(2006-02-22) Boutin Biowar For Dummies

Paul Boutin on DIY BioWar for Dummies. Experts used to think that distributing a killer germ would require a few vats and a crop duster. Brent and I have a different idea. We'll infect a suicidal patient zero and hand him a round-the-world plane ticket. But we need a dangerous virus - smallpox, maybe. We won't be able to steal a sample; we'll have to make our own... Enough raw material to build, say, the Small Pox genome would take just over $200,000. The real cost of villainy is in overhead. Even with the ready availability of equipment, you still need space, staff, and time. Brent guesses he would need a couple million dollars to whip up a batch of smallpox from scratch. No need for state sponsors or stolen top-secret germ samples... Three years ago, Eckard Wimmer headed a team of researchers at SUNY Stony Brook that made live Pol Io virus from scratch, part of a Defense Department project to prove the threat of synthetic bioweapons... Every hands-on gene hacker I polled during my project estimated they could synthesize smallpox in a month or two. I remember that game from my engineering days, so I mentally scale their estimates using the old software manager's formula: Double the length, then move up to the next increment of time. That gives us two to four years - assuming no one has already started working