Soto, who was the consultant for the telly show House told the DEF CON hacking conference in Las Vegas that the the eventual success of Joe Biden’s “cancer moonshot”, a US government-funded programme that’s aimed at finding vaccine-based treatments for cancer, would necessarily open up the potential for bioweapons of unimaginable destructive potential.

“The reason you haven’t heard much about bioweapons is that they’ve been held back by a pretty severe limitation, which is the potential for blowback,” Sotos said.

He added is hard for any attacker to use weaponised diseases because they spread beyond their initial distribution range: destroy your neighbouring nation and you destroy your own as well.

But the cancer moonshot is going to really drive new technologies to manipulate DNA because cancer is a disease of DNA. And the same exquisite targeting that allows it to attack only your cancer cells also overcomes the blowback potential for bioweapons, he said.

If you can build a treatment that can be restricted to attack only cells with the genetic flag for cancer, you can build a bioweapon that can be restricted to attack only individuals with a particular genetic flag revealing their ancestry, gender or family.

Of course, the tech is not there yet although the potential of such biohacking is possible. Sotos argued that its eventual refinement “is inevitable. There are going to be thousands of people doing this sort of genetic manipulation in the basements of hospitals”.

But a plausible attack doesn’t just mean mass fatalities. “There’s some stuff worse than dying,” Sotos said. “And I call that hell.”

For example a militant vegetarian group could make a weapon which makes people unable to eat meat. You could manipulate women’s DNA so that they are so light sensitive they have to wear a burkha.  Apple could hardwire its reality distortion field into users brains forcing them to upgrade, rather than just using the current brainwashing techniques.

Sotos cited genes for intractable diarrhea, massive weight gain, total baldness and “an intense fishy body odour” which could make your future pretty miserable if your enemies got the “make him like his mother” bio-weapon.