Nice. Any specific recommendation? Interesting titles.

Sure a book that’s ten years old is better than 30 year old papers. Doesn’t mean that it can’t be wrong, especially in the face of technological change. Digging into how modern biotech is constantly breaking ground is difficult, there’s no one thing happening. Biocrystallization is used commercially, we produce drugs using modified organism as, we’re understanding genetics at genome network/hologenetic levels like never before with new computational and statistical tools. Immune system level effects are getting easier to control. In part I’m not being specific to not oust synthetic biologist friends of mine, in part because the conversation hasn’t called for it, and in part it’s not my field, just close to it. (Biomedical)

Technological trends at this scale are notoriously impossible (in fact, there’s a whole field of research on it trying to figure out how to predict breakthroughs for funding reasons) to predict. We could find out tomorrow that genetics is incomprehensibly complicated in a way that defies most of the use cases for bio tech that we’d like, or alternatively, we find new tools which incrementally make it easier to predict phenotypic effects from genotypic changes. My bet is on the latter, but the prior isn’t a ridiculous position to hold.

Here’s a cool presentation about where macroscopic synthetic biology is at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1qRIetbuoH4

It’s not for bioweapons strictly, my interests in this field tend to be more about macroscopic synth bio, but perhaps illustrative of why this field is not easily summarized and what sorts of leaps have been made and what challenges are obviously remaining.

Your comments on my rhetoric are frankly, rhetorically speaking, grasping at straws. Vagary isn’t always a conspiracy developed by powers that be. Sometimes its because the person you’re talking to feels you’re arguing in bad faith, is tired when they have opportunities to respond, and isn’t planning on writing a white paper for your digestion. This isn’t a summit on bio warfare, this was me going “hey bio weapons aren’t a technological dud” and you deciding to be “seriously concerned” about someone having the audacity to disagree with your stance. Feel free to elaborate on your “serious concern” or don’t. We are here to discuss different things, and you’re showing nothing but adversarial participation.

Look, ultimately why I’m focusing on technical capacity is because I don’t disagree on the political side of this. I think it’s highly unlikely that anyone would use bio weapons or develop them soon, and it’s definitely true that it’s inextricably political. My point is ultimately that bio weapons are getting easier and easier to produce and it’s not a non issue to consider. The top comments here were more than happy to dismiss bioweapons wholesale as even a thing that could happen.

I’ll check out your book recs. I’ll point out that the main book on this topic folks have cited is ten years old now, and we’re experiencing a legitimate bio tech revolution right now. How much further it’ll go is anybody’s guess.

Re: ppe

Sure, the outcomes are different, but the scale is too. The scale of a chemical weapons program is necessarily higher from a hazard point of view due to the sheer volume of material. The specifics make that messy though, yes, any particular pathogen would want differing levels of ppe.

Re: precursors

Right, the part of the point I’ve made about bio weapons is that spotting the precursors is very difficult, because a normal bio lab needs roughly the same stuff a weapons bio lab does.

I don’t disagree that many of the chemical weapons used in Syria may be from larger chemical weapons programs. But that doesn’t mean lab scale ones don’t also exist.

Re: ended contact with chemistry

Not everybody is trying to posture. The point wasn’t to show off a magnificent knowledge of lab equipment, but to demonstrate the similarity at a high level.

Re: llms for biology

Ehhhh there are plenty of research applications of llms at the moment and at least one is in use for generating candidate synthetic compounds to test. It’s not exactly the most painful thing to setup either, but no if you were to try to make a bio weapon today with llm tools (and other machine learning tools) alone it would go poorly. Ten, twenty years from now I’m not so sure, the prediction horizon is tiny.

Re: caught in openai fear

Why would I consider that when my opinions on bio weapons and CBRN are wholly unrelated to openais garbage? I didn’t even know openai cared about CBRN before today and I fully expect it’s just cash grabbing.

People can abuse and misinterpret real concepts in a way that makes them seem absurd.

Yes in practice anthrax is nontrivial. But folks here also seem to think any of this is magically impossible, and not something that dedicated people can reasonably do with fewer resources by the day. Which by the way is great, the surge of amateur micro bio is great, we’re learning a lot, we’re getting very smart hobbyists contributing in unexpected ways.

I had fine discussions with others here and in the past. This particular poster wants to soapbox and dismiss rather than engage.

happen to be afraid

Again, I’m not.

fissile material easy to get

Right so fundamentally getting the ingredients for chem and bio warfare is objectively easier than fissile material. To dismiss them as the same implies you don’t realize you almost certainly have the ingredients to make a substantial amount of chlorine gas sitting in your home right now.

Yes bio is a bit harder than that, but not as much as you might think. Anthrax is a common soil bacteria. Ricin from grain. Isolating specific bacteria takes time and is sloppy, sure, but doable in a garage. Not easy, not something we should simply brush off, either.

Ultimately, you’re not going to be convinced. You want to paint something as the same ol false fear instead of a developing threat from genuine technological improvements that you are potentially not aware of. Oh well.

You can ramble about the politics of politicians and CBRN all day if you want, it won’t be responding to the focused discussion I was having about the practicality of bio warfare though.

Incredible gymnastics to bend over backwards to interpret my response as one which doesn’t address what you say, when I specifically ask you to expand on what you mean and justify it. Ambiguous language doesn’t make you clever. Truly a discourse for the times.

So your problem is with politicians using fearmongering. Sure. That’s always frustrating, using fear mongering top drum up support has been a political passtime since politics.

I was not however, referring to fear mongering politics, but the practical and technical application of CBRN as a program and the actual, real, issues with bioterrorism and state bio weapons programs. Glad you got that soapbox out of your system though.

Bio and chemical terrorism are hardly akin to nuclear weapons. Refining uranium at any rate that could produce a bomb in someone’s lifetime takes industry that must be hidden at a state level.

This is simply not true of chemical and bio warfare.

I think the claim that cbrn is made up to self justify needs a lot more justification than you’re giving it. It’s just a profoundly confusing claim. They didn’t issue mopp4 in Syria for nothing…

And whether or not you think nuclear weapon proliferation is a problem, it’s hard to claim CBRN anti proliferation efforts are just a made up excuse to exist, it’s a very real reason to exist as a program concept. Maybe you wouldn’t have one if you could decide to, but that’s a far cry from whatever you seem to be claiming.

tried and tested

Nobody is saying terrorists won’t keep using conventional bombs. Terror attacks aren’t just about maximum kills nor casualties per dollar, however, and as the barrier to entry lowers and lowers it’s important to consider ramifications from many technologies.

hype them up to fail

This does not seem a reasonable countermeasure when the risk of failure is potential pandemics.

I’ll have to check it out.

The general point seems to be yours, that intellectual availability is the largest restriction on bioterrorism. I don’t disagree, but a big part of my argument is that access to this information has never been higher (which is better than not for a variety of reasons) and access to resources usable for this has never been higher. We have plenty of garage scale bio labs as it is. So yes, the biggest limit is availability of people with knowledge to do it, that’s not a hard roadblock, at least not anymore.

And the prediction horizon on biotech is tiny. Give it another ten years? Twenty? It’s not a zero threat because nobody has done it right now yet.

I have not. Is it good?

Keep in mind that it was written in 2014, the Field of bioengineering in the past ten years has advanced considerably.

Here’s an overview. Not the highest casualty count but certainly not ineffective.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8818129/

The equipment and ppe for bio weapons and chemical weapons of the same health hazard is about the same. The only difference with biological weapons is you’re doing stuff with fridges, incubators, agar, and petri dishes, rather than beakers, Bunsen burners, and filters.

In either case your logic is relying on a threatening actor to not have any education. Sure, the pool of candidates is lower for sophisticated say, anthrax, something you can almost trivially find in dirt, but it’s also lower for sophisticated chemical weapons like say, sarin. And keep in mind, yes it’s hard to do biology or chemistry, but devoted individuals do it in garages, for often innocuous reasons. You can’t just assume some terrorist group will never have a strongly devoted individual or group who are competent enough to pull something off, you need to have preparedness. (In the form of local procedures, drills, and organization and plans and equipment to respond to threats as they develop, along with preventative measures)

Also make no mistake, spotting lab scale chem and biological warfare production is extremely difficult. Even moreso for biological production, but both resemble conventional labs (and could be!). Where biological becomes an issue is that lab scale production of a pathogen can self propagate in a way chem attacks or bomb attacks can’t.

I’m not saying to be afraid, the barrier to entry on all weapons production is the lowest it’s ever been, but sophistication in preventing them is also quite high. But it’s not something that can just be brushed away, it’s a real problem that real professionals are continuously solving.

breaks out CRISPR kit in their dusty garage

I mean, it’s genuinely not hard. This reads to me more like assuming all terrorists are fundamentally incapable of anything remotely intelligent, which is both silly and not the official position of CBRN experts. From smaller cultists to state actors, bio warfare is a genuine concern.

if you wanna be afraid

I’m not.

justify your grant expenditures

What grants do you think I’m getting?

Your comment sounds to me like lashing out about something because you want to assume every last thing you’re sneering at is wrong, when really the thing you’re sneering at is wrong in methodology and conclusions but not in the origin of a problem wholesale.

Terrorists have used biological and chemical weapons to large effect. The barrier to entry has never been lower and gets lower by the day. This isn’t a non issue, it’s a very real concern for CBRN groups, both counter terrorism and state actors.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8818129/

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7855324/

I feel it’s important to mention that as far as CBRN threats are concerned, biological warfare threats are very real, a serious problem, and admittedly accelerated by ai tools for novel biological structures. Militaries don’t use bio weapons because they suck at military things, largely, but terrorists have and can used bio weapons to terrifying effect. Bio warfare proliferation is difficult to spot and counter.

To be clear here, open ai is late to the party on this front with a terrible paper, but practically it’s a serious concern, both ai tools and non ai tools lowering the barrier to entry, as well as the fact that any given bio lab essentially looks like a bio warfare lab.

Unions aren’t the ones who decide salaries outright, they negotiate with the employer. Wages go up under unions, not that all union workers are paid better than all non union workers. A Delta Union would almost definitely make their deal even better.

If that’s what you feel is the case if you don’t separate politics from technology then that sounds like a personal problem to address.

Technology and ethics and politics are not airgapped magically distinct things. Pretending that they are is a strategic political choice you are actively making.

“People want to talk about the things they care about when they should be talking about the things I care about!”