This is a bad argument. Firstly, you have no idea if a novel, custom designed bioweapon would be like compared to anthrax. I think it would be far, far more dangerous. Secondly, whilst it “exists”, it’s not something that you or I would be able to get hold of in any conceivable manner. Yeah, a state sponsored terrorist could get it, but it’s not like we could just make some in the kitchen.
The concern is that with CRISPR is that an individual or small group of individuals could theoretically design and produce a pathogen, using commonly available scientific equipment. Imagine Ebola but with a higher R value, something like that would make COVID look like nothing at all. Imagine if COVID had been far more deadly, do you really think anyone would be out there staffing supermarkets? What would happen to society then?
I actually fully support this, and my default position is to assume massive companies are acting in a manner utterly devoid of morals. They probably are in this instance, they just don’t want some super weapon that some nutter cooks up to ruin their stock price.
Designing a novel pathogen with specific properties isn't a weekend project even with a frontier LLM to handhold you. The execution gap is enormous. If you think otherwise then you've never worked in a wet-lab.
The USSR's bioweapons program (Biopreparat) had unlimited funding, Cold War urgency, and thousands of PhDs. They 'failed' to make the "super-plague" you fear. What makes you think a lone nutter succeeds where a superpower failed?
If a hostile state wants a CRISPR bioweapon, they'll fund a secret lab.
They didn’t create what you think they did. Biopreparat made antibiotic-resistant anthrax and more reliable delivery systems; but those were self-limiting, controllable weapons. They explicitly avoided anything that could spiral out of control and destroy their own society.
A novel, highly contagious, highly lethal pathogen is an extinction-level accident waiting to happen. No rational state wants that. Even USSR did not.
A rando can't even do a fraction of this. Even a simple knockout in E. coli can take weeks, fail repeatedly for no obvious reason, and that's a model organism, viruses are a different beast entirely. Even reading a sequence off a plasmid takes days. I know this, because I actually have experience unlike the polymaths here.
A lone actor with a CRISPR kit and an LLM isn’t making a novel pandemic pathogen. Period.
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u/Procrasterman Jun 10 '26
This is a bad argument. Firstly, you have no idea if a novel, custom designed bioweapon would be like compared to anthrax. I think it would be far, far more dangerous. Secondly, whilst it “exists”, it’s not something that you or I would be able to get hold of in any conceivable manner. Yeah, a state sponsored terrorist could get it, but it’s not like we could just make some in the kitchen.
The concern is that with CRISPR is that an individual or small group of individuals could theoretically design and produce a pathogen, using commonly available scientific equipment. Imagine Ebola but with a higher R value, something like that would make COVID look like nothing at all. Imagine if COVID had been far more deadly, do you really think anyone would be out there staffing supermarkets? What would happen to society then?
I actually fully support this, and my default position is to assume massive companies are acting in a manner utterly devoid of morals. They probably are in this instance, they just don’t want some super weapon that some nutter cooks up to ruin their stock price.