All of jbs's Comments + Replies
Thank you for your thoughts, I agree that this is tricky - but I believe we should at the very least have some discussions on this. The scenario I think about is based on the following reasoning (and targets not yet known pathogens): a) we are conducting research to identify new potential pandemic pathogens, b) DNA synthesis capabilities + other molecular biology capabilities required to synthesise viruses are becoming more accessible, we cannot count on all orders being properly screened, c) only a small number of labs (~20?) actually work on a given pote...
This is an interesting question which I have thought about a little before, but stopped given infohazards risks from thinking too hard about ways in which this might be possible outweighed the actionability of such insights. For a variety of reasons, which includes this reason, I am a fan of pushing fast response passive immunoprophylaxis platforms and other countermeasure approaches such as the receptor-competition based ones, it seems that whatever we are worried about, such approaches would be robustly good.
Short answer (mostly based on undergrad...
Interesting, thank you for sharing! I was aware of this report, but did not consider their methodology in-depth at the time of reading.