From what I understand it’s hard to order the sequences of DNA or RNA you’d need for this without someone noticing. It’s probably not impossible, but not something anyone is going to bungle into.
I am 100% pro bio hacking, I would go as far as to say that I think the bio hacking community might be the only place I can see solutions to our largest problems coming from. I mean the bio hacking community too, not acedemia. Not that acedamia isn’t crucial to that process.
Anyway, Maybe a few years ago the barrier to entry was too high for most people but that is so not the case anymore. Even just this year a friend sent me a link to a $2000 gizmo that was about the size of a pack of gum that could do desktop sequencing. Generating your own custom DNA in your bedroom is considerably harder (but not impossible) but it is not at all difficult to order a custom sequence from a half dozen different retailers. The file you send them is just a big chunk of a few letters. It’s assembly code with no comments (yes I know folks do put in comments in text sometimes and sometimes biologically but just like always comments lie more than not), they functionally cannot be checking for what it could do if what you’re working on is even remotely novel. For the price of a playstation you can have it delivered to your door next day air.
There are very real risks here for our entire planet. Possibly one of our largest risks. To hide behind “it’s too difficult for a malicious actor” is not helpful. I think genetic literacy is maybe the only thing we all can do as we might be entering very weird territory as a closed system that has a bent towards global narcissism and self harm.
Something that gives me some comfort is that to be good at it you really have to do a gross and difficult deep dive into how all life works and I think there are very few people that could do that and still feel like it’s ok to do harm at even a small scale. The things we are going to see in the next few years will be pretty fucking weird. I guess when you get down to this level, the only thing to have is something like faith. Eeeek.
I think the key here is that you have to be doing something novel, which seems like a high bar. Like you can order the DNA for small pox. No one will fulfill that. But it does seem like a determined, over-educated would-be bioterrorist could pull this off with COTS equipment in the very near future, maybe.
Yeah, I guess if you just send them this specific genome for smallpox DNA[0] they might tell you to get lost. What I'm saying is that anyone who was awful like that would probably just go get a different disease in person. Historically people have managed that fine without having to learn version control. I mean, we have treatments for smallpox and a vaccine. My point being is that it's not useful to say "oh, it's too technical and I'm sure the DNA providers have some checks in place." I have never seen a god damned thing about what checks they are doing, and I'm nearly certain they are not that well regulated. I for sure know that there isn't a public accountability portal for these companies.
What makes me feel alright is that I think to do some damage is not a technical or money issue but an issue with taking a dive on the closest thing we have to the meaning of life and I'd hope that that study would be the sort of thing that keeps someone from being the worst kind of monster. I mean, we have a ton of tools out there to be awful, why this?
I guess what I'm saying is that to look at this set of problems and say "someone else probably has it handled" or assume anything we know is even slightly predictive of the future is silly. I think it's important for those that care to get an understanding of biology as we are now at an unprecedented point in existence where there's just not a way to feel too comfortable. Added benefit, the more people that get that understanding the closer we might get to yeast that eats plastic or mushrooms that make insulin.
That's what is usually said. I don't think I've actually heard of this getting triggered. I'd like to think that global governments have this totally under control. Maybe the US does, but does China? In any case so far it's seemed like a whole "this rock keeps away Tigers" sort of thing.
I think it more a result of companies that synthesize the raw material being unwilling to whip up things like SARS variants, and it being quite difficult to figure something out like that from scratch. That may change or turn out to be incorrect, this is just my understanding at the moment.
From what I understand it’s hard to order the sequences of DNA or RNA you’d need for this without someone noticing. It’s probably not impossible, but not something anyone is going to bungle into.