What’s more realistic in the near-term is that conventional gain-of-function research creates a terrible, conventional bacterium that’s more deadly than Ebola and resistant to all of the antibiotics that we mass produce.<p>If there was an advantage to being opposite-handed, some bacterium would have done it by now. The article even says that researchers <i>just</i> found out that e-coli can consume different-handed food.<p>I’m guessing that the first discovery in this area, the ambi-vory of e-coli, is not really all that unique. Medical and biological science is still just scratching the surface. They’re still cataloguing new components of human anatomy, things you could have found with a microscope centuries ago… It is highly unlikely that out of the universe of billions of years of bacteria, e-coli is the singular organism that went down this route to the furthest extent that was advantageous. The fact that they found one example with their limited resources tells me that this is not so improbable.<p>The fear-mongering just sounds like a funding push to me. The basic research will be enriching for humanity, if it doesn’t create the very thing from which it purports to save us, though I’m thinking this messaging is a bit out there. Could you engineer a super-bioweapon this way? Probably. But there are easier ways to do that with information that’s already in the textbooks.