From The Bulletin Of The Atomic Scientists (the Doomsday Clock people), November 15:
Pandemics can begin in many ways. A wild animal could infect a hunter, or a farm animal might spread a pathogen to a market worker. Researchers in a lab or in the field could be exposed to viruses and unwittingly pass them to others. Natural spillovers and accidents have been responsible for every historical plague, each of which spread from a single individual to afflict much of humanity. But the devastation from past outbreaks pales in comparison to the catastrophic harm that could be inflicted by malicious individuals intent on causing new pandemics.
Thousands of people can now assemble infectious viruses from a genome sequence and commercially available synthetic DNA, and numerous projects aim to find and publicly identify new viruses that could cause pandemics by characterizing their growth, transmission, and immune evasion capabilities in the laboratory. Once these projects succeed, the world will face a significant new threat: If a single terrorist with the necessary skills were to release a new virus equivalent to SARS-CoV-2, which has claimed 20 million lives worldwide, that person would have killed more people than if they were to detonate a nuclear warhead in a dense city. If they were to release numerous such viruses across multiple travel hubs, the resulting pandemics could not plausibly be contained, and would spread much faster than even the most rapidly produced biomedical countermeasures. And if one of those viruses spread as easily as the omicron variant—which rapidly infected millions of people within weeks of being identified—but had the lethality of smallpox, which killed about 30 percent of those infected, the subsequent loss of essential workers could trigger the collapse of food, water, and power distribution networks—and with them, societies.
To avoid this future, societies need to rethink how they can delay pandemic proliferation, detect all exponentially growing biological threats, and defend humanity by preventing infections. A comprehensive set of directions detailing how we can build a world free from catastrophic biological threats is required. That roadmap now exists.
The threat. Each year, universities and labs around the world train more people in laboratory skills important for biomedical research and the bioeconomy, but many of those same skills can also be used to assemble viruses. Judging from records of doctoral degrees awarded in different fields that acquire the relevant skills, at least 30,000 individuals can successfully follow public step-by-step protocols to obtain any influenza virus with a published genome sequence from commercially available synthetic DNA. Coronaviruses and paramyxoviruses such as MERS and measles require synthetic genes to be assembled into larger genomes, likely cutting the number of people with the requisite skills and resources to the single-digit thousands. Only one or two hundred are likely capable of assembling huge poxviruses such as variola, the causative agent of smallpox.
While it’s unlikely that any of the people capable of acquiring infectious samples will decide to unleash a pandemic in a given year, history strongly suggests that someone eventually will. In the 50 years since the dawn of recombinant DNA, at least one murderer possessed a background that today would confer the necessary skills: the cult member and virologist Seichi Endo, who sought to obtain the Ebola virus and later helped commit mass murder against civilians using chemical weapons. His existence alone suggests that we should expect to see one deliberate pandemic event every 50 years. Other terrorists and mass murderers who may have received a relevant education or could plausibly have acquired the necessary training include multiple al Qaeda operatives, a neuroscience graduate student who opened fire in a crowded theater, and the Unabomber, a brilliant Berkeley mathematics professor who wrote of the “immense power of biotechnology” and sought to bring down industrial civilization.
What these historical murderers lacked, and we still do not yet know, is which specific viruses are likely to cause new pandemics. The genomes for virtually all known human pathogens are freely available online, but the variola smallpox, which causes smallpox, is the sole disease that almost certainly would spread if released. Fortunately, it is also one of the least accessible viruses, and one that societies have successfully controlled and eradicated using already-stockpiled vaccines. Other frequently-cited agents include the 1918 influenza virus, MERS-CoV, and Nipah virus, but any terrorist who attempts to cause global catastrophe by unleashing one of these is likely to fail....
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