The app for independent voices
I can illustrate my thinking with a case study. A few years back, my sister had an ear infection that got so far out of hand it started actively gnawing its way through her mastoid process toward her brain. She said it was by far the most intense pain she ever experienced - and she's given birth to three kids. The bacterium couldn't be cultured and the first round of broad spectrum antibiotics they tried didn't work. Fortunately, the second round of antibiotics worked - so I didn't have to box up my Nanopore and fly across the country to find out which antibiotic resistance genes the damn thing had. If I imagine the alternate scenario where the second antibiotic didn't work and we found out a universally resistant pseudomonas superbug was about to kill my sister, I would have campaigned for access to any phages that might conceivably help. If phage scientists had responded with "sorry, but we don't have pure enough stocks yet," I would have argued that my sister's ear canal was already awash in endotoxins - so what possible harm could it do to try adding a drop of crude phage stock to the existing ocean of bacteria.
Aside from the life-or-death quick-and-dirty topical application scenarios, there's also a broader public policy problem to wrestle with. Ever since the Asilomar Conference, bioethicists have been wringing their hands about how to guard against vague, ill-defined, abstruse hypothetical risks. The hand-wringing artificially stoked inordinate public fear about risks that never materialized. An old made-for-TV movie called "The Henderson Monster" puts the overblown hysteria on unintetionally hilarious display:
And it's not just some quaint bit of history - Greenpeace's monstrous current campaign to blind half a million children by denying them access to golden rice rests on exactly this same type of unsubstantiated "but Frankenstein!" thinking.
In the US, it takes the FDA many months to carefully consider authorizing updated Covid booster doses. This hasn't had the intended effect of promoting public confidence in the idea that the FDA employs careful high standards - it has instead had the disastrous blowback effect of making most of the public think the updated Covid booster doses must be dangerous, ineffective, or unnecessary. In 2023, 47% of Americans got the low-bar flu boost while only 23% got the high-bar Covid boost. Setting standards artificially high without clear rationales based on predictable known risks can be dangerous too.