the mess, learning the lessons, and continuing with progress will take place, if it happens at all, over much longer time frames.  Nobody alive at the time of such a war will live to see any recovery that might eventually occur.  This is the paradigm which defines the future.

SUCCESS:  Imperfect management worked with conventional explosives because the scale of these weapons is limited, incapable of crashing the systems which are required for recovery. 

FAILURE:  Imperfect management will not work with nuclear weapons, because the scale of these powers is vastly greater, and can be credibly proposed capable of destroying the systems required for recovery.

If the power of genetic engineering is of existential scale such as is the case with nuclear weapons, then it would seem to follow that reducing the risk of a genetic global catastrophe is not sufficient.   Instead, mitigating the risk seems more like a game of Russian roulette where one gets away with repeatedly pulling the trigger, until the one bad day when one doesn't.

A simple rule governs much of human history.   If it's possible for something to go wrong, sooner or later it likely will.

I've tried to intelligently discuss issues like genetic engineering concerns with leaders and experts in the field.   As example, I spent a month posting every day on Jennifer Doudna's team on Facebook.   I ended this attempt at dialog only when they deleted all my posts without warning or explanation.

What I've learned from this experience is that anyone who has reached the level of expert in a field like genetic engineering has too large of a personal investment in that field to be objective and detached regarding the question of whether that field should exist.

Given how quickly technologies like CRISPR are becoming ever easier, ever cheaper and ever more accessible, I've come to the conclusion that bio-security will soon no longer be possible.    Revolutionary technologies like genetic engineering are being deliberately released in to the wild of the broad public (Doudna is clear and explicit about this goal) and as these powers spread throughout the population they will escape the reach of any attempts at effective management.

We can't control drugs, guns, or even reckless driving.  It puzzles me why we think we'll be able to control genetic engineering.   Bio-security seems a form of science clergy mythology to me honestly.