by DerrickT
Unnecessary Bioterrorism Hysteria:
[Via Mike the Mad Biologist]
A recent post about the looming specter of bioterrorism by William Lind due to ‘biohacking’ seems overblown to me. But before I get Lind, what I find particularly disturbing about hyping a non-existent bioterror threat is that it makes combating infectious disease–the stuff that kills millions worldwide–much harder due to unnecessary regulations and restrictions. Onto Lind:
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Almost any time an article uses Frankenstein when discussing science, I cringe. The point of the original book was about the responsibility of a creator to their creation. It was not about imagining death and destruction because we do science.
Why not imagine that someone will invent a gamma bomb in their basement and turn us all into raving mutants? That is another fictional trope.
Yes, it might be possible that some biohacker ‘could’ do something but then someone ‘could’ put together an atomic bomb. What is the likelihood? Very low for either because of the many difficulties involved.
Creating a pathogen that kills 2/3 of the population sounds scary but we do not really understand why the plague accomplished that hundreds of years ago. And, those of us around today are the ones that were immune. So that road is shut.
Someone might try to do some fancy engineering to recreate the 1918 flu that killed millions but again, the conditions found today are different than then and the likelihood that it would be as devastating are much smaller.
Biological terrorism is scary because it is easy to imagine doomsday while few really understand the difficulty of working with any sort of pathogen. Or even simple bacteria.
Governments around the world have spent billions using experts in the best labs tn order to weaponize pathogenic agents. It is an extremely difficult problem. Things like how do you make sure it kills the ones you want instead of your own people come into play.
A home hacker would not be able to easily work with a deadly pathogen. Because they are deadly.
Really special care must be used with them. Especially since many only grow in human cells, requiring very expensive, specialized equipment and costly growth medium. Home hackers are working with easy, simple things like bacteria that are not deadly in themselves.
How about putting a ‘bad’ gene in to a safe bacteria? First, few things in life are that easy. It often takes many different protein products to evade our immune system and allow a pandemic to proceed.
Trying to get some Ebola gene working in bacteria sounds scary. But putting any new gene into a bacteria like E. coli almost always makes that bacteria much less likely to survive in the wild. Bacteria have been selected in nature to replicate rapidly. Anything that hampers that is usually quickly lost.
We have to take special care in a research lab to apply selective pressure to make sure the genes we want in a cell stay functional. In the wild, there is not this pressure and the genes get easily lost.
In fact, there are many variables for creating a pandemic other than the pathogenicity of the infective agent itself. Things like how rapidly it is spread by an infected individual and to how many other people. If it kills too fast, it does not spread far. If someone is dying, it is hard to spread. That is Ebola. The infectious agent can spread farther by not killing as fast but then this allows time for the body’s own defenses to get into the act. As well as social defenses such a closing schools, etc.
I simply do not think anyone understands all the variables to be able to effectively create a deadly pathogen de novo.
And remember, a bomb can be recreated in exact copies to be placed wherever. But a living organism keeps changing its DNA as time goes on, especially things like bacteria and viruses. They only want to replicate, not necessarily to kill. So there would be some selective pressure on most organisms to become less virulent. This is what we see in nature and what would happen here.
I’m not saying that something could not be put together. But I think it is much more likely that a devastating pandemic will come from our intense interactions with livestock, such as large factory farms, and other animals (i.e. zoonotic) than from something specifically created.
A Man With A Ph.D. 
Speaking of which, what has happened to Swine Flu?
Swine flu is still spreading and in now in all 50 states. Some states have been hit harder than others. 10,000 cases and 17 deaths. This would suggest that over 100,000 people in the US have gotten the swine flu.
The swine flu does not seem to have been as deadly here as in other countries. This may be due to some residual immunity due to previous exposure to a similar variant.
So, this version appears to have been much more easily spread than predicted but not as deadly.
Let’s hope it stays that way come fall.