The Myths and Realities of Synthetic Bioweapons

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."

Comments

Resident Evil/Biohazard

[AtomicSymphonic]

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

[Errol backfiring]

IT would probably be easier, bot not exactly easy. Off course, terrorists could "cook up a weapon" as they need it, and if they can use suicidal people to do that for them, they have a severe advantage to military forces. Making such weapons is hard, but storing them is also quite hard. So if you use someone else to make it for you, these weapons are useless unless you use them immediately.

Re:Still not easy

[Thanshin]

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.

Re:Still not easy

[gtall]

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 Ahmed working for a Pakistan uni might do so.

Re:Still not easy

[ColdWetDog]

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 another couple of decades, but not tomorrow.

TFA did point out that terror weapons - scary things that don't really kill very many people - are another issue entirely. It doesn't take much to get a populace wound up - all you have to do is chop somebody's head off and put it on YouTube.

Re:Still not easy

[cusco]

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 sicker, for someone who never showed up the resulting panic would cause almost as many problems as an actual outbreak. Remember, the goal isn't casualties, it's instilling fear in the target population.

Greater Danger

[Anonymous Coward]

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

[Thanshin]

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

[ma11achy]

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.

Re:Oh my

[Thanshin]

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter/kickstarter.

Re:Oh my

[StripedCow]

The nice part of this product is that you can wear it without anyone noticing!

interesting

[zvien]

awesome

Poison Ivy

[dixonpete]

I've always thought http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U... ( from Poison Ivy) might be useful somehow in warfare. I got a dose of it last month from a trek through the woods and was really impressed by it's effects. I got a really light brush from a plant and the effects took better than a month to heal. Do a Google Image search and you'll see the effects can be very impressive.

Re:Poison Ivy

[penguinoid]

Poison ivy is self-replicating and transmissible to another plot of land.

Re:Poison Ivy

[Aldenissin]

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.

Bioweapons are a real threat

[gurps_npc]

We can create bioweapons. The main problems with creating them are:

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 still need Highly intelligent and highly trained people involved. Most of whom lack Suicidal tendencies.

This armegeddon scenario is actually far more likely than a nuclear war, as that requires far more people to behave far more stupidly and unlike nanite fears, is actually physically reasonable.

Re:Bioweapons are a real threat

[cusco]

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.

Re:Bioweapons are a real threat

[Isaac-1]

All three points can be solved by certain religious beliefs.

Just me? Article is not all that insightful.

[mha]

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...) and so much happened just the last 10 years! So an assessment of the danger of these developments that only looks at the current state (and what a bad job they do with this) is kind of useless.

Re:Monsters?

[ColdWetDog]

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. Otherwise, not so much.

Re:Monsters?

[cusco]

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.

knocking down the straw man

[Anonymous Coward]

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 only need a reasonable sized lab to create them.
The argument is against the US and Russia and China funding the basic research that is still needed to create this knowledge base.
The ladies writing the article have a sad lack of knowledge of the historical usages of bio weapons. It goes back to ancient times when corpses where flung into besieged cities. Wells were polluted with the dead. It was used often because it worked.