Quote: (04-08-2017 05:57 AM)Zelcorpion Wrote:
Quote: (04-08-2017 05:39 AM)Orson Wrote:
And what's the cheapest to get right now? Reverse engineering deadly smallpox, perhaps?
CRISPR and Cas9 have made fast gene editing techniques cheap and widely available. All that's necessary is enough time to reverse engineer it.
Biological agenst are much tougher to reproduce and not nearly as deadly. I studied that aspect of human history extensively and also alternative view of medicine.
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Chemical attacks however - that is easy enough to reproduce, though to be fair - nothing will be as easy as truck attacks. 10 Jihadis with trucks can next time do a joint attack at a concert, massive public square where they run over hundreds at a cost basis of 500$ while having working IQs in their 70s (with only one smarter commander).
We will get more of them. The Jihadis will easier dirty-nuke a city than come up with a truly effective bio-agent.
Yeah. I used to think the same until I took a graduate course on the history of biotechnology at Harvard University a decade ago.
Back then, in the wake of 9/11, President Bush was perturbed that there was no way then to track fissile material coming in a harbor on a containerized ship. Much research went into that problem.
Chem weapons are easy to reproduce - but they are very difficult to deploy without either quickly dispersing rendering it ineffective or else killing the delivery agent, as the Tokyo subway terror attack showed many years ago.
Of course, changing technology like cheap and widely available aerial drones may soon change all that - and we may soon find out (by demonstration).
A decade ago, WMD specialists were pretty secure in the knowledge that crucial genetic components to reverse engineer smallpox were only available to some 600 specialists - a group small enough to be monitored easily.
Last fall that changed. By mid-November, MITs Tech Review announced:
Quote:Quote:
“Scientific advisers to President Obama warn that the U.S. urgently needs a new biodefense strategy and should regularly brief President-elect Donald Trump on the dangers posed by new technologies like CRISPR, gene therapy, and synthetic DNA, which they say could be coöpted by terrorists.
"In a letter to the president, the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) urges the creation of a new entity charged with developing a national biodefense strategy within six months....
"The council is also urging the president to ask Congress to establish a $2 billion fund to respond to public health emergencies that could be caused by new biotechnologies....
[Old strategies were rather static, like the biotech.]
"But PCAST members say the recent 'exponential' growth of biotechnology has rendered this approach outdated. A new strategy, they say, 'must prepare not only for known biological agents, but also for a much wider array of novel and ever-changing biological threats that may be impossible to fully anticipate.'
"Specifically, the council argues that synthetic DNA, gene therapy, and genome-editing technologies like CRISPR open up new possibilities for intentional misuse, such as modifying a virus or bacteria to make it resistant to drugs."
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“ 'If you can get access to the sequence data, that’s really all you need,' says Todd Kuiken, senior research scholar with the Genetic Engineering and Society Center at North Carolina State University.
"It will be nearly impossible to monitor all such experiments, Kuiken says."
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/60293...r-threat/?
Change.
9.11 came, and Bush's war against Saddam kicked the nuclear proliferation threat down the road...until now (cf, the Norks, and soon enough Iran). But that's technology that requires the resources of a state, as well as borrowing from other states. And therefore the threats can be identified and monitored. Not so with biologicals.
By contrast, in 2006, computer technology was predicted to be available to make specialist experimentation in biologicals widely available for dual use as a terror threat by about 2020.
With the new cheap and fast gene editing technology, you don't need the resources of a nation-state. A city's resources and animal labs to test product is all you need - maybe less, if you are determined.
And this is what ISIS has in Raaka. (And perhaps elsewhere.)
Sadly, we seem to be close to the schedule of emerging biological terror threats that I learned about at Harvard.