Advances in Bio-weaponry

kjh1 writes "Technology Review is running an eye-opening article on how biotechnology has advanced to the point where producing bio-weapons that were once only possible with the backing of governments with enormous resources is now possible with equipment purchased off eBay. You can now purchase a mini-lab of equipment for less than $10,000. The writer also interviewed a former Soviet bioweaponeer, Serguei Popov, who worked at the Biopreparat, the Soviet agency that secretly developed biological weapons. Popov has since moved to the US and provided a great deal of information on the types of weapons the Soviets were developing."

Comments

Re:Me thinks thou doth protest too much...

[Lord Kano]

There's no big conspiracy. I just have a really annoying girlfriend.

You made a good run of it, but the ruse is over.

LK

Re:Bill Joy and others saw this years ago

[Metex]

why aren't the intelligent, well-educated, technically minded of the world actually taking issues like this seriously, and doing something about it?

I think of two reasons when asked this question:
1) I have to spend, minimum 8+ years doing focused study in one area of knowledge just to get to the fringes of the body of knowledge in which I will be developing technology in.
2) I have to take all of those 8 years of knowledge condense it into a catch phrase of 2-10 words which explains the problem to people not in my field.

Part 2 is the killer. How am I going to explain a problem when I can't go 2 words without saying By X s postulate, or according to Ys theorem or Zs experiment? Also I need to make sure I take into account 1000 people using my work as reference and building upon it? The nuclear bomb wasn't made by 1 scientist in was made by thousands.

The way intelligent, well-educated, technically minded people end up explaining things to people who make the decisions is try to find the most simplest explanation possible that maybe gets 70% of the problems across. Take 'Global Warming' sounds kind of bad and it tells you the earth is heating up. But actually we are trapping more energy in our atmosphere so a more accurate description is 'Global Energy Increase' which unfortunately sounds somewhat positive. This is a tad more accurate since instead of the earth just heating up it also takes into account places getting much colder then usual (refrigerators need energy to run). We can continually expand it until it turns into a 500 page report, but no one will remember why we are concerned about the original problem.

Unfortunately allot of stuff can't be reduced to that level so it gets swept under the carpet.