A university professor and two students recreated a virus identical to the one that caused the devastating 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic. If they can do it, so can terrorists.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2025/01/14/spanish-flu-killed-50-million-terrorists-can-now-create-synthetic-version-virus
14 Comments
Submission Statement
Like assembling a jigsaw, the researchers in this article were able to order all the separate pieces of DNA fragments to recreate the 1918 Spanish Flu virus from separate vendors.
To add to the worry of that, I’m guessing in coming years AI will amplify the capability of those with more limited skills, perhaps at the level of a few undergraduate electives in biochemistry.
Is the answer to this more rapid development and deployment of vaccines? That has sped up since Covid. But even facing H5N1 Bird Flu, it would still take several months to give everyone the correct mRNA vaccine at current production rates.
Maybe it’s a lesson we will have to learn that hard way after some bioterrorism catastrophe?
Not really a good method to do terrorism since it kills your families and loved ones too
It is also unclear what makes a killer influenza. There is a real chance it will have resemblances with more recent strains of influenza so mankind just happens to have immunity. Even if not, it might still not do much as today’s conditions don’t match 1918.
What is the specific issue that is so alarming? I didn’t read anything in the article about how this extends to novel, or otherwise horrifying, diseases.
The Spanish flu is like the windows 95 of flus; the yearly vaccine provides protection against it.
Bioengineering a virus to become a brand new murder machine is hard enough that anyone out to do it isn’t being thwarted by limiting access to out of date virus segments.
There’s one potential reason the Russian propaganda campaign in the USA is pushing the anti-vax agenda….
It’s not hard to just make a virus that already exists in a lab, and it’s pretty easy to make a vaccine for it. Biological weapons development is about creating new, even more dangerous disease based weapons, that can’t be nullified by a flu vaccine. That still requires lots of resources.
Honestly not really surprising if you have ever set foot in a biology lab.
We work with modified viruses that can infect human cells but cannot replicate. However, it would probably not be extermely difficult to figure out what we would need to change to reenable that capability and we certainly have the tools.
Bacteria is probably even easier to mess up. We work with antibiotic resistant bacteria on a pretty regular basis and it would not be a stretch to create pretty broad restiances if we tried.
And the best part is, we don’t even work in any kind of (infectious) disease research. I bet the capabilities of people actually concerned with the matter, exceed ours significantly.
Of course all of that would be pretty illegal but to especially the bacteria stuff could be covered up pretty easily I think. It is decent ethics and a good dash of “can’t be bothered, got work to do” that prevents biology labs from being breeding grounds for bio terrorists I think.
Luckily for us Islamic jihadists are not known for scientific endeavors.
I wish people would stop calling it the Spanish Flu. Especially since it seems likely it started in Kansas.
Also the mortality was more due to the sanitation conditions (including the war sanitary issues) as it was higher in countries with less developed sanitation protocols.
Now bring on the Black Death and we can see. I’m sure sanitation was a larger factor there as well.
They love to play with fire while holding a gasoline tank with the size of a planet
This is what concerns me about the growth of AI. It will be very plausible in 5 years time for a virus to be created by AI that is purposely designed to wipe out the majority of the human race.
The challenge in weaponizing this stuff is to tie it into requiring an enzyme sequence related, selectively, to any combination of skin color, presence of a foreskin, deity choice, presence of petroleum reserves underfoot, being North Korean, or race.
/s
I just wish people would stop trying to play god, releasing these things into the public. We don’t need to mess with this type of science, ever. You can’t prevent sickness by creating sickness. This is biological warfare.
sure yeah, usual fearmongering on par with Irak’s mass weapons of destruction.