Question for bio folks here, and not to steal from the joy of this article but I've been recently curious how far are we from engineering something like a virus that targets a subset of the population (e.g. via specific genetic markers). This sort of tech being commoditized feels much much scary than the LLM safety talk - by a mile.
I'm going to play the devil's advocate and disagree.
The viral life-cycle comprises attachment/entry, replication and maturation/release. These stages are generally well understood to the point where 'disarmed' (replication-incompetent) viruses are routinely used as a delivery vehicle in molecular biology.
The first part, attachment/entry is directly related to protein-protein interactions (between the envelope protein of the virus and the entry receptor of the host cell). This particular interaction determines the tropism of the virus, that is, its capability to infect a particular type of cell. Examples include the interaction of gp120 protein of the HIV virus and CD4 of a helper T cell, or the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 and ACE2 of nasal ciliated cells.
The parent specifically asked about targeting a group of people - designing an envelope protein (or proteins) targeting a specific HLA haplotype would probably get you halfway there (this is not advice).
