I’m probably going to end up on a list for saying this might be possible.
Most evil thing I can think of?
I’ve not put much time into it but I’ll take a swing at it. My top candidate would probably be to use the million to set up DNA synthesis company making custom DNA sequences to sell to university labs and similar.
The company probably wouldn’t survive very long term as there’s established companies already in the field but there’s a good chance that it would allow you to leverage that million bucks to get more investment and most importantly leave you in a position where, once you have the equipment, you can synthesis your own sequences un-monitored. (hence why you wouldn’t just use the million to pay an existing company to do it)
It’d be a huge task but then you could synthesis the 180K bases of smallpox, building it up from small synthesized sections, culture it and release it into the human population through contaminated letters sent to many many unimportant people in every country in the world at once.
Make sure to leave a manifesto where you claim to have done it “for science” to smite the “unscientific” and commit suicide in a manner which leaves no body or proof that you’re dead so that there will be an eternal hunt for you and eternal fear of future attacks.
Hundreds of millions dead, one of the greatest achievements in human history reversed, economic turmoil across the globe, biotech and bio research probably permanently crippled, science itself demonized, blamed and hated.
Definitely illegal, by virtue of being bioterrorism, also I believe that you underestimate the difficulty of synthesis and overestimate how fast your epidemic could spread before being re-contained.
If I search for the price of synthesis I find at the moment $0.35/bp. That means the project is probably doable for 100k at the moment.
But there a potential that it will get much cheaper as there a company claiming to develop a 3D DNA laser printer that 10,000x as effective as present DNA printing.
There are probably countries where one could legally assemble the virus and people stupid enough to experiment with the virus in unsafe conditions that it will leave the laboratory.
As far as the topic of preventing re-containment goes, it doesn’t make sense to openly speak about it.
I’m not a molecular biologist, but I imagine that the cheaper forms of DNA synthesis wouldn’t be capable of synthesizing a virus’s capsid. Some viruses also need a lipid envelope or other more complex structures.
If you have the full DNA just inject it into cells. The DNA contains all the instructions for the cell to produce whatever else the virus needs.
You basically take millions of cells and a lot of copies of the DNA and hope that at least one cell produces viruses. When one cell produces them other cells get infected and produce them as well.
It might not work the first time but that’s why didn’t say 180k*0.35=63k but said 100k.
I’m no molecular biologist myself but I did do some labs experiments doing my bioinformatics studies and given my intuition I don’t see why it should be that difficult.
Ah, you’re right. I’d actually considered that but thought it’d limit you to a single locus of infection; but now I realize that you could use it to culture the virus under laboratory conditions and then collect the second-generation viruses. Isolating them might be tricky, though.
As to people experimenting with the virus in unsafe conditions, though, Wikipedia informs me that that actually happened in the late Seventies, leading to one death but not a large-scale outbreak. So that’s a little reassuring.
I must apologize, I only skimmed the second half and took it as just being able to find somewhere there it wasn’t explicitly banned like sitting out on a barge in international waters.
So are you trying to find things which are bad but not so obviously bad to everyone that they’ve been banned? but it’s not really limited to any particular country but if you want to apply it everywhere then it would have to be legal in every country, even those where wearing hats in church is illegal?
Intentionally causing a crisis of trust would probably be a good cheap option, so a more complex version of this:
I’m probably going to end up on a list for saying this might be possible.
Most evil thing I can think of?
I’ve not put much time into it but I’ll take a swing at it. My top candidate would probably be to use the million to set up DNA synthesis company making custom DNA sequences to sell to university labs and similar.
The company probably wouldn’t survive very long term as there’s established companies already in the field but there’s a good chance that it would allow you to leverage that million bucks to get more investment and most importantly leave you in a position where, once you have the equipment, you can synthesis your own sequences un-monitored. (hence why you wouldn’t just use the million to pay an existing company to do it)
It’d be a huge task but then you could synthesis the 180K bases of smallpox, building it up from small synthesized sections, culture it and release it into the human population through contaminated letters sent to many many unimportant people in every country in the world at once.
Make sure to leave a manifesto where you claim to have done it “for science” to smite the “unscientific” and commit suicide in a manner which leaves no body or proof that you’re dead so that there will be an eternal hunt for you and eternal fear of future attacks.
Hundreds of millions dead, one of the greatest achievements in human history reversed, economic turmoil across the globe, biotech and bio research probably permanently crippled, science itself demonized, blamed and hated.
Definitely illegal, by virtue of being bioterrorism, also I believe that you underestimate the difficulty of synthesis and overestimate how fast your epidemic could spread before being re-contained.
If I search for the price of synthesis I find at the moment $0.35/bp. That means the project is probably doable for 100k at the moment.
But there a potential that it will get much cheaper as there a company claiming to develop a 3D DNA laser printer that 10,000x as effective as present DNA printing.
There are probably countries where one could legally assemble the virus and people stupid enough to experiment with the virus in unsafe conditions that it will leave the laboratory.
As far as the topic of preventing re-containment goes, it doesn’t make sense to openly speak about it.
I’m not a molecular biologist, but I imagine that the cheaper forms of DNA synthesis wouldn’t be capable of synthesizing a virus’s capsid. Some viruses also need a lipid envelope or other more complex structures.
If you have the full DNA just inject it into cells. The DNA contains all the instructions for the cell to produce whatever else the virus needs.
You basically take millions of cells and a lot of copies of the DNA and hope that at least one cell produces viruses. When one cell produces them other cells get infected and produce them as well.
It might not work the first time but that’s why didn’t say 180k*0.35=63k but said 100k.
I’m no molecular biologist myself but I did do some labs experiments doing my bioinformatics studies and given my intuition I don’t see why it should be that difficult.
Ah, you’re right. I’d actually considered that but thought it’d limit you to a single locus of infection; but now I realize that you could use it to culture the virus under laboratory conditions and then collect the second-generation viruses. Isolating them might be tricky, though.
As to people experimenting with the virus in unsafe conditions, though, Wikipedia informs me that that actually happened in the late Seventies, leading to one death but not a large-scale outbreak. So that’s a little reassuring.
Why? I would guess that the right virus cells have a specific molecular mass. That means you just need to run everything you have through a gel.
I must apologize, I only skimmed the second half and took it as just being able to find somewhere there it wasn’t explicitly banned like sitting out on a barge in international waters.
So are you trying to find things which are bad but not so obviously bad to everyone that they’ve been banned? but it’s not really limited to any particular country but if you want to apply it everywhere then it would have to be legal in every country, even those where wearing hats in church is illegal?
Intentionally causing a crisis of trust would probably be a good cheap option, so a more complex version of this:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2936
but may not be totally legal everywhere because so many countries have vague catch-all laws like “causing an affray” or “inciting public worry”