3 ms·

Others have already (rightly) made the point that we're not yet able to synthesize new viruses from scratch. And the "amateur bio-hacking" thing is completely

by timr 13y ago

Others have already (rightly) made the point that we're not yet able to synthesize new viruses from scratch. And the "amateur bio-hacking" thing is completely overblown -- the most advanced amateur work I've seen is stuff like putting GFP into bacteria, which is just trivial. It requires little more than some commercially available kits and a warm water bath. Synthesizing new organisms is many orders of magnitude harder. That's not to say that things won't change, but if I had to pick a serious biological threat that exists right now, it would be antibiotic resistance. Thanks to air travel and long incubation times, we're not that far away from a global pandemic of multi-drug-resistant TB, yet almost nobody is talking about it.

skosuri 13y ago
We have been able to make viruses from scratch for about a dozen years. Synthetic poliovirus, 1918 flu, sars like corona amongst a dozen or so other demonstrations.
- timr 13y ago
  We can re-create existing ones from known (small) genomes and make some modifications to ones that we understand well. Even that work is well beyond what a hobbyist can achieve. Creating a novel virus would be a major research project.
  - skosuri 13y ago
    There is a lot more work on synthetic viruses that you might not be aware of that goes beyond just simple instantiation (like viral attenuation for vaccines or hypotheses on origins of the viral outbreaks). Creating a novel virus these days is not that diffult (Grad student project). Anyways, your first post made it seem like it hadn't been done.
    - timr 13y ago
      I'm not aware of every paper in the field, but I know the high points. We're still a long way off from the day when niche groups can generate novel viruses with specific infective properties. We're still basically just tinkering with the existing viruses in labs to figure out what the parts do. Depending on how you define "novel", it could indeed be a "grad student project", or it could be a paper that deserves a Nobel. But it still falls firmly in the "improbable as a weapon" category of threats. I'm still far more scared of XDR TB than hypothetical synthetic viruses.

by timr 13y ago

skosuri 13y ago

We have been able to make viruses from scratch for about a dozen years. Synthetic poliovirus, 1918 flu, sars like corona amongst a dozen or so other demonstrations.

timr 13y ago
We can re-create existing ones from known (small) genomes and make some modifications to ones that we understand well. Even that work is well beyond what a hobbyist can achieve. Creating a novel virus would be a major research project.
- skosuri 13y ago
  There is a lot more work on synthetic viruses that you might not be aware of that goes beyond just simple instantiation (like viral attenuation for vaccines or hypotheses on origins of the viral outbreaks). Creating a novel virus these days is not that diffult (Grad student project). Anyways, your first post made it seem like it hadn't been done.
  - timr 13y ago
    I'm not aware of every paper in the field, but I know the high points. We're still a long way off from the day when niche groups can generate novel viruses with specific infective properties. We're still basically just tinkering with the existing viruses in labs to figure out what the parts do. Depending on how you define "novel", it could indeed be a "grad student project", or it could be a paper that deserves a Nobel. But it still falls firmly in the "improbable as a weapon" category of threats. I'm still far more scared of XDR TB than hypothetical synthetic viruses.