My greatest concern is that the emergence of this technology without the appropriate public attention and international controls could lead to an unstable arms race.
Protein engineering is a technology of molecular machines - of molecular machines that are part of replicators - and so it comes from an area that already raises some of the issues that nanotechnology will raise.
An international race in the relevant technologies is getting under way at this point, not necessarily with an understanding of where that race leads in the long run, but strongly motivated by the short-term payoffs.
For many years I'd been concerned about technology and the future, and had been looking at what could be built with tools that we didn't have yet.
...Local prohibitions cannot block advances in military and commercial technology... Democratic movements for local restraint can only restrain the world's democracies, not the world as a whole.
Any powerful technology can be abused.