Quote:
Originally Posted by WebSlave
And just think what publishing their paper did. Anyone malicious entity interested in creating a perfect doomsday biological weapon now has a template of how to do exactly that.
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The knowledge on making a doomsday microbe has pretty much been available to anyone capable of reading a microbiology textbook, and a good blender. It's basic microbiology knowledge that bacteria readily pick up and incorporate DNA from the environment so if you have a bacteria you want to modify say E. coli to produce the exotoxin from Clostridium botulinum (botulism causing bacteria), you filter out enough botulinum and blend them up to break up the cells freeing and breaking up the DNA, and add it to the E.coli cultures. Then you just need to screen and repeat the E.coli cultures until you get the results you want and introduce the resulting bacteria to your target population.
The reason it hasn't happened is because it's inefficient, extremely expensive, and once released can't be restricted to a specific target.
Modifying a viral pathogen has more layers of difficulty (not as much since the advent of crisper but still a pain) as you need to also be able to culture cells in which the virus can reproduce.
Ed