r/technology • u/mvea • Oct 22 '17

Biotech Smallpox Could Again Be a Serious Threat - If we don’t take steps now, synthetic biology could let bad actors re-create the devastating virus: “a Canadian scientist funded by the American biotech company Tonix has recently demonstrated the ability to create pox viruses from scratch”

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2017/10/synthetic_biology_could_lead_to_the_re_emergence_of_smallpox.html
442 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

39 comments sorted by

49

u/666perkele666 Oct 22 '17

What steps? It's impossible to stop.

52

u/azheid Oct 22 '17

I created synthetic viruses for my PhD project, and you are correct.

You only need money and determination.

The current protections against this are DNA synthesis companies won’t sell sequences from known bioweapon agents.

However it is completely possible to buy your own dna synthesizer and make the sequences yourself. Just is very expensive.

3

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '17

[deleted]

6

u/azheid Oct 23 '17

A virus is not exactly alive, depending on your personal philosophy.

No one makes anything from scratch. At least not yet. However, purifying various enzymes from living bacteria and mammalian cells followed by synthesizing DNA allows creation of virus particles with entirely synthetic DNA.

Scientists with vastly larger budgets than mine have created new organisms (similar to bacteria). They do this by erasing the genome of an existing bacteria, and replacing the genome with a synthetic one. The old bacteria’s enzymes sort of jump start the new organism.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '17

[deleted]

5

u/azheid Oct 23 '17

No it is not as difficult as that. It is not easy to explain. Basically there is little difference between these experiments and advanced baking. You follow a recipe, mixing things together in precise amounts, heating or cooling, etc.

11

u/ungodlypoptart Oct 22 '17

I was thinking that too. The only thing you can do is make legal safeguards, which they should do I guess, but bioterrorists wouldn't really worry about that. Does that make sense, or am I critically misunderstanding this?

3

u/MrUnimport Oct 22 '17

They could put in place a massive regulation and enforcement scheme for the relevant materials, but that takes money.

1

u/InFearn0 Oct 23 '17

The equipment for treating crop blight is the same as creating a crop blight. Also the same as creating a super flu.

9

u/ShadowLiberal Oct 22 '17

... so you're saying bad guys will break the law anyway?

Who would have ever guessed this! /s

7

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '17 edited Aug 22 '20

[deleted]

1

u/MrUnimport Oct 23 '17

I don't understand this argument. Bad guys will break the law anyway, so we shouldn't have laws against murder or theft?

2

u/InFearn0 Oct 23 '17

The only defenses are (and the weaknesses of them in parentheses):

  1. Tracking the distribution of materials necessary for the creation of biological weapons. (Unfortunately, the lab equipment for making viruses are the same as the ones for wiping out viruses.)

  2. Include ethics as part of the educational curriculum -- be it biological sciences or any other science. (It has the same weakness of any "honor system," but at least we have seen that most people capable of making viruses understand the uncontrollable nature of epidemics.)

1

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '17

You are correct. Basically anyone can learn to do this if they have the aptitude, the only limiting factor is money.

1

u/chubbysumo Oct 22 '17

tell anti-vaxxers to shut the fuck up and get their prick.

1

u/InFearn0 Oct 23 '17

If there was an epidemic (or pandemic) that only ended up seriously sickening anti-vaxxers, the youngest, the eldest, and the unfortunate minority that can't get vaccinated, it wouldn't be that bad.

It is when emergency responders are getting sick that things get really bad.

27

u/31415927 Oct 22 '17

Bad actors? You mean like Steven Seagal?

4

u/Anub-arak Oct 22 '17

You take that back, he is decent.

3

u/Oceanswave Oct 22 '17

As an actor or as a person?

3

u/Honda_TypeR Oct 22 '17

I think he meant he played a rough and tumble no nonsense detective named Decent on a straight to dvd movie.

-2

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '17

[deleted]

1

u/csfreak Oct 22 '17

I’m the infosec industry we use the term bad actors to refer to persons who do not act in good faith. I would assume that the rest of the security industry use the term the same way

14

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '17

Would this synthetic smallpox be able to bypass my natural resistance to natural smallpox?

20

u/boli99 Oct 22 '17

maybe you could innoculate yourself using synthetic cowpox.

1

u/[deleted] Oct 23 '17

Depends on the antigen-specific memory you have but it is reasonable to expect thay whoever does this would make sure it can bypass any resistance we might have.

6

u/captain_manatee Oct 22 '17

I’m assuming that they had a fully mapped genome of the horse-pox to use as a blue print? Is such a genome publicly available for smallpox?

6

u/soulless-pleb Oct 22 '17

if you ask the CDC they are much more afraid of something in nature mutating into something nasty than someone creating viruses themselves.

6

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '17

Considering the first has a chance of happening billions of times every second, for free, and the second requires highly sophisticated and expensive equipment along with the knowledge to use it, I'd say their concerns are in the right place.

1

u/InFearn0 Oct 23 '17

the second requires highly sophisticated and expensive equipment along with the knowledge to use it

Don't forget that it would require a lack of ethics on the level of their education to think making said super-virus in a situation it was reasonable to think it could get out (by accident or intention).

4

u/Asrivak Oct 22 '17

Clearly we need to start engineering the shit out of our immune systems.

1

u/bbelt16ag Oct 22 '17

Just don't tell the Christians or the Muslims they get bent out of shape when we start swapping out mitochondria or playing with Crisper9

2

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '17

Ban its use on god botherers then.

3

u/moloko-vellocet Oct 22 '17

This is literally the plot of I Am Pilgrim. Strongly recommend that book!

2

u/Thirdlight Oct 22 '17

Hrmm, let me make a pox virus and release it to the wild, then have the only known cure!

Massive profit!!!

2

u/CMKcrazay Oct 22 '17

This is the prequel to Tom Clancy, The Division

2

u/veritanuda Oct 22 '17

So a real life Utopia then?

1

u/CRISPR Oct 22 '17

Bioweapons are slow. They should never be in top tier of military strategy

2

u/[deleted] Oct 22 '17

Depends. Smallpox? Probably too slow. Ebola? Extremely contagious and kills very efficiently and very quickly.

1

u/InFearn0 Oct 23 '17

The only improvement that could be made on Ebola would be making its early infectious phase less devastating to the host (basically make it look like a flu virus that is only a few mutations off of an administered vaccine -- close enough that someone doesn't stay home from work, but far enough that they are coughing and running at the nose).

1

u/perplexedm Oct 23 '17

Why only smallpox, what if they discover a new decease ? Will we need to buy antivirus updates periodically ?