Why biological weapons are scary, and what we can do about it

Some threats are dangerous because of sheer size; others are terrifying precisely because they're tiny. LessWrong breaks down why biological weapons are uniquely scary: a single smallpox virion weighs a fraction of a billionth of a gram, yet unlike poison or a bullet, it self-replicates inside the body, turning one infection into billions of new virions and spreading exponentially to others nearby. The piece notes that in 2018, researchers assembled a smallpox relative called horsepox from mail-order DNA fragments for around one hundred thousand dollars, and warns that commercial labs can now turn a known genetic sequence into a live virus for just a few thousand dollars. As the analysis puts it, there's no in-principle barrier to building such a virus once its design is known — a gap between technical possibility and biosecurity policy that the post argues deserves far more attention.

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