Just like in a car, the true demonstration of intelligence is closing your eyes and slamming the pedal to the floor.
Designing a modifcation to an existing virus is perhaps more achievable, but the implementation is still the hard part.
You may be skipping a few of the involved steps.
You email the RNA strand (a text file) to a lab along with some money. The lab converts that information into a physical object (read: virus) and sends it back to you in the mail.
What step is missing?
Distance from mailbox to live virus is a few days of bench work from a semi-competent biochemist.
And yes, this service claims to have safeguards. Does every service? Does every future analogous service? Are those safeguards guaranteed to be robust against totally novel pathogens?
Answers: No, no, and no.
Although, I must admit, as a doomer, I'm pleasantly surprised things aren't already worse than they are.
did you mean greater number of people with less resources?
EDIT: thanks to others that point out how you can interpret this differently, which I think is: "it is now easier for smaller teams with fewer resources" rather than my original interpretation of "power is now concentrated so that fewer people can do this than before"
Now, the worry is a lone nut in a basement with no money could pull off an act of bio terrorism.
Versus EUV which one could dump literally unlimited amounts of money into solving and still probably fail for decades.
* there's not an obvious benefit to being the one nation that says "you know what? We want to be known as 'the nation whose biolab insecurity wrecked the world', because taking blame works out so well for everyone.", though I'm fairly sure a large portion of the world will be totally willing to wargame the impact of hosting a lab as a deadman switch so nobody else attacks them first…
They really just synthesize anything for you?
You: "No, of course not. I once went on a website to buy a drug, and they made go to a doctor and get a prescription and send it to them"
The black market exists -- but comes with black market problems.
Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.
[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.
The point is that the rate-limiting step in producing something infective is a couple million dollars in special lab equipment, skilled practitioners, and incredibly tricky and tedious procedures that take time and repetition to master.
So yeah, you can try to pay someone who has that expertise to make your top-sekret superbug (good luck with that), or you can do what any real threat actor is doing to do, and put in the time and investment. That's the hard part, not asking ChatGPT for a genome sequence.
Let me put it another way: despite the synthesis pathways for many common illegal drugs being widely known and trivial enough that an undergrad O-chem major could do them, in fact doing this is a very good way to get caught and arrested. And that's easy.
There you go!
Steps from your mailbox to an actual virus is a few days of bench work.
That's not a service that makes you a virus, and making one from an mRNA transcript is not trivial.
But the next one (or the first one, if that one wasn’t manmade) will probably be much worse.
- can save my life,
- is interested in saving my life
- i have some control over
Yes, they are currently snatching kids of (illegal) immigrant parents and it is horrible, but who else would protect me against lone nuts in a basement, or robor armies of trillionairs?
However I think the result is disappointing, it concludes the only solution is a massive preventative surveillance state and global governance.
A profitable prediction markets trader who goes by the alias semiotic rivalry posted this prediction on his X account recently:
> Prediction: in 1-2 years, almost everyone will agree that open sourcing the best AIs is totally crazy as the AIs become capable of autonomous hacking of most humans and institutions, serious terrorism and creation of biological weapons, etc.
And I mostly agree with him. As much as it's awful to have such a concentration of capabilities in the hands of a few governments or corporations, as far as I can tell there are no easy answers here, only a matter of trade offs and different risks.
And technology doesn’t really care what you use it for. It can be constructive or destructive.
It “only” enhanced local destructive potential, until last century. Then it got to the point where a huge effort could produce a truly global catastrophe. And then a bit smaller effort. And technology continues to march on.
I will give you a classic example, the Lipid Nanoparticle used for the delivery of mRNA vaccine is the real lynchpin of covid vaccines. The media never talks about it. Any biology student knows how lipid bilayers work (they are the basic building block of cells, it's like asking a programmer what a terminal is). But the process of manufacturing those lipid nano particles at scale was the main bottleneck for delivering mRNA to the target cell. That was the trade secret. It's not sexy or hot like mRNA so the media doesn't talk about it. It's why many developing countries tried to make their own vaccines and failed completely. The mRNA was the easy part but what use is a bunch of mRNA if you can't get them delivered to cells?
Any biology student (even high school ones) can describe how a cell membrane works. But designing a man-made one that can be created at scale and be guaranteed to fuse with mammalian cells is mostly a matter of trial and error. It's a bit like finding viable pseudo linear memory use alternatives to the basic attention architecture in machine learning. Every lab has their own take on it.
With AI nowadays the search space of viable biotech ex nihilo experimentation is much smaller given that you can just prompt it to give you plausible protocols.
[0] "43 freight containers and weighing in at 165 tons." - https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2024/12/03/asml-releases...
[1] not in red blood cells
It'd be like releasing an invasive species into an ecosystem that has not co-evolved to co-exist with it.
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