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The New Bioweapons: How Synthetic Biology Could Destabilize the World
How synthetic biology could destabilize the world.
As the 1960s drew to a close, government scientists were producing sizable quantities of deadly bacteria and toxins that were devised, in the words of the microbiologist Riley Housewright, to “confound diagnosis and frustrate treatment.” If bad actors do eventually produce and release a viral pathogen, it could infect vast swaths of the human population in far less time than it would take officials to detect and identify the threat and start fighting back. The capital costs of the facilities and materials needed to make a new disease are low, but responding to an epidemic of one involves a complex and staggeringly expensive set of components: expansive testing and detection networks, vast quantities of personal protective equipment, socially disruptive lockdowns, and an apparatus that can develop, manufacture, and distribute treatments and vaccines.
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