A new bioweapon let lose would be incredibly difficult to contain, and could potentially become something we have to contend with forever
That said:
What if a different group near simultaneously makes one targeting people with no copies of the HbS/HbA gene?
(One copy: resist malaria; two copies: sickle cell anaemia)
2 bad things can be threats at the same time. Even 10,000 things can be.
A bad pathogen could go world wide, but you could trash multiple cities with online attacks. No electricity, no water, no communications. Things would get bad.
++coronavirus though...
I can imagine that terrorist are sad now that they cannot use their preferred advanced bioengineering skills acquired through great efforts posing as scientist towards the so far unsuspecting services providing them with harmful DNA building blocks and now have to turn to much much more pedestrian methods instead of the heightened sophistication they crave.
Or to sources from other countries.
The framing of nations as inherently in competition with each other doesn’t track for me. Sometimes, in specific instances, nations will be in competition, but finland having a good or bad education system does not impact me even slightly.
Yet you do depend on Linux.
Where it tracks for you or not isn't relevant. It tracks for Putin and he's been extremely clear about that for hours and hours of extremely boring monologues :P
Blaming "the government" for toxic tap water and runaway prices is like blaming the getaway car instead of the bank robbers.
Blaming the government for toxic tap water is like blaming an organised private/public coalition of bank robbers for a bank robbery.
>it was systematically bought and gutted so private balance sheets wouldn’t have to carry the cost of your cancer.
The US Government, day 1, was bought and sold to defend the right to own slaves, even from the predation of states that had made it illegal. It's not some recent malformation that it just started defending the interests of rich people over poor people lmao. The explicit purpose of the US government is to do the shit it does. The machine has been designed well, not poorly.
"...this sparkling analysis from Wood (History/Brown Univ.; ed., The Rising Glory of America, 1971) impressively argues that [the American Revolution] was anything but conservative. Wood's contention that the Revolution was ``the most radical and far-reaching event in American history'' may stretch the point (did it really have more of an impact than the Civil War?). But from now on it will be hard to argue that the rebellion was a genteel event that left fundamental institutions unscathed. Wood pictures colonial society as overwhelmingly deferential—to king, to family patriarch, and to aristocrats—with ``personal obligations and reciprocity that ran through the whole society.'' But patriots such as Adams, Jefferson, and Franklin, aspiring to become gentlemen, resented this entrenched order of patronage and kinship. Their classical republicanism stressed benevolence and government by an enlightened elite. To their dismay, however, they discovered that their rhetoric unleashed all the latent entrepreneurial and egalitarian energies of American life, which even the elaborate mechanism of the Constitution could not completely contain. Among the results, Wood says, were a new concept of the dignity of labor, improvements in the lot of women, the first significant antislavery movement, and the frank acceptance of private interest underlying the political party system. Above all, Wood suggests, the Revolution produced the messy, fractious politics of liberal democracy, dominated by ordinary people pursuing commercial interests."
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/gordon-s-wood/the...
Commerce gets in the way of ideals.
Also, see the "lab leak" discourse. To me the question seemed irrelevant because the countermeasures would be exactly the same, but that's not how other people think; they're not interested in a mask mandate against a naturally occuring virus, but if they can tie the exact same genetically identical virus to a human enemy? The social status of the threat goes up!
Regular old measles? Not sexy. But a convenient vector for the internal threat. https://www.politico.com/news/2026/11/08/americas-measles-ep...
Made-up AI-assisted super-measles? Doesn't exist yet. But it's a great super sexy threat to defend against. You just have to ignore the kids dying of boring old regular naturally occuring measles in the meantime.
Oh, that's what it is? I never had a model for such thinking.
We know we don't get to see the bio side of the top models. They're out there solving hard maths problems etc but a query with the word 'microbes' in it often kicks you back to a smaller model automatically.
Are the bleeding edge models finding something scary enough that can be done with synthetic DNA that it needs to be restricted asap?
I see LLMs as being essentially irrelevant for whether someone can do this. It's lab skills, planning skills, biological experiment debugging skills.
"Why did my plasmid not start getting expressed, how did I screw up?" "How do I make this huge protein" aren't LLM questions, they're university level biology questions, and "why is my protein growth tank not making the thing I want, and what is the grey stuff, do I need to put clean it again" is an experience question.
Putting checks on DNA synthesis puts making the horrible stuff out of the range of what high schoolers can do though.
It's not like you can prompt it to create super AIDS in an afternoon but I'm sure an uncensored model could help you do real harm.
You don't need AI to generate known toxin or pathogen sequences (as these are already known).
And if AI could design novel toxins, this screening wouldn't catch those anyway.
This is old stuff, being implemented and getting lots of news.
but for bio... I don't think we have 99.999999% accuracy simulation, and experiments aren't "0.00001 cent"
so we have to rely a lot on existing data or pay a lot
I got into this hobby briefly (pre-LLMs) before realising how much of a loaded gun it is, and that I’m just not qualified to safely muck around with this stuff.
Something like this is suspected to have happened to us humans: the black plague has been pressuring/selecting individuals with more active and strong immune systems. Today the plague isn't so active or deadly to humans, but stronger immune systems are probably behind auto-immune illnesses (https://aihep.org/post/the-bubonic-plague-and-autoimmune-dis...).
Usually the synthesis of oligonuclotides is done with phosphoramidite chemistry [0]. So tell us more about those enzymes to make DNA molecules from scratch.
[0] https://www.twistbioscience.com/blog/science/simple-guide-ph...
Unless we are talking about really long oligos (which is harder and $$$), you’ll need some post-synthesis enzymatic work to get your full strand.
I guess it's not a bad idea to put basic hurdles in place but it would be a serious mistake to see this as any sort of comprehensive preventative. DNA just isn't difficult to manipulate.
This reeks of the Longtermists getting their influence into government. They were doing an entire round on YouTube about a year ago.
This works in aqueous solution under mild conditions and enables synthesis of much longer oligos (~1,000 bases), which can subsequently be assembled into 50 kbp constructs.
Not sure about that inkjet printer analogy.
But Esvelt points out the policy only requires screening for DNA sequences 50 base pairs or longer. A would-be bioterrorist, he argues, could easily stitch together a dangerous sequence from much smaller fragments ordered from multiple different suppliers. Esvelt says he has built an algorithm capable of screening sequences as short as 30 base pairs for their risk potential and made it freely available. “That’s the main flaw in an otherwise pretty great policy,” he says. “Don’t bother building a fence if there’s going to be an obvious huge gap in it.”
Also, DNA chemistry is very well established. Someone with the appropriate background could easily assemble oligos without too much difficulty. I guess this stops Little Johnny from printing ebola from the internet.
Why does he call it an "otherwise pretty great policy"?
He's claiming that the policy needs to be more comprehensive. You're concluding that it doesn't pass a cost/benefit test. That's not at all the same claim!
Seems like this has little to do with deterring terrorism then, considering the assumption that a terrorist may not be a US government funded scientist.
"procure synthetic nucleic acids and benchtop synthesis equipment from U.S.-approved suppliers. Those vendors must verify their customers’ identities and screen orders for potentially dangerous sequences that, for example, could encode toxins or pathogens."
If this was just about feds self-policing, they wouldn't have the customer identity requirement.
Probably they're taking this route because AI is moving fast and Congress moves slowly.
But yes, this is stupid. No one who is inclined to build a biological WMD is going to be more than mildly inconvenienced by supply restrictions. DNA isn't plutonium.
I am detecting a bit of frustration here.
(Also, my comment is great, because I wrote something instead of nothing.)
Cluade find how to time travel, Make no mistakes!
When you then look at the mafia in charge of the USA right now, run by oligarchs and other shady criminals, you ultimately have an apartheid system at work now, because these top-down pseudo-kings can control what others can do. Everyone is monitored and a potential terrorist now. Now imagine that DNA can be patented (I don't refer to right now, but look how ESTs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expressed_sequence_tag) in the 1990s could be patented) - and suddenly you will have a state-run mafia decide which monopolist can yield de-facto control, with a few minor companies roleplaying the "it's still capitalism!!!" when in reality it no longer is.
Carry on, everything is apparently fine.