Sam is a smart guy, so I really don't want to come off
       as sounding like a jerk here, but this grossly 
       underestimates the technical feasibility of creating 
       such a virus.

That being said, "Don't Panic (tm)". The likelihood of any of these scenarios is extremely extremely low and people have been thinking about and preparing for them for decades.

As for what is much more likely to happen with naturally occurring viruses like the H7N9, natural variants of the H5N1, etc... see my comment from a few days ago [3].

Disclaimer: I'm the first author of [1] and a collaborator of the two first authors of [2].

[1] http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130717/srep00810/full/srep00... [2] http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/11/252 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6839147

BUT, more importantly--you don't even need fancy biotech to engineer a terrible virus. No sequencing, recombinant DNA, fancy BSL-4 labs, well-educated virologists, none of that. All you need is a captive population, something any self-respecting evil warlord should be able to get. (Certainly the North Koreans, the Taliban, etc. have access to plenty of prisoners.)

The same simple mechanism used by Fouchier (the guy who created the controversial bird/ferret superflu) can be applied to humans: serial passage. Put any moderately bad flu virus in a certain number of prisoners, then expose them via air circulation to other prisoners. Take the sickest people from the second group and expose them to another uninfected group via air circulation. After five or six passages the virus in the last group will show extraordinary virulence and transmissive capabilities because you've applied artificial selection.

To seed the virus and start an attack, you take a few of these prisoners, expose them to the worst virus, and put them on planes to your target country while they are still in the incubation/transmissive period.

Obviously, this is a nightmare scenario that I hope never happens, but the idea that terrorists or evil dictators need fancy science to engineer superbugs is false. The same methods farmers have used for centuries to grow taller corn and leafier lettuce can be applied to viruses by anybody with enough prisoners and moral depravity.

[1]: It should be noted that in-house synthesizing costs are coming down, though, and we won't be able to rely on the safeguard of companies automatically BLASTing ordered sequences against a CDC blacklist for much longer.

Can you comment on the models that are used for simulating outbreaks? Do they factor in natural evolutionary pressure and change of the virus? In the case of smallpox, you have something fairly stable, but influenza is highly variable over time. I can't imagine how one does that but it would be cool to know if it's possible.

        Do they factor in natural evolutionary pressure and change of the virus?

If you're not trying to create a "supervirus," but just shotgun a series of viruses to create maximum health disruption, then (as you know!) it's already within our technical grasp. Expensive, time-consuming, and probably failing 90% of the time, but accessible nonetheless. Considering how bad our hit rate is on the trivalents, I could see a plague of multiple, high-lethality strains with a wide variety of hemagglutinin and neuramidase antigenic shifts as a plausible bioterror scenario.

It's not a doomsday scenario, since we have such good reporting and analysis infrastructure, and much of the heavy engineering on the problem (like alternate vaccine production methods) was done during the earlier bird flu outbreaks, but it would be a very nasty kind of terror attack.

One point that I didn't have time to make was that high mortality is not generally evolutionarily advantageous. Even if you cooked up a strain that was especially nasty, it could take considerable effort to prevent it from mutating in the wild into something less so, since the mutated virus would have a survival advantage of not killing its host. Unlike machines, a creator can't really control what happens to a biological system in the wild as it interacts with the environment. In the scenario you describe, there is considerable uncertainty as to whether it would actually spread as engineered.

This is the crux of what I've clearly done a poor job of saying: we know so little that all these scenarios still rely on incredible amounts of luck more than technology.

Not terribly reassuring :) Perhaps 1918 wasn't a very high-fitness virus, but it still got ~5% of us before burning out.

That leaves the threat level >> (conventional) terrorism.

>If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures.

This is naive.

Understanding of weapons != Knowledge of countermeasures (since were talking about logical fallacy)

It's a weapon that has no counter measures. None that I'm aware of, except prohibition.

You can say instead: "underestimates the difficulty" or "overestimates the feasibility."

The rest of your argument is very far fetched. One person's difficulty formulating a sentence could not be less related to biologists' collective capabilities in tailoring viruses.

I have apparently underestimated my ability to craft a joke.

Nuclear weapons have been around for over 50 yeras. We do not yet have __in place__ any ability (other than treaties and fear) to prevent a nuclear holocaust. Missile shields, "Star Wars" -- all of those are of questionable capability, and none of them are deployed.

Given that our only way of preventing nuclear winter is to agree not to launch (and go to war to prevent Bad Guys from getting them?), an option which is not available when dealing with a disease, I'm not optimistic about our future ability to prevent a superbug from wiping out humans.

But that's not the point I think Sam was making. I read the article as discussing a purposeful designing of a virus with specific properties. My contention is that the knowledge required to engineer something that can evade the immune system, spread easily, and cause high mortality is very likely the same mechanistic knowledge that would help you to defeat such a virus.

Remote sensing is what held off nuclear holocaust during the Cold War. The ability to reliably and quickly detect and respond to nuclear first strike creates the "mutually assured destruction" strategic framework aka deterrence.

At this point in time I'd still say that we only have the ability to reintroduce old disappeared pathogens. We do not actually have the ability to design new effective viruses.

Unlike the seasonal flu shot, this vaccine is tailored to the emergent strain.

Uh, nope. What does "almost wiped out" mean to you? 30% of population dead is "almost wiped out"? It's horrible, of course, but there were still 70% who stayed alive. Well, I could say that I can jump almost three meters high with that logic. :-)

We would be knocked back to the ... 1970s!?!?

In the 1970s the world's population was about 3.5 billion and today it is double that. Sure it would be very disruptive, but there would still be plenty of creative people around to pick up the pieces.

If society breaks down then you'll suddenly be looking at countries being unable to support anything close to that number of people.

Grab a copy of The White Plague. It's an entertaining read.

Imagine the genetically-engineered counterpart to the CryptoLocker ransomware. Private and public antivirus research. MacAffee for your white blood cells. Imagine ad-supported biotech.

The internet has created a sort of commoditization of fraud. Scam spam, ad-ware, spyware, etc, often run by companies operating right out in public. Professionals openly discuss security from both sides of the line.

Imagine this sort of bizarre professional attitude in the a low-cost engineered-virus biotech field. What would the Windows of this world be - a suite of programmable bacteria with a solid API?

Don't you dare.

That pressuposes that the "good guys" would be the victims here. How about the opposite?

What about regular "democratic" superpowers doing it to poorer countries they want to control, as they have done similar things all along the colonial and post-colonial era?

The way dictatorships in Latin America and Middle East got weapons, supplies and a helping hand from the US for example against their people or neighborhooding countries.

It's the other way around. The "good guys" are cooking up viruses and publishing them as science (in this case at least)

Proof of evolution

[...]

> If we're instead talking about a mythical time in the future when we do understand enough biology to engineer something like this, one would have to assume the good guys possess the knowledge to develop countermeasures.

------------------------

The amount you need to destroy is more or less a constant. When the efficacy of your technologies is limited, then a technology that only gives you a small percentage edge over your opponent's technology - say Iron vs Bronze - is survivable for the defender provided they have an edge in some other area, though not necessarily pleasant. However, as the efficacy of technology increases, you only need a small percentage edge over your opponent in terms of relative efficacy of technologies to have more than enough power to destroy all that you need to in order to remove them forever.

Consider that armies could be separated by hundreds of years of technology in the past, and still fight on a roughly equal footing. Technology did not more very fast, nor was it very powerful. Then imagine what an army of today would do to an army of a hundred, or even fifty years ago. In the Iran-Iraq war two armies with Cold-War level technology faced each other off for eight years. The Iraqi army were, however, swept aside very quickly by a more advanced force.

The timespan in which there's a rough parity in power shortening. Even small difference in development with respect to time can rapidly become insurmountable when you're dealing with a high rate of change and powerful technologies. What you're defending is more or less static: people, land, resources, they're not getting any more durable, while weapons are always becoming more powerful.

You only need one world ending plague. The defender has to be on top every time, the attacker only has to surpass them once. There is no chance to adapt to what they make, or to try again any more than biological evolution can adapt people to a bullet in the head - because any minor adaptation in that direction makes no difference when compared to the sorts of forces that are imparted.

And I don't think we should have much confidence in the idea that the defender is going to be on top every time.

The questions seem to me to be ones of whether a reluctance to destroy the world is characteristic of organised systems, and whether organised systems will always have the edge over individual effort. If we get to a level where someone can create a suitably devastating bio-weapon in their garden shed, will we also be in a position where that's effectively analogous to creating any other outdated weapon in your shed?

I don't know, computer viruses don't lead me to much hope on that point. Enormous energies are being expended to restrain the energies of a few, with no clear victory in sight. The playing field is not always slanted the way we might like.