No one is saying this. Things -can- go wrong, and they do, in any industry. Do you want glass production to shut down because there could be a coke spill along a shipment lane? It's been established, though, that these salmon are A: unlikely to escape, and B: not going to create a breeding population if they -do- escape, due to evolutionary disadvantage.
I didn't say anything about the salmon escaping, so I'm unsure of what you're responding to here.
Also, we're not making new proteins here. Even if we were it would be extremely unlikely that we make something, accidentally, that acts as a prion. We'd be more likely to make a self-replicating nanoswarm in the smoke-stack of a coal powerplant in Venezuela. If you've looked at proteins, they're very complex beasts. We're only on the very edge of being able to make custom proteins, and they're usually pretty useless because it takes a tremendous amount of computational power to simulate them.
Yes, I have looked at proteins.
Okay, how exactly do you know all of this stuff about the probabilities of accidentally doing something that has never been done accidentally or intentionally before? Are you a molecular biologist or something? I don't even see how scientists could know what you're claiming to know; we didn't even know that prions existed until recently. You appear to me to be pulling stuff out of your ass in a desperate attempt to assert your point by any means whatsoever, truthful or not.
A salient difference between creating a prion and creating a self-replicating nanoswarm is that creating a prion is something that
has actually happened before. And coincidentally the problem was spread by someone saying "What could possibly go wrong if we feed chopped up cows to other cows?"
Nothing could go wrong because proteins are, y'know, super-duper complex? This is exactly the kind of reasoning I'm referring to by people saying that the ship cannot sink.
As for proteins not normally found in nature... Well, I'm not going to claim I have any formal education on this, but if they had any effect on anything, why wouldn't they be found in nature? There are animals out there that produce deadly neurotoxins as a backup plan in case they get eaten by another animal. Just how are humans going to top that?
We don't even know why left-handed amino acids don't exist. There are all kinds of substances that humans create or that are accidentally created by human actions that are lethal but aren't found in nature. Take strontium 90 for example or, hell, most of the products of chemical engineering.
You guys are using the most utterly sloppy reasoning to try to reassure yourselves that nothing can go wrong.