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Urgent Needs To Prepare For Manmade Virus Attacks, Says US Government Report (theguardian.com)
A major U.S. government report warns that advances in synthetic biology now allow scientists to have the capability to recreate dangerous viruses from scratch; make harmful bacteria more deadly; and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body. The Guardian reports: In the report, the scientists describe how synthetic biology, which gives researchers precision tools to manipulate living organisms, "enhances and expands" opportunities to create bioweapons. "As the power of the technology increases, that brings a general need to scrutinize where harms could come from," said Peter Carr, a senior scientist at MIT's Synthetic Biology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The report calls on the U.S. government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect novel bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defenses, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible. The Guardian references a case 20 years ago where geneticist Eckard Wimmer recreated the poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horse pox virus. "The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century," reports The Guardian. "Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesized."
The report calls on the U.S. government to rethink how it conducts disease surveillance, so it can better detect novel bioweapons, and to look at ways to bolster defenses, for example by finding ways to make and deploy vaccines far more rapidly. For every bioweapon the scientists consider, the report sets out key hurdles that, once cleared, will make the weapons more feasible. The Guardian references a case 20 years ago where geneticist Eckard Wimmer recreated the poliovirus in a test tube. Earlier this year, a team at the University of Alberta built an infectious horse pox virus. "The virus is a close relative of smallpox, which may have claimed half a billion lives in the 20th century," reports The Guardian. "Today, the genetic code of almost any mammalian virus can be found online and synthesized."
and modify common microbes so that they churn out lethal toxins once they enter the body
In the specific case of viruses, it's counter productive. As some hyper dangerous viruses have shown like Ebola, it you kill your host, you won't have a host into which to reproduce anymore.
Viruses aren't full autonomous life forms, their just simple genetic code (recipes that need an actual host's cell with cellular machinery to interpret the code and produce more viruses).
The "evolutionary target" that most viruses aspire to become (i.e.: the fittest mutant that are selected by natural selection) isn't ebola, it's the common cold : a virus that is relatively benign and doesn't harm the host too much, so it can safely keep replicating in a still-alive host, and can have the time to find other alive hosts to which to transmit (while leaving as much alive hosts as possible for a potential future new round of infection by a new variant)
If some mad scientist create some lab monster that produces lots of lethal toxins, that synthetic virus is at a high risk of killing the host without having had any chance to spread.
With bacteria, the problem is similar but in reverse : bacteria are autonomous life forms - cells that multiply on their own. They basically don't need us (beyond a few disease-inducing bacteria that rely on bodies for environment (relative warmth) and food).
Whatever weird dangerous gene the mad scientist sticks into them, that poison isn't necessary to achieve what it basically wants (to multiply).
So, unless these poison-producing genes are somewhat linked to some critical biochemistry needed by the bacteria, there will be no evolutionary pressure to keep producing the poison (quite the opposite : due to the way they replicate their genome (=single origin) bacteria tend to lose useless gene. Less bullshit genes = less times spent in replicating that bullshit)
(also, if the bacteria needs some environment for potential victim (say, again warmth) the same logic as with virus applies (a dead host won't be producing any warmth anymore).
The first infected victim with a synthetic bug will die, but over lots of generation, the bacteria will eventually lose the poison-producing gene because it will be able to replicate faster (and thus over take the slower replicating bacteria that have more bullshit gene) (*).
So yeah, a few mad scientist could try to CRIPR their way in clandestine lab to build super-bugs with ultra-killing genes, but if these monsters kill too fast, they won't stand a long term chance.
It will suck for the first few patients who get sick, but the bugs will have a hard time taking over the world.
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(*) - conversely, that's why antibiotic resistance started to become "a thing" only recently when antibiotics started to get used on large scale (by the agricultural industry, by over prescription, etc.). Before that large scale antibiotics use, there's any pressure to justifiy the bacteria keeping the extra genetic material coding for the resistance (e.g.: the plasmid carrying beta-lactamases).
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