The Myths and Realities of Synthetic Bioweapons 36
Lasrick writes Three researchers from King's College, London, walk through the security threats posed by synthetic and do-it-yourself biology, assessing whether changes in technology and associated costs make it any easier for would-be terrorists to pursue biological weapons for high-consequence, mass- casualty attacks (and even whether they would want to). "Those who have overemphasized the bioterrorism threat typically portray it as an imminent concern, with emphasis placed on high-consequence, mass-casualty attacks, performed with weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This is a myth with two dimensions."
Resident Evil/Biohazard (Score:1)
Synthetic bioweapons are the name of the game in the Resident Evil franchise. Personally, I have always considered something like this to be a distinct possibility, so should we be surprised at this development?
Or should we all be calling for Leon S. Kennedy and friends to save the day once more?
Still not easy (Score:2)
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So just send the weapon maker to enemy territory to build/make it there. Even if he makes a mistake and kills himself, there's a chance his corpse will infect the surroundings.
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I think it depends on the resources available. If, say, some rogue scientists in, to pick a nice orderly with a long proud tradition of human rights, say Pakistan, were to synthesize a bioweapon...or a chem weapon, I could see them turning it over to the Taliban for disposal. This is what scares the hell out of the Pentagon and the Indian defence establishment but with respect to nuclear material. So the article might be right in that there is no threat to Johnny Ahmed producing a bio weapon, Dr. Johnny Ah
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Not really. What the Fine Article was saying, basically, is that even with planet leading expertise and equipment, making anything other than the biological equivalent of a dirty bomb is very, very hard. The US and USSR could barely do it in the 1990s. Even though the tech has improved by leaps and bounds, actually using that tech has also become much harder.
It's not all that easy to splice DNA together to get something functional. You can get a Nobel Prize for that sort of thing these days. Maybe in a
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Everyone is over-thinking this. All they really need is to get a tourist, work or student visa for some innocent illiterate campesino somewhere (preferably non-African), tell them they won a "lottery" or something that gets them a well-paying job in the US, infect them with Ebola, put them on a plane with instructions how to get on the subway, and tell them that their new employer will meet them at Grand Central Station. Even if they didn't infect anyone as they waited there all day, getting sicker and sic
Greater Danger (Score:1)
The greater danger is really a nation or researcher engineering a major killer (e.g. airborne ebola) and having it escape the lab by accident a few decades hence, kind of like the smallpox vials the CDC found...
Shared atmosphere (Score:3)
Can you imagine how interesting these problems will get once humanity stops sharing a single atmosphere?
I predict the first human colony will be killed by terrorist bio-attack.
Oh my (Score:2)
Apologies for bringing down the tone of the conversation, but I read this as "Myths and Realities of Synthetic Blowjobs". 0_0
I really need to get out more.
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Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter/kickstarter.
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The nice part of this product is that you can wear it without anyone noticing!
interesting (Score:1)
Poison Ivy (Score:1)
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Poison ivy is self-replicating and transmissible to another plot of land.
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While I like the way you think, I have to agree that it would probably better serve as a chemical weapon. Although, I suppose one could try to engineer it to grow "faster" and in more environments, but as it is a plant, it just grows too slow and under too-specific conditions to do much more real damage than it already does. It'd mostly serve as a distraction and harasser, which isn't to say it wouldn't have value. It does have many more disadvantages though, like that many are not allergic to it.
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As long as you can create your Chimera in 3000 base pairs or so. Putting them all together gets very much harder.
Perhaps if you are worried about very, very tiny monsters [fsu.edu]. Otherwise, not so much.
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The reason Ken Alibek was given a visa and citizenship almost overnight when he defected from the Soviet Union was because of his work on 'black pox', a smallpox/Marburg chimera. They had combined the two and came up with an air-transmissible hemorrhagic virus that worked.
Oh, you meant the monster. Never mind.
Bioweapons are a real threat (Score:2)
1) Total lack of ethics - and the resources to get away with murdering thousands of human test subjects along the way.
2) Suicidal tendencies - not just for individuals, but for the funding group. Because any realistically dangerous weapon will have a good probability of killing it's creators first, and a very high probability of killing it's creators in the long term (either directly, by evolution, or by revenge nuclear attacks.
3) You
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Military organizations never seem to have much trouble filling these jobs, even when the participants know it's illegal. Clinton was horrified when he found what was going on at Dugway and the other vile biowarfare sites the Pentagon has, and as Commander In Chief he instructed the military to cease all work on bio-weapons. The Pentagon's response was to rename the programs and move them to the Black Budget. No one even had to change cubicle.
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All three points can be solved by certain religious beliefs.
Just me? Article is not all that insightful. (Score:2)
Lots of generalities and assertions, no depth at all. Was this really worth being posted? They may or may not be right - but all you can have after reading it is an "opinion". No actual knowledge in that article, or even any insights. It is mere boulevard paper level journalism.
Also, what is missing is the speed with which the options increase. I just finished edX course MIT "Introduction to Biology" (HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!!! WARNING: CONTAINS ACTUAL KNOWLEDGE! https://www.edx.org/course/mit... [edx.org]) and so much ha
knocking down the straw man (Score:1)
Wow, way to knock down the straw man arguments.
Your basic premise is not the one that I have seen in most writings.
The premise I have seen is that once the knowledge for bio weapons in created, the EQUIPMENT/RESOURCES needed to create them will be much smaller than the equipment and resources needed to create a nuclear bomb.
You can know everything about building a nuke from scratch, and it will cost a country a huge amount to make one.
Once you have a few scientists who know how to make the pathogens, you on