Comment by fc417fc802
8 hours ago
> Advanced machinery and safety precaution is needed to engineer a virus or a bacteria to be a bio weapon. It's not something you can do in your tool shed at the moment. Also one would need lethal viruses to even start with and that's not something you can order off of amazon.
This is laughably misinformed. You can in fact build a bio weapon in a glorified shed if you know what you're doing. However it will be quite involved, requiring experience on the bench and a great deal of attention to small details. In short an LLM can't suddenly morph you into a molecular biology lab tech with 5+ years of experience.
Meanwhile as with any STEM discipline the educational process effectively serves as a screen for being a reasonably well adjusted adult.
> Further, even to build a chemical weapon, the compounds needed are strictly controlled almost in every country
You can synthesize from basic precursors but you will hit the same issue as above. You will need actual experience on the bench and the process of getting that is going to screen out the vast majority of would be bad actors. (Notably it failed to screen out the members of Aum Shinrikyo but that is very much the exception.)
> This is laughably misinformed. You can in fact build a bio weapon in a glorified shed if you know what you're doing.
This is pure ignorance and or thinking it can be done like shown in TV shows or movies. Any bio-weapon that is effective would be a virus/bacteria that is propagated via air particles like Antrax. That's not something you can build in a shed because without the safety precaution the person creating it would be the first victim of it.
> This is pure ignorance
I have relevant professional experience but do spout off.
> That's not something you can build in a shed
A negative pressure enclosure, filtration, and UVC sterilization can't be built in a shed? On what basis do you make this seemingly absurd claim? Go check out what hobbyist mushroom growers commonly get up to in their back yard.
BSL-3 is far from technically complex. It's just safety critical to an absurd degree thus (rightfully) mired in bureaucracy.