5 ms·
The design was never the hard part. You still have to make the thing. Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implemen
by timr 2mo ago
The design was never the hard part. You still have to make the thing.
Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.
- estearum 2mo agoYou can literally send an email to one of hundreds of companies that do exactly this. They have no way of knowing whether you're asking them to synthesize a virus or a drug candidate or what.
- transcriptase 2mo agoYes in much the same way you can literally build a rocket and go to the moon. You may be skipping a few of the involved steps.
- estearum 2mo agoWhat involved steps are those? You email the RNA strand (a text file) to a lab along with some money. The lab converts that information into a physical object (read: virus) and sends it back to you in the mail. What step is missing?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoThe part where that service doesn't exist and isn't close to existing.
- estearum 2mo agohttps://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custom-mrna-synthesis https://www.genewiz.com/public/services/gene-synthesis/custo... Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist. And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens? Answers: No, no, and no.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoReally? mRNA? What kind of meme nonsense is this? You really don't know anything about these protocols do you. Still, even though your estimates are silly, they aren't silly enough to change the conclusion that this isn't a comforting security barrier, so I suppose we agree on that much.
- transcriptase 2mo agoI can’t even bring myself to explain how wrong this person is.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- consensus1 2mo agoOne of the easiest and most effective AI regulations would be to simply require all these labs to run all incoming requests through a suite of the most advanced models asking if the request is likely to be a pathogenic agent.
- estearum 2mo agoYes probably true. Unfortunately we need only one defector lab to severely degrade the overall effectiveness of this approach (leaving aside the effectiveness of the detection models themselves).
- dgellow 2mo agoThat’s one interesting way to generate demand for AI vendors if the AI bet doesn’t pay off /s
- wat10000 2mo agoWho’s going to simply require that? There are ~200 sovereign nations on the planet, they’re not all going to do it, or have effective enforcement if they do.
- ben_w 2mo agoThis is the kind of thing that would be relatively easy to convince nations to sign up to*; actually enforcing, I suspect you're right. * there's not an obvious benefit to being the one nation that says "you know what? We want to be known as 'the nation whose biolab insecurity wrecked the world', because taking blame works out so well for everyone.", though I'm fairly sure a large portion of the world will be totally willing to wargame the impact of hosting a lab as a deadman switch so nobody else attacks them first…
- demibabs 2mo agoWould they not be like “hmmm this one looks kinda similar to a known virus” They really just synthesize anything for you?
- estearum 2mo agoI'm sure some of them would, but they're not required by law to do so. And historically the way you'd do this is by actual fragment/substring matches. But these are novel viruses now. So what you really want to do is try to predict whether a novel genome is pathogenic... which is itself obviously a very hard technical problem.
- Enginerrrd 2mo agoThat’s not too much a concern I think. Most of the real pathogenic qualities result from known genes. Inventing a totally novel virus that is also pathogenic is basically science fiction right now. Splicing together known components that could be bad in combination is closer to current technology.
- smallmancontrov 2mo agoNo, of course not. In 2010 I went to a guest lecture from a guy who worked on the scanning algorithm for IDT. A few years later, there was a minor scandal when someone in a nearby lab used a personal credit card for a purchase and got a big shared account locked. So not only were they scanning the content of synthesis orders, they were validating payment back to labs. In 2010, when HTTPS was rare and facebook didn't even offer it.
- estearum 2mo ago"There are websites where you can just buy prescription drugs online?" You: "No, of course not. I once went on a website to buy a drug, and they made go to a doctor and get a prescription and send it to them"
- smallmancontrov 2mo ago
- timr 2mo agoNo, you literally cannot. Synthesizing a stretch of DNA is trivial, and what you can send away for [1]. Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial. [1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.
- rbliss 2mo agoYet.
- timr 2mo agoNo, the sophomoric LLM argument does not apply here. The world is not a big computer. The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master. So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is going to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence. Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.
- estearum 2mo agoYour example of how easy it is to control outputs behind specialized knowledge is a thing (recreational drugs) that exist in mass quantities every place on the planet at consumer-accessible prices?
- timr 2mo agoNo. My argument is that many things in the world are hard in a way that computers cannot solve, and the existence of LLMs does not change that. Synthetic biology is one of those things.
- haxiomic 2mo agoThere’s YouTubers who do this [0]. I’d argue estimate the risks of a synthetically induced pandemic of massive impact this century are very high - [0] https://youtu.be/aoczYXJeMY4?is=OqObeGzZB6AKL0Jk https://youtu.be/aoczYXJeMY4?is=OqObeGzZB6AKL0Jk
- wat10000 2mo ago“There is another theory which states that this has already happened.” But the next one (or the first one, if that one wasn’t manmade) will probably be much worse.
- 1attice 2mo agoYou get that the one we had was really really bad for a lot of people, right? A friend of mine buried five members of her immediate family. I feel like we are all somehow memoryhole-ing this massive trauma that nothing in this batshit era makes any sense without remembering. Specifically, I wonder if the thirst for a machine god has anything to do with the activation of the Rapture narrative in the collective unconscious, which we then empower by forgetting its trigger. Call Joseph Campbell
- wat10000 2mo agoI know it was, but you also get that it wasn't all that bad for most people, right? It occupied this weird middle ground where it was bad enough to kill a pretty significant number of people, but not so bad that we're all shell-shocked survivors suppressing the trauma of burying loved ones. And nobody wants to characterize it like that. Half the people want to act like it was nothing, and the other half want to act like it was the worst catastrophe to afflict the world in modern times. I did get pretty suck for a few weeks, recovered. My wife ended up with strange nerve damage that had her using a cane in her 40s for about six months, but she got back to normal. A friend got hit by Long Covid and plans out how to nap during the work day so he can make it to quitting time. But I don't know anybody who died from it. I am NOT saying nobody died from it, just that it wasn't so widespread that everybody had direct experience of death, like would be the case in something like a smallpox epidemic. The US saw over a million dead, which is a hell of a lot, but in a country of 350 million it's not "everybody comes out with massive trauma" a lot. Plagues get a lot worse than that. Bodies weren't left to rot because nobody was left alive to bury them. Nobody straggled into the next town because it wiped out the entire population of their home town. A few years later, lots of people say with a straight face that it was no big deal. Nobody who went through the Black Death was saying it was no big deal a few years later. I'm afraid Covid set us up for the next pandemic to be far worse than it has to be, because it was just mild enough that a substantial number of people are able to dismiss it. And that attitude is going to carry over the next time some novel virus starts spreading around the world. And that one might kill half the population instead of <1%. Edit: and I want to emphasize that this is not a memory-hole thing. In December 2020, one third of Americans polled said that Covid was no more of a threat than the seasonal flu (https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2020-12/topline_npr_misinformation_poll_123020.pdf https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/...). A lot of other polls tell a similar story: right in the worst months of the pandemic, a large minority of Americans still thought it was no big deal. That's while it was going on, not in retrospect.