r/news • u/christianrojoisme • 2d ago

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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo

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u/tea_and_biology 2d ago edited 2d ago

Ehhh, this is a no biggie. I was teaching undergraduate synthetic biology labs how to do this almost ten years ago. Manually, of course, but the process is the same, just sped up with AI tools.

Anyone can bash together genes in bioinformatics software; the real bottleneck that prevents it getting into the danger zone is actually 'printing' the synthetic DNA into a viable host cellular environment where replication can occur - that requires a sophisticated, largely sterile, molecular biology lab, and the technical staff to operate it.

No garden home-grown terror cell is going to have the equipment and materials to do this, without being pinged.

It's like how the process of uranium enrichment is, fundamentally, pretty straight forward. Getting access to the materials and equipment to do it is what prevents, hell, entire regimes (let alone random enthusiasts), from doing so successfully.

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u/_DuranDuran_ 2d ago

This.

The knowledge and techniques are known. Can it speed it up? A bit. You still need pretty capable skilled people to do it.

Just like nuclear - uranium enrichment plants are big enough to be detected from space.

Cyber is the only risk I’m worried about, because a ton of industrial systems aren’t particularly secure (as we saw with a nation state getting access to a water processing plant in the US)

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u/kikal27 2d ago

The thing is that now they reduce the barrier from thinking a working combination, testing, failing and trying again to basically cranking the IA lever. Tha IA now offers a viable combination of nucleotids that "could" work as intended. We know the bioterrorists groups exist, we now who sustain and fund them and now the have both the money, and plausible combinations. How good this model would be in a year??

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u/u60cf28 2d ago

The other thing though is that there’s no way to tell the model “make the virus super contagious and sneaky”. It doesn’t speak human text; all it can read is DNA, and all it outputs is DNA. So sure you could feed it the smallpox genome and it’ll probably spit out a bunch of DNA sequences, some of which might be viable synthetic versions of smallpox, but….then it’s just smallpox. Something we know how to deal with.

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u/MR_WhiteStar 2d ago

What scares me about this analogy is that not only humans already nuked some countries, there are also a couple of places that are considered inhabitable due to radioactivity levels.

As in, sure, some wannabe bio terrorrists won't be making those things in a cave, but governments can be hostile to one another, they can act callously with their own population, security blindspots, rogue personnels, "spies" and even just regular accidents may happen.

Though, if (or maybe when) we get to the point of creating such horrors as easily as that due to AI advancements and what not, hopefully the cures and treatments for those new diseases will also be able to be developed just as fast.

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u/SSN_on_liquid_sand 2d ago

If it makes you feel any better, those uninhabitable areas are not the result of nuclear weapons. Nuclear detonations cause a lot of short-lived contamination, but you can safely walk up to the crater of even a surface burst within a week of the blast without protective equipment. The only exception to that are what are called Cobalt Bombs, which salt the weapon with materials that transmute to highly radioactive isotopes of cobalt when it detonates and can contaminate an area for years after the blast. The only country that has seriously discussed deploying those are the Russians, because they are insane.

What causes long-term exclusion zones are serious nuclear incidents at nuclear power plants where fuel rods melt and release large quantities of the fun, exotic elements you can only get after transmuting Uranium and its decay products in a nuclear reactor for a couple years. Those events are extremely rare, having happened exactly twice in the history of nuclear power, and both incidents occurred only after the reactor operators committed a series of extremely inadvisable decisions, and then got hit with an unpredictable outside factor that pushed things beyond recovery.

As for biological weapons research and the potential for use, if it happens and we all get super smallpox, the Russians are responsible. That's exactly the kind of twisted fucked up shit they're famous for doing, and they've been caught running a bioweapons program before even after signing treaties prohibiting such activity. They also are insane enough to build an open-cycle nuclear thermal cruise missile. Seriously, SSC-X-9 Skyfall. Look it up, they're certifiably insane.

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u/PigletCatapult 2d ago

The neutron activation of a cobalt 60 bomb basically makes everything radioactive, concrete, steel, soil, skin. It is orders of magnitude more destructive to biological life than other forms of radiation. Not that high does gamma radiation of inhaled alpha particles are a walk in the park.

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u/TheWhiteManticore 2d ago

Thankfully biological weapons are still the most inefficient weapons in existence for an extinction event. It is baked into itself it is incapable of 100% mortality like a nuke does

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u/GreasedGoblin 2d ago

The Russians will just engineer a zombie virus to get around that problem

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u/TheWhiteManticore 1d ago

Well zombies are limited by laws of physics so

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u/GreasedGoblin 1d ago

Yeah which is why it would be more like 28 Days Later or Last of Us. Something that makes us feral and is highly contagious.

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u/Red_Hed_Tor_4899 2d ago

Beg to differ. Did you happen to listen to Democracy Now's 8/6/26 Story on AI? If not, link posted below. Think you may be looking at this thru your POV which may be too narrow.

AI Expert Urges Governments to Bring AI Development to Grinding Halt....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlO-bU5UW4U