I mean if you're worried about bioterrorism, I'm sure there are plenty of ways and means to do so outside of convenient packages like this for someone with enough motivation.

I mean with enough motivation anyone (assuming they pass a background check) can pursue a degree in biology / genetics, get a job with access to a lab, and do the thing.

The same stupid argument applies to anyone who orders the kit - why not persue a degree in biology and get a job in a lab instead. Obviously the kit has many advantages.

A terrorist organization, like ISIS can get their hands on a few kits, gather a few dozen smart guys and ask them to work day and night on creating say a "better" COVID virus they can spread in the West. They won't have problems supplying test subjects to the team...

Alright but let's slow down a bit here... This kit is about plants, and it doesn't give you absolutely anything that those "few dozen smart guys" wouldn't have access to in a regular university. Meaning, if you have the inclination and resources to produce a deadly virus, this kit does not make it any easier.

Yeah, a "regular university" signs up students right off the streets of Siria.

These are called regular Syrian universities and there are plenty of those.

Sure, and they are happy to sign up any number of ISIS members?

The usual practice in illegal organizations (such as ISIS in Syrian state controllerld areas) is not to freely disclose member affiliations.

To a lesser extent, there are some sort of universities in rebel controlled areas.

No idea how good/bad they are.

Oh they sell a plant kit, but that is meant for practice. They also made a dog glow-in-the-dark. The guys at the Odin have done a lot of stuff on humans too. One of them tried (and failed) to give himself a gene that would have made him a incredibly muscular, and tried (and succeeded) in performing a microbiome transplant (as a cure for IBS). They have also tried (and failed) to do their own HIV treatment.

You're right about the university thing, though. It's never been that hard to get this equipment.

Wait do you have sources for those stories?

Most of their stuff is on YouTube.

https://m.youtube.com/@TheODINinc

Or just search their lead person: Josiah Zayner

They tried and kind of succeeded in making their own COVID vaccine as well

Making a nuke is pretty straight-forward. Yet currently too difficult for terrorists and even some rogue states.

If you make it easier though, some organizations may reach the cutoff they otherwise couldn't.

With enough smarts and motivation, you can do anything. But the amount of these is usually a given and hard to change.

It's also really difficult though.

Just like people building their own nuclear bombs hasn't been a major worry.

The real issue is the CIA, FSB, etc. doing it deliberately.

There's a difference. Building a nuke is actually really easy [1]. The hard part is getting and enriching uranium. For the bio stuff, you only need some lab equipment, where there's no reason why it wouldn't get really cheap and easy to procure.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/jun/24/usa.science

But it still took the best physicists in the world with unlimited resources almost a decade to do so...

That article is a nice thought experiment, but they didn't actually build it.

Like many things, doing something for the first time with no proven blueprint is a lot harder than re-creating a process that you know works. And there's plenty of leaked/released information out there that a sufficiently interested party would very easily be able to obtain most of the steps/schematics necessary.

It's a little outdated at this point, but McPhee's 'The Curve of Binding Energy' is a fascinating read on this topic

> The hard part is getting and enriching uranium.

That is an important part though.

Which was exactly my point: you can't argue that "wide access to biotechnology will do no harm, after all, people haven't started building nukes in their back yard".

I think that's the point they were making.

building your own nuke (at least from scratch) requires orders of magnitude more industrial might than biohacking

We need some way to detect germs in realtime, without knowing in advance what they are, so people can evacuate buildings that have them.

There's gotta be some miniature electron microscope that can look at viruses in the air or something, right?

It may be possible to detect Covid-19 with Nanopore's Minion?

Rapid and Accurate Detection of SARS Coronavirus 2 by Nanopore Amplicon Sequencing. Xiao-Xiao Li and al.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35464969/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanopore_sequencing

Electron microscopes can only see atoms with lots of electrons (high atomic number). So to observe a biological specimen with one, you need to coat the sample with heavy metals first

Only Fauci-funded Chinese laboratories have the right to manipulate pathogens!

*Taxpayer funded

* Sovereign Citizen funded

That's an oxymoron.

Wouldn't be if it weren't for all that big gummint.

This offering seems largely educational, this stuff being what people learn in bioengineering degrees anyway. And this stuff isn't really plug-and-play :) Most beginner attempts will simply fail (e.g. dead target organism, no change to desired traits, etc.). Any serious bioengineer (incl. ill-intentioned ones) would have more advanced equipment and knowledge anyway.

Why isn't outlawing it the solution? Seems like a pretty good solution

Because outlawing stuff shifts incentives to favour the most violent entrepeneurs?

Outlawing does not decrease demand, making stuff real expensive, so everyone wants to sell or buy it, but there's no legal protection against fraud or theft, so to meet demand, violence must escalate.

Just look back at prohibition, the drug war, outlawing guns in Britain eskalating knife violence, etc.

The way to handle the problem is not by outlawing products,but by reducing demand for them.

Why do people want drugs and alcohol? Generally to self-medicate. Mitigate the underlying causes,and watch demand evaporate.

Then it just gets made in secret by malicious actors without any kind of safety in mind.

if it's legal, it's still only available to individuals with the time, work ethic and intelligence to get good at it, the overlap of those with bad actors is probably fairly small.

If it's outlawed, it's only available to moneyed interests that need to practice institutional capture. The overlap of those with bad actors, well...