6 ms·

>We now have the tools to create viruses in labs. What happens when someone creates a virus that spreads extremely easily, has greater than 50% mortality, and h

by JunkDNA 13y ago

>We now have the tools to create viruses in labs. What happens when someone creates a virus that spreads extremely easily, has greater than 50% mortality, and has an incubation period of several weeks? Something like this, released by a bad guy and without the world having time to prepare, could wipe out more than half the population in a matter of months. Misguided biotech could effectively end the world as we know it Sam is a smart guy, so I really don't want to come off as sounding like a jerk here, but this grossly underestimates the technical feasibility of creating such a virus. Computer folks routinely overestimate how much biologists actually know about the systems we study. We know jack about how the vast majority of biology works. We have the most fleeting glimpses of understanding that are regularly crushed by the complexity of dynamic systems with nested feedback loops and multiple semi-overlapping redundancies. I won't say it's impossible, but we don't even know enough to know whether the three things: high mortality, long incubation, and ease of transmission are even possible. While we can imagine it, there might be biological and epidemiological factors that prevent such a thing from existing. This also commits the logical fallacy of ascribing superpowers to the bad guys cooking up viruses while assuming the good guys are sitting on their duffs letting bad things happen. H5N1 was a pretty good example of international collaboration. There were academic competitors and industrial labs working around the clock collaboratively on it in the early days before much was known. Whole vaccine divisions at pharmas were all over it. If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures. I'm not arguing that pandemics aren't something we should worry about. Europeans were almost wiped out by the plague and in modern times Africa has been decimated by HIV. These are real problems that the human race has faced and will likely face again, irrespective of lab-created stuff. Biotechnology is the primary mechanism by which we're going to be able to survive when the next one comes, wherever it comes from. EDIT: Fixed wrong word usage in 2nd sentence.

jamesaguilar 13y ago
So you mean "overestimate" in the second paragraph right? Because the rest of it reads that way.
- jasallen 13y ago
  specifically the first "underestimate" is wrong, the second is correct. :-)
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  Yes, thanks, edited.
  - jamesaguilar 13y ago
    The first one is still wrong. "Underestimate the technical feasibility" means, "They think it is less feasible (harder) than it actually is." I think you mean the opposite: they think it is easier than it actually is. I.e. you're trying to say it's harder than we think. You can say instead: "underestimates the difficulty" or "overestimates the feasibility."
    - nswanberg 13y ago
      James, you are correct but I think JunkDNA's point is still being made effectively. In fact this was likely an intentional statement meant to illustrate the difficulty involved in intentionally creating a thing--if an error could be easily introduced in a handful of words, how likely is it that a malicious DNA creator will get their supervirus working exactly right?
      - jamesaguilar 13y ago
        That is very optimistic of you. Personally I think it was more likely that it was simply a typing error, as he has acknowledged. That's fine, we all make them. I had some difficulty parsing what he was trying to say, which is the only reason I brought it up. The rest of your argument is very far fetched. One person's difficulty formulating a sentence could not be less related to biologists' collective capabilities in tailoring viruses.
        nswanberg 13y ago
        "The rest of your argument is very far fetched." I have apparently underestimated my ability to craft a joke.
qq66 13y ago
The scenario might seem far-fetched today, but what if biotech made the same kind of progress over the next 50 years as computer technology has over the last 50? A human-engineered super virus might seem as unlikely to a virologist today as an iPhone would seem to Alan Turing.
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  I address this in my second paragraph. You can't assume the advances all happen on the negative side (the ability to perfectly engineer a deadly virus) without corresponding advances on the positive side (enough understanding of biology to combat new viruses).
  - gknoy 13y ago
    I think you have a mistaken assumption, though, namely that advances in CREATING dangerous things will be paralleled by advances in the ability to prevent bad things. Nuclear weapons have been around for over 50 yeras. We do not yet have __in place__ any ability (other than treaties and fear) to prevent a nuclear holocaust. Missile shields, "Star Wars" -- all of those are of questionable capability, and none of them are deployed. Given that our only way of preventing nuclear winter is to agree not to launch (and go to war to prevent Bad Guys from getting them?), an option which is not available when dealing with a disease, I'm not optimistic about our future ability to prevent a superbug from wiping out humans.
    - kolinko 13y ago
      I think the analogy is broken. In case of nuclear armrace it's a different technology that destroys (bombs), and a different that saves (missile protection?). In case of genetics it's one and the same - engineering organisms.
      - waps 13y ago
        The thing that defeats viruses is evolutionary pressure, not "engineering organisms". At this point in time I'd still say that we only have the ability to reintroduce old disappeared pathogens. We do not actually have the ability to design new effective viruses.
seiji 13y ago
ascribing superpowers to the bad guys Grab a copy of The White Plague. It's an entertaining read.
- Pxtl 13y ago
  There's a science fiction novel waiting to be written that incorporates the ideas from The White Plague and Ribofunk and the 21st century IT world. Imagine the genetically-engineered counterpart to the CryptoLocker ransomware. Private and public antivirus research. MacAffee for your white blood cells. Imagine ad-supported biotech. The internet has created a sort of commoditization of fraud. Scam spam, ad-ware, spyware, etc, often run by companies operating right out in public. Professionals openly discuss security from both sides of the line. Imagine this sort of bizarre professional attitude in the a low-cost engineered-virus biotech field. What would the Windows of this world be - a suite of programmable bacteria with a solid API?
  - seiji 13y ago
    Imagine ad-supported biotech. Don't you dare.
    - blacksmith_tb 13y ago
      Too late - Paul McAuley's _The White Devils_ has ad-covered GM butterflies in it, for example...
castillowl 13y ago
His scenario is hypothetical with quick estimates of mortality and incubation period. This virus has been created in the lab and the formula is known. How is he then underestimating the technical feasibility? >If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures. This is naive. Understanding of weapons != Knowledge of countermeasures (since were talking about logical fallacy)
- x3c 13y ago
  E.g. Atom bombs It's a weapon that has no counter measures. None that I'm aware of, except prohibition.
  - TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
    but... lasers? ;)
HillRat 13y ago
Starting from scratch, sure (everyone always seems to think of DNA and RNA as super-Legos; I blame Hollywood), but I think it's worth being at least slightly afraid of things like lab-engineered influenzas, given that flu is a very small, well-studied, and easily mutated RNA virus. Cooking up a more deadly (and, yeah, I recognize that we haven't proven that the Unholy Grail of "high mortality, long incubation, and ease of transmission" even exists in any single wild-type bug) influenza -- even if we don't necessary know the methods of action -- isn't a big lift as far as major bioengineering projects go. If you're not trying to create a "supervirus," but just shotgun a series of viruses to create maximum health disruption, then (as you know!) it's already within our technical grasp. Expensive, time-consuming, and probably failing 90% of the time, but accessible nonetheless. Considering how bad our hit rate is on the trivalents, I could see a plague of multiple, high-lethality strains with a wide variety of hemagglutinin and neuramidase antigenic shifts as a plausible bioterror scenario. It's not a doomsday scenario, since we have such good reporting and analysis infrastructure, and much of the heavy engineering on the problem (like alternate vaccine production methods) was done during the earlier bird flu outbreaks, but it would be a very nasty kind of terror attack.
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  You are correct, I was mostly interpreting his post to be about a purposefully engineered virus with specific properties. One could throw darts and hope to get "lucky" by recombining and tweaking existing pathogens. That individual would be wrong a lot, but with concerted effort might find something. I'm not sure that is new technology though. This could have been done at least 15 years ago. One point that I didn't have time to make was that high mortality is not generally evolutionarily advantageous. Even if you cooked up a strain that was especially nasty, it could take considerable effort to prevent it from mutating in the wild into something less so, since the mutated virus would have a survival advantage of not killing its host. Unlike machines, a creator can't really control what happens to a biological system in the wild as it interacts with the environment. In the scenario you describe, there is considerable uncertainty as to whether it would actually spread as engineered. This is the crux of what I've clearly done a poor job of saying: we know so little that all these scenarios still rely on incredible amounts of luck more than technology.
castillowl 13y ago
> This also commits the logical fallacy of ascribing superpowers to the bad guys cooking up viruses while assuming the good guys are sitting on their duffs letting bad things happen It's the other way around. The "good guys" are cooking up viruses and publishing them as science (in this case at least)
hotpockets 13y ago
The author is only arguing for ramping up funding of defensive biotechnologies. It is much easier to create a new virus than to find a cure for an existing one. The immune system is simply vastly more complicated than a virus.
gngeal 13y ago
Europeans were almost wiped out by the plague Uh, nope. What does "almost wiped out" mean to you? 30% of population dead is "almost wiped out"? It's horrible, of course, but there were still 70% who stayed alive. Well, I could say that I can jump almost three meters high with that logic. :-)
- memracom 13y ago
  What if we lost 50% of the world's population? We would be knocked back to the ... 1970s!?!? In the 1970s the world's population was about 3.5 billion and today it is double that. Sure it would be very disruptive, but there would still be plenty of creative people around to pick up the pieces.
  - cmdkeen 13y ago
    There is a point where the breakdown in social order is going to lead to a much greater problem. If the food and energy systems we rely on to supply cities break down then you'll be looking at problems other than the outbreak causing deaths. If society breaks down then you'll suddenly be looking at countries being unable to support anything close to that number of people.
- coldtea 13y ago
  "Almost" means that the "30%" could easily have been 70% or even 80% were the thing any more potent.
Xeoncross 13y ago
> We know jack about how the vast majority of biology works. We have the most fleeting glimpses of understanding that are regularly crushed by the complexity of dynamic systems with nested feedback loops and multiple semi-overlapping redundancies. Proof of evolution
6d0debc071 13y ago
> This also commits the logical fallacy of ascribing superpowers to the bad guys cooking up viruses while assuming the good guys are sitting on their duffs letting bad things happen. [...] > If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures. ------------------------ The amount you need to destroy is more or less a constant. When the efficacy of your technologies is limited, then a technology that only gives you a small percentage edge over your opponent's technology - say Iron vs Bronze - is survivable for the defender provided they have an edge in some other area, though not necessarily pleasant. However, as the efficacy of technology increases, you only need a small percentage edge over your opponent in terms of relative efficacy of technologies to have more than enough power to destroy all that you need to in order to remove them forever. Consider that armies could be separated by hundreds of years of technology in the past, and still fight on a roughly equal footing. Technology did not more very fast, nor was it very powerful. Then imagine what an army of today would do to an army of a hundred, or even fifty years ago. In the Iran-Iraq war two armies with Cold-War level technology faced each other off for eight years. The Iraqi army were, however, swept aside very quickly by a more advanced force. The timespan in which there's a rough parity in power shortening. Even small difference in development with respect to time can rapidly become insurmountable when you're dealing with a high rate of change and powerful technologies. What you're defending is more or less static: people, land, resources, they're not getting any more durable, while weapons are always becoming more powerful. You only need one world ending plague. The defender has to be on top every time, the attacker only has to surpass them once. There is no chance to adapt to what they make, or to try again any more than biological evolution can adapt people to a bullet in the head - because any minor adaptation in that direction makes no difference when compared to the sorts of forces that are imparted. And I don't think we should have much confidence in the idea that the defender is going to be on top every time. The questions seem to me to be ones of whether a reluctance to destroy the world is characteristic of organised systems, and whether organised systems will always have the edge over individual effort. If we get to a level where someone can create a suitably devastating bio-weapon in their garden shed, will we also be in a position where that's effectively analogous to creating any other outdated weapon in your shed? I don't know, computer viruses don't lead me to much hope on that point. Enormous energies are being expended to restrain the energies of a few, with no clear victory in sight. The playing field is not always slanted the way we might like.
bryan_rasmussen 13y ago
I think I'd also like to add where's the motivation? Basically someone who did this would have to be what? A Serial killer with a biotechnology fetish? I'm sure that a profile could be constructed of someone that would have the motivation to do it, but that would of course be a big limitation of possible people doing it, and then out of that group limit it to the people capable of doing it, and so forth - and actually would it really be likely that someone with the skill to do it would also be in the group motivated to do it? 12 monkeys aside I actually think not.
Anon84 13y ago
Sam is a smart guy, so I really don't want to come off as sounding like a jerk here, but this grossly underestimates the technical feasibility of creating such a virus. Nature already created viruses like this [1]. Although the mortality rate was "only" 30% but no biotech was required. Also, people are seriously studying what would happen if H5N1 was released into the wild [2] That being said, "Don't Panic (tm)". The likelihood of any of these scenarios is extremely extremely low and people have been thinking about and preparing for them for decades. As for what is much more likely to happen with naturally occurring viruses like the H7N9, natural variants of the H5N1, etc... see my comment from a few days ago [3]. Disclaimer: I'm the first author of [1] and a collaborator of the two first authors of [2]. [1] http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130717/srep00810/full/srep00810.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130717/srep00810/full/srep00... [2] http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/252 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/252 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6839147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6839147
- JunkDNA 13y ago
  Thanks for injecting some actual peer reviewed research into this discussion. As I mentioned elsewhere, I was mostly responding to the notion that one can engineer a virus with specific properties as opposed to relying on natural pathogens. No argument that there are no shortage of naturally occurring bugs that can kick our butts. Can you comment on the models that are used for simulating outbreaks? Do they factor in natural evolutionary pressure and change of the virus? In the case of smallpox, you have something fairly stable, but influenza is highly variable over time. I can't imagine how one does that but it would be cool to know if it's possible.
  - Anon84 13y ago
    Do they factor in natural evolutionary pressure and change of the virus? Not at all. Meta population models use some type of stochastic discrete PDEs and agent based models just infection probabilities. This is an over simplification but just so you have an idea. You can get the gritty details in the papers above.
- pak 13y ago
coldtea 13y ago
>If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures. That pressuposes that the "good guys" would be the victims here. How about the opposite? What about regular "democratic" superpowers doing it to poorer countries they want to control, as they have done similar things all along the colonial and post-colonial era? The way dictatorships in Latin America and Middle East got weapons, supplies and a helping hand from the US for example against their people or neighborhooding countries.

by JunkDNA 13y ago

jamesaguilar 13y ago

So you mean "overestimate" in the second paragraph right? Because the rest of it reads that way.

jasallen 13y ago
specifically the first "underestimate" is wrong, the second is correct. :-)
JunkDNA 13y ago
Yes, thanks, edited.
- jamesaguilar 13y ago
  The first one is still wrong. "Underestimate the technical feasibility" means, "They think it is less feasible (harder) than it actually is." I think you mean the opposite: they think it is easier than it actually is. I.e. you're trying to say it's harder than we think. You can say instead: "underestimates the difficulty" or "overestimates the feasibility."
  - nswanberg 13y ago
    James, you are correct but I think JunkDNA's point is still being made effectively. In fact this was likely an intentional statement meant to illustrate the difficulty involved in intentionally creating a thing--if an error could be easily introduced in a handful of words, how likely is it that a malicious DNA creator will get their supervirus working exactly right?
    - jamesaguilar 13y ago
      That is very optimistic of you. Personally I think it was more likely that it was simply a typing error, as he has acknowledged. That's fine, we all make them. I had some difficulty parsing what he was trying to say, which is the only reason I brought it up. The rest of your argument is very far fetched. One person's difficulty formulating a sentence could not be less related to biologists' collective capabilities in tailoring viruses.
      - nswanberg 13y ago
        "The rest of your argument is very far fetched." I have apparently underestimated my ability to craft a joke.

qq66 13y ago

The scenario might seem far-fetched today, but what if biotech made the same kind of progress over the next 50 years as computer technology has over the last 50? A human-engineered super virus might seem as unlikely to a virologist today as an iPhone would seem to Alan Turing.

JunkDNA 13y ago
I address this in my second paragraph. You can't assume the advances all happen on the negative side (the ability to perfectly engineer a deadly virus) without corresponding advances on the positive side (enough understanding of biology to combat new viruses).
- gknoy 13y ago
  I think you have a mistaken assumption, though, namely that advances in CREATING dangerous things will be paralleled by advances in the ability to prevent bad things. Nuclear weapons have been around for over 50 yeras. We do not yet have __in place__ any ability (other than treaties and fear) to prevent a nuclear holocaust. Missile shields, "Star Wars" -- all of those are of questionable capability, and none of them are deployed. Given that our only way of preventing nuclear winter is to agree not to launch (and go to war to prevent Bad Guys from getting them?), an option which is not available when dealing with a disease, I'm not optimistic about our future ability to prevent a superbug from wiping out humans.
  - kolinko 13y ago
    I think the analogy is broken. In case of nuclear armrace it's a different technology that destroys (bombs), and a different that saves (missile protection?). In case of genetics it's one and the same - engineering organisms.
    - waps 13y ago
      The thing that defeats viruses is evolutionary pressure, not "engineering organisms". At this point in time I'd still say that we only have the ability to reintroduce old disappeared pathogens. We do not actually have the ability to design new effective viruses.

seiji 13y ago

ascribing superpowers to the bad guys Grab a copy of The White Plague. It's an entertaining read.

Pxtl 13y ago
There's a science fiction novel waiting to be written that incorporates the ideas from The White Plague and Ribofunk and the 21st century IT world. Imagine the genetically-engineered counterpart to the CryptoLocker ransomware. Private and public antivirus research. MacAffee for your white blood cells. Imagine ad-supported biotech. The internet has created a sort of commoditization of fraud. Scam spam, ad-ware, spyware, etc, often run by companies operating right out in public. Professionals openly discuss security from both sides of the line. Imagine this sort of bizarre professional attitude in the a low-cost engineered-virus biotech field. What would the Windows of this world be - a suite of programmable bacteria with a solid API?
- seiji 13y ago
  Imagine ad-supported biotech. Don't you dare.
  - blacksmith_tb 13y ago
    Too late - Paul McAuley's _The White Devils_ has ad-covered GM butterflies in it, for example...

castillowl 13y ago

His scenario is hypothetical with quick estimates of mortality and incubation period. This virus has been created in the lab and the formula is known. How is he then underestimating the technical feasibility? >If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures. This is naive. Understanding of weapons != Knowledge of countermeasures (since were talking about logical fallacy)

x3c 13y ago
E.g. Atom bombs It's a weapon that has no counter measures. None that I'm aware of, except prohibition.
- TsiCClawOfLight 13y ago
  but... lasers? ;)

HillRat 13y ago

Starting from scratch, sure (everyone always seems to think of DNA and RNA as super-Legos; I blame Hollywood), but I think it's worth being at least slightly afraid of things like lab-engineered influenzas, given that flu is a very small, well-studied, and easily mutated RNA virus. Cooking up a more deadly (and, yeah, I recognize that we haven't proven that the Unholy Grail of "high mortality, long incubation, and ease of transmission" even exists in any single wild-type bug) influenza -- even if we don't necessary know the methods of action -- isn't a big lift as far as major bioengineering projects go. If you're not trying to create a "supervirus," but just shotgun a series of viruses to create maximum health disruption, then (as you know!) it's already within our technical grasp. Expensive, time-consuming, and probably failing 90% of the time, but accessible nonetheless. Considering how bad our hit rate is on the trivalents, I could see a plague of multiple, high-lethality strains with a wide variety of hemagglutinin and neuramidase antigenic shifts as a plausible bioterror scenario. It's not a doomsday scenario, since we have such good reporting and analysis infrastructure, and much of the heavy engineering on the problem (like alternate vaccine production methods) was done during the earlier bird flu outbreaks, but it would be a very nasty kind of terror attack.

JunkDNA 13y ago
You are correct, I was mostly interpreting his post to be about a purposefully engineered virus with specific properties. One could throw darts and hope to get "lucky" by recombining and tweaking existing pathogens. That individual would be wrong a lot, but with concerted effort might find something. I'm not sure that is new technology though. This could have been done at least 15 years ago. One point that I didn't have time to make was that high mortality is not generally evolutionarily advantageous. Even if you cooked up a strain that was especially nasty, it could take considerable effort to prevent it from mutating in the wild into something less so, since the mutated virus would have a survival advantage of not killing its host. Unlike machines, a creator can't really control what happens to a biological system in the wild as it interacts with the environment. In the scenario you describe, there is considerable uncertainty as to whether it would actually spread as engineered. This is the crux of what I've clearly done a poor job of saying: we know so little that all these scenarios still rely on incredible amounts of luck more than technology.

castillowl 13y ago

hotpockets 13y ago

The author is only arguing for ramping up funding of defensive biotechnologies. It is much easier to create a new virus than to find a cure for an existing one. The immune system is simply vastly more complicated than a virus.

gngeal 13y ago

Europeans were almost wiped out by the plague Uh, nope. What does "almost wiped out" mean to you? 30% of population dead is "almost wiped out"? It's horrible, of course, but there were still 70% who stayed alive. Well, I could say that I can jump almost three meters high with that logic. :-)

memracom 13y ago
What if we lost 50% of the world's population? We would be knocked back to the ... 1970s!?!? In the 1970s the world's population was about 3.5 billion and today it is double that. Sure it would be very disruptive, but there would still be plenty of creative people around to pick up the pieces.
- cmdkeen 13y ago
  There is a point where the breakdown in social order is going to lead to a much greater problem. If the food and energy systems we rely on to supply cities break down then you'll be looking at problems other than the outbreak causing deaths. If society breaks down then you'll suddenly be looking at countries being unable to support anything close to that number of people.
coldtea 13y ago
"Almost" means that the "30%" could easily have been 70% or even 80% were the thing any more potent.

Xeoncross 13y ago

> We know jack about how the vast majority of biology works. We have the most fleeting glimpses of understanding that are regularly crushed by the complexity of dynamic systems with nested feedback loops and multiple semi-overlapping redundancies. Proof of evolution

6d0debc071 13y ago

> This also commits the logical fallacy of ascribing superpowers to the bad guys cooking up viruses while assuming the good guys are sitting on their duffs letting bad things happen. [...] > If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures. ------------------------ The amount you need to destroy is more or less a constant. When the efficacy of your technologies is limited, then a technology that only gives you a small percentage edge over your opponent's technology - say Iron vs Bronze - is survivable for the defender provided they have an edge in some other area, though not necessarily pleasant. However, as the efficacy of technology increases, you only need a small percentage edge over your opponent in terms of relative efficacy of technologies to have more than enough power to destroy all that you need to in order to remove them forever. Consider that armies could be separated by hundreds of years of technology in the past, and still fight on a roughly equal footing. Technology did not more very fast, nor was it very powerful. Then imagine what an army of today would do to an army of a hundred, or even fifty years ago. In the Iran-Iraq war two armies with Cold-War level technology faced each other off for eight years. The Iraqi army were, however, swept aside very quickly by a more advanced force. The timespan in which there's a rough parity in power shortening. Even small difference in development with respect to time can rapidly become insurmountable when you're dealing with a high rate of change and powerful technologies. What you're defending is more or less static: people, land, resources, they're not getting any more durable, while weapons are always becoming more powerful. You only need one world ending plague. The defender has to be on top every time, the attacker only has to surpass them once. There is no chance to adapt to what they make, or to try again any more than biological evolution can adapt people to a bullet in the head - because any minor adaptation in that direction makes no difference when compared to the sorts of forces that are imparted. And I don't think we should have much confidence in the idea that the defender is going to be on top every time. The questions seem to me to be ones of whether a reluctance to destroy the world is characteristic of organised systems, and whether organised systems will always have the edge over individual effort. If we get to a level where someone can create a suitably devastating bio-weapon in their garden shed, will we also be in a position where that's effectively analogous to creating any other outdated weapon in your shed? I don't know, computer viruses don't lead me to much hope on that point. Enormous energies are being expended to restrain the energies of a few, with no clear victory in sight. The playing field is not always slanted the way we might like.

bryan_rasmussen 13y ago

I think I'd also like to add where's the motivation? Basically someone who did this would have to be what? A Serial killer with a biotechnology fetish? I'm sure that a profile could be constructed of someone that would have the motivation to do it, but that would of course be a big limitation of possible people doing it, and then out of that group limit it to the people capable of doing it, and so forth - and actually would it really be likely that someone with the skill to do it would also be in the group motivated to do it? 12 monkeys aside I actually think not.

Anon84 13y ago

Sam is a smart guy, so I really don't want to come off as sounding like a jerk here, but this grossly underestimates the technical feasibility of creating such a virus. Nature already created viruses like this [1]. Although the mortality rate was "only" 30% but no biotech was required. Also, people are seriously studying what would happen if H5N1 was released into the wild [2] That being said, "Don't Panic (tm)". The likelihood of any of these scenarios is extremely extremely low and people have been thinking about and preparing for them for decades. As for what is much more likely to happen with naturally occurring viruses like the H7N9, natural variants of the H5N1, etc... see my comment from a few days ago [3]. Disclaimer: I'm the first author of [1] and a collaborator of the two first authors of [2]. [1] http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130717/srep00810/full/srep00810.html http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130717/srep00810/full/srep00... [2] http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/252 http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/252 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6839147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6839147

JunkDNA 13y ago
Thanks for injecting some actual peer reviewed research into this discussion. As I mentioned elsewhere, I was mostly responding to the notion that one can engineer a virus with specific properties as opposed to relying on natural pathogens. No argument that there are no shortage of naturally occurring bugs that can kick our butts. Can you comment on the models that are used for simulating outbreaks? Do they factor in natural evolutionary pressure and change of the virus? In the case of smallpox, you have something fairly stable, but influenza is highly variable over time. I can't imagine how one does that but it would be cool to know if it's possible.
- Anon84 13y ago
  Do they factor in natural evolutionary pressure and change of the virus? Not at all. Meta population models use some type of stochastic discrete PDEs and agent based models just infection probabilities. This is an over simplification but just so you have an idea. You can get the gritty details in the papers above.
pak 13y ago

coldtea 13y ago

>If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures. That pressuposes that the "good guys" would be the victims here. How about the opposite? What about regular "democratic" superpowers doing it to poorer countries they want to control, as they have done similar things all along the colonial and post-colonial era? The way dictatorships in Latin America and Middle East got weapons, supplies and a helping hand from the US for example against their people or neighborhooding countries.