I tend to ignore sky is falling rhetoric, but this interesting none the less.
According to one molecular biologist who should know, there are already 20,000 labs in the world where a single person will be able to synthesize any existing virus within the next decade. In the same 20,000 labs, five people with $2 million will be able to create an enhanced pathogen -- meaning a virus that could infect people who have been immunized with conventional vaccines -- and kill perhaps a billion of them. With an additional $3 million, the same five people could build a lab from scratch, using equipment purchased online.
The threat, then, is not merely from the diseases we know about -- anthrax, smallpox, plague -- but from the diseases that haven't been invented yet. The threat is also coming from a new kind of science that by its very its nature is not susceptible to traditional forms of control. DNA cannot be monitored in the way enriched uranium can. It isn't possible to distinguish "safe" lines of biological engineering research from "dangerous" ones, since they are identical.
Most of the people in general don't worry about problems they haven't got the vocabulary to discuss, which allows most of the politicians to ignore them most of the time. The fact that this subject isn't part of our regularly scheduled programming itself indicates how far we, as a country, are from grappling with the diseases that will be invented a few years from now.
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