1. unlike nuclear explosives or even conventional explosives, the key ingredients are just… us. Life. Food. Amino Acids.
2. They can be rapidly self-replicating. Even if you make just a tiny amount of a potent self-replicating bioweapon, you can cause enormous amounts of harm.
As for making them… thankfully yes, it’s still hard to do. The cost and difficulty have been dropping really rapidly though. AI is helping with that.
This plot shows DNA sequencing (reading) costs, but the trends are similar for the cost and difficulty of producing specific DNA sequences and engineering viruses.
The problematic things with bioweapons are
1. unlike nuclear explosives or even conventional explosives, the key ingredients are just… us. Life. Food. Amino Acids.
2. They can be rapidly self-replicating. Even if you make just a tiny amount of a potent self-replicating bioweapon, you can cause enormous amounts of harm.
As for making them… thankfully yes, it’s still hard to do. The cost and difficulty have been dropping really rapidly though. AI is helping with that.
This plot shows DNA sequencing (reading) costs, but the trends are similar for the cost and difficulty of producing specific DNA sequences and engineering viruses.