Fuck this shit, Metacelsus! How bad is this? This is not a realm where I have much knowledge or smarts. Can you give an estimate of probability that stoopit or evil amateurs will turn something dangerous loose on the world using this recipe? If the probability is not high, what is keeping it from being, like, 85%, which is where my unhapppy imagination is currently placing it?
It's pretty bad, but it's not terrible. Even though the steps are easy to follow, you'd still need some reasonably expensive equipment and materials (maybe $5000 in consumable reagents and $15000 in equipment, and that's if you're being stingy).
I think the risk is more from academic researchers who don't know what they're doing, rather than stupid/evil amateurs. Maybe 5% risk that this particular paper is used for something bad? But don't judge me on this prediction.
I also think the truly evil people would do something worse than SARS-CoV-2 though.
I think the bigger harm may be beyond COVID. This seems like a really handy protocol for engineering nearly any RNA virus. Even if the protocol can't be adapted directly, I bet you can learn some useful stuff for engineering most viruses from this paper.
The dirty little secret is that nothing in this paper is novel. It's so standard that any molecular biologist graduate student or scientist worth their salt should be able to do this *without* the paper.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that personally, I think the risk from this paper are the amateurs, not the professionals. Any professional biomedical scientist would not need to refer to this paper.
It seems to me the difficulty an evil genius would run into with engineering a new, super-lethal virus variant would be getting the "super-lethal" part, not the actual technical challenge of making the virus. Finding the right way to mutate the virus in order to make it more lethal without compromising the function/structure of the proteins seems extremely difficult to me.
Fellow scientist here: I'm all for better and more detailed methods but were the details of 70% EtOH preparation really necessary? Etc. I don't recall ever reading Nature Protocols; is that standard for this journal?
Fuck this shit, Metacelsus! How bad is this? This is not a realm where I have much knowledge or smarts. Can you give an estimate of probability that stoopit or evil amateurs will turn something dangerous loose on the world using this recipe? If the probability is not high, what is keeping it from being, like, 85%, which is where my unhapppy imagination is currently placing it?
It's pretty bad, but it's not terrible. Even though the steps are easy to follow, you'd still need some reasonably expensive equipment and materials (maybe $5000 in consumable reagents and $15000 in equipment, and that's if you're being stingy).
I think the risk is more from academic researchers who don't know what they're doing, rather than stupid/evil amateurs. Maybe 5% risk that this particular paper is used for something bad? But don't judge me on this prediction.
I also think the truly evil people would do something worse than SARS-CoV-2 though.
I think the bigger harm may be beyond COVID. This seems like a really handy protocol for engineering nearly any RNA virus. Even if the protocol can't be adapted directly, I bet you can learn some useful stuff for engineering most viruses from this paper.
The dirty little secret is that nothing in this paper is novel. It's so standard that any molecular biologist graduate student or scientist worth their salt should be able to do this *without* the paper.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that personally, I think the risk from this paper are the amateurs, not the professionals. Any professional biomedical scientist would not need to refer to this paper.
As a professional biomedical scientist, I think it'd be a handy reference that would make things easier and faster.
But you're right, it wouldn't be enabling, it would be helpful for professional scientists. It does enable amateurs.
28 Weeks Later . . .
It seems to me the difficulty an evil genius would run into with engineering a new, super-lethal virus variant would be getting the "super-lethal" part, not the actual technical challenge of making the virus. Finding the right way to mutate the virus in order to make it more lethal without compromising the function/structure of the proteins seems extremely difficult to me.
Fellow scientist here: I'm all for better and more detailed methods but were the details of 70% EtOH preparation really necessary? Etc. I don't recall ever reading Nature Protocols; is that standard for this journal?