Creation of Synthetic Life

[Formless]

I'm saying hypothetically.

Fair enough.

[MKSheppard]

1) the idea of a terrorist group getting their hands on the equipment to make bioweapons is laughable, and exactly the kind of scaremongering I was talking about on the last page

Wrong. All you need is a decently well educated bio major -- a couple million in equipment to set up a lab -- and a couple pounds of dirt to get anthrax from. The easiest way to make a biological weapon would be to take a disease that has a decent chance of fatalities; and then over several hundred generations of diseases; selectively breed the disease by feeding it common antibiotics; and selecting only those who survive the antibiotics relatively well to breed the next generation.

That's the easy part.

The hardest part is then engineering a delivery system that will spread the superdisease fairly well and reliabily. But; if you have suicide terrorists, your job becomes a lot easier.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

Well, considering that case in Algeria with the bubonic plague outbreak which may have been related to a biowarfare attempt, and the general way the basic principles are being disseminated, I wonder if the process isn't somewhat more complex and we're making sure that isn't apparent so that the terrorists kill themselves trying to follow it while failing to follow a couple of key steps/procedures.

[Formless]

Wrong. All you need is a decently well educated bio major -- a couple million in equipment to set up a lab -- and a couple pounds of dirt to get anthrax from.

What terror group has access to that equipment? Maybe I've just got a stereotype of terrorist groups as being dirt poor (and guerrilla warfare groups in general for that matter), so if you could help me out here...

[MKSheppard]

What terror group has access to that equipment? Maybe I've just got a stereotype of terrorists as being dirt poor, so if you could help me here...

Are you this fucking stupid? I'm amazed you don't forget to breathe and die.

In the 9/11 report; it's stated that Al-Quaeda pre-2001 required $30 million a year to conduct it's operations.

[Formless]

Are you this fucking stupid? I'm amazed you don't forget to breathe and die.

In the 9/11 report; it's stated that Al-Quaeda pre-2001 required $30 million a year to conduct it's operations.

Not all of us are as well versed in the literature as you are, jackass. Why the hell do you think I even asked the fucking question? If asking questions is stupidity, what do you think intelligence is?

[Shroom Man 777]

Hang on a sec. So terrorist organizations can replicate what a multi-million scientific effort conducted over a period of years, and with access to cutting edge technology and the best and brightest scientific minds and repositories of research gleaned from previous efforts and with backing from all sorts of organizations and with prior scientific experiences in these fields, just by having a few million dollars? So unlike how obtaining nuclear weapons is difficult because not only do you need money, but also extensive facilities and expertise and personnel in an effort that will take years to build up, all that making a biological WMD requires is just a few million dollars? I never knew a couple dozen million bucks would give terrorists all sorts of infrastructure and tools that'd make modern day pharmaceuticals envious, if only all those researchers and corporations and laboratories knew it was as oversimplistic as that then they could've saved themselves from all the painstaking efforts involved in research and development by taking up this skewered and un-nuanced simplistic view of the complexities involved in biological shit lol.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Wrong. All you need is a decently well educated bio major -- a couple million in equipment to set up a lab -- and a couple pounds of dirt to get anthrax from. The easiest way to make a biological weapon would be to take a disease that has a decent chance of fatalities; and then over several hundred generations of diseases; selectively breed the disease by feeding it common antibiotics; and selecting only those who survive the antibiotics relatively well to breed the next generation.

That's the easy part.

Easy part, right ... that's why it hasn't taken the better part of a decade and millions of dollars and the hard work of dozens of scientists to even reach a step where we can begin to understand the biological processes involved.

The hardest part is then engineering a delivery system that will spread the superdisease fairly well and reliabily. But; if you have suicide terrorists, your job becomes a lot easier.

Well, not really. Just because they don't care about their own lives doesn't mean it is easier for them to overcome the technological and biological hurdles that dozens of research institutions all around the world have spent millions of dollars and countless hours of effort trying to overcome. Do you have any idea how difficult this process is? 90% of the time, the end product straight up won't do anything, and you have to repeat the experiment from the beginning. Most of the rest of the time, it doesn't live up to optimal expectations. Simply selectively breeding a disease isn't enough (if it were, then natural processes would have created unstoppable killer diseases on their own!).

[Shroom Man 777]

Turns out you'll need all sorts of scientific institutions that pharmaceuticals and Western science has access to, which shithole terrorist groups may not have, and maybe the over-simplified matter of several million dollars is not the end all be all deciding matter in this matter, who knew lol. The terrorists will need to recruit the smartest fatty nerds for their program, not just any shmuck, and how many super-smart geneticists can Hizbullah or whatever recruit anyway? It's not like super-smart geneticists with the necessary knowhow are plentiful. Does Al-Quaeda randomly recruit a whole shitload of super-smart Harvard graduates into their makeshift bioweapons program and spend the next few years up to a decade developing WMDs? Or do they send their own people into Cambridge and like pay for their university tuition fees, lol? What happens when XYZ-bioweapon not only kills Israelis, but also Palestinians, would Hamas be cool with that? Maybe they're waiting for the Israelis to completely wall off the East Bank and Graza, quarantining their demographic so when they biowar the Zionists their own Hamas guys will be totally quarantined by the wall so Yasser Arafat won't catch the Shroombola. Heh. Would spreading disease even be in line with whatever political goals the terrorists are trying to score or attain? Then it turns out that whatever a bunch of terrorist shits may concoct can easily be counteracted by the West's own pharmaceutical and medicinal and biological scientific knowhow, because a bunch of Mohammad Jihads in some backalley biolab in Bakalakadaka Street might not be able to match the biowarfare countermeasuring prowess of the CDCC and a whole fuckload of other Western institutions? And, again, how will the terrorists assure that they themselves won't get infectorized? Also it turns out lots of viruses can be blocked by buying a bunch of N95 masks like what everyone in Hong Kong did, oh no, maybe a pipebomb would actually kill those guys for sure instead of a million-dollar invested biowarfare program with uncertain results, questionable delivery, unsure effectiveness, zero target discrimination, and with the terrorists not having any prior experience or idea at all about these things?