Mini advent calendar of Xrisks: synthetic biology

Are there more detailed discussions of this risk that you can link to? I'm curious about synthetic biology's practitioners' justifications (or rationalizations) for having few safety measures, given how seemingly obvious the risk is to an outsider. In general, it seems like you're wasting the attention that you're drawing to this countdown by not pointing people to more information.

Perhaps some low hanging fruit for pandemic prevention would be better disinfectants. Bleach can kill 99.999% of pathogens, but it causes nasty fumes and irritation on skin contact. If you can get the same results as bleach with reduced negative side effects, it should result in more people using it in more situations. There's a new disinfectant called Steriplex SD that seems promising.

Another thing worth considering is that more people might do bio-hacking at home if sterilization were less of a pain. This could increase or decrease risk depending on your perspective (more potentially competent counter-agents, e.g.)

An example of a nasty trick that would make for a relatively easy to produce and deploy bio-weapon : http://www.plospathogens.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.ppat.1001257

Inhaled prions have extremely long incubation times (years), so it would be possible for an attacker to expose huge numbers of people unknowingly to them. The disease it causes is slow and insidious, and as of today, there is no way to detect it until post-mortem. There's no treatment, either. I'm not certain of the procedure for making prions in massive quantities in the laboratory, but since they are self-replicating if placed in a medium containing the respective protein, they probably could be mass-produced.

On the bright side, the disease would not be self-replicating in the wild, so it would not be an existential risk - merely a very nasty way to cause mass casualties. Also, this method has never been tested on humans, so it might not be very effective, so one can hope that terrorists will stick with bombs.

The reason the life sciences are resistant to regulation is at least partially because they know that killer plagues are several orders of magnitude harder to make than Hollywood would like you to think. The biosphere already contains billions of species of microorganisms evolving at a breakneck pace, and they haven't killed us all yet.

An artificial plague has no special advantages over natural ones until humans get better at biological design than evolution, which isn't likely to happen for a couple of decades. Even then, plagues with 100% mortality are just about impossible - turning biotech from a megadeath risk to an xrisk requires a level of sophistication that looks more like Drexlerian nanotech than normal biology.

A lot of the advances made by synthetic biology are separated rather widely from the danger. This is from ~10 minutes of searching the iGEM website. I am not down-playing the risk posed by synthetic biology, but it's not all, or mostly, dangerous. It's mostly awesome. Biodetectors Cheap disease diagnosis Bioremediation

How far do you think we are from home build-a-virus kits?

its helpful

One thing that make bioweapons truely existential risk is the possibility of multipandemic. Each bioweapon agent could not wipe out humanity because individual differences of the people. 50 per cent mortality for all humans from one agent is good estinate and it would be great catastrophe but not x-risks. If somehow 20 different agents with such mortality will be relized it would mean survaval 1 person from a million, and as they will be far from each other it most likely means human extinction.

The multipandemic could result from all out bioweapon war or be deliberately created as Doomsday weapon or result from quick development of cheap biolabs which will be simultaniosly availabel to large group of people. It could happene in next 10-20 years.

:(