An EUV factory is a moderately sized building in its own right[0]; on the other hand, DNA is manufactured separately inside most of the cells in your body[1], the plant on your windowsill, the mould on your bread…

[0] "43 freight containers and weighing in at 165 tons." - https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2024/12/03/asml-releases...

[1] not in red blood cells

My understanding is DNA synthesis is now like a 2nd or 3rd year undergrad tier challenge and doesn't even require much specialized equipment.

Versus EUV which one could dump literally unlimited amounts of money into solving and still probably fail for decades.

its not really a question of will, its a question of difficulty. if it were easy and cheap to build EUV processes, no amount of complaining and posturing would prevent someone from reproducing that.

Not sure if you realize it but biology is a lot harder to regulate. Most of the secret sauce in biotech is in the manufacturing process, not the reagents itself.

I will give you a classic example, the Lipid Nanoparticle used for the delivery of mRNA vaccine is the real lynchpin of covid vaccines. The media never talks about it. Any biology student knows how lipid bilayers work (they are the basic building block of cells, it's like asking a programmer what a terminal is). But the process of manufacturing those lipid nano particles at scale was the main bottleneck for delivering mRNA to the target cell. That was the trade secret. It's not sexy or hot like mRNA so the media doesn't talk about it. It's why many developing countries tried to make their own vaccines and failed completely. The mRNA was the easy part but what use is a bunch of mRNA if you can't get them delivered to cells?

Any biology student (even high school ones) can describe how a cell membrane works. But designing a man-made one that can be created at scale and be guaranteed to fuse with mammalian cells is mostly a matter of trial and error. It's a bit like finding viable pseudo linear memory use alternatives to the basic attention architecture in machine learning. Every lab has their own take on it.

With AI nowadays the search space of viable biotech ex nihilo experimentation is much smaller given that you can just prompt it to give you plausible protocols.

Not even close to the same thing. That's taking an existing viral transfection system and swapping in a single gene.

Thermo Fisher sells a kit to do this.

“There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

But the next one (or the first one, if that one wasn’t manmade) will probably be much worse.

No, you literally cannot. Synthesizing a stretch of DNA is trivial, and what you can send away for [1].

Building a functional virus is not even remotely a turn-key operation. Assuming you could get the genome, expressing that genome in a way that results in infectious virus is non-trivial.

[1] Even then, the companies will rarely give you long enough reads to make a full genome scaffold. It looks like there are two companies that will do 50-100kb assemblies as a service today, but I guarantee you they're going to look at what you're trying to make, and who is asking them to do it.

Would they not be like “hmmm this one looks kinda similar to a known virus”

They really just synthesize anything for you?

Yes in much the same way you can literally build a rocket and go to the moon.

You may be skipping a few of the involved steps.

One of the easiest and most effective AI regulations would be to simply require all these labs to run all incoming requests through a suite of the most advanced models asking if the request is likely to be a pathogenic agent.

No, I think they mean that it used to take a giant lab full of specialists with lots of funding to do lots of damage before.

Now, the worry is a lone nut in a basement with no money could pull off an act of bio terrorism.

I had the same reaction, but I think they meant fewer as in "requires less consensus-building to wield meaningful power." Used to have to convince lots of people to go to war in order to kill a couple million people. Fast approaching a one- or two-man weekend project.

Fewer as in the size of an individual group, even though the total number of people who could find themselves in such a group is greater.

I'm so surprised that HN is this much anti-government. I'm a doomer myself, I fear the rich, I fear the terrorists, and I think the only one that

  - can save my life, 
  - is interested in saving my life
  - i have some control over

Yes, they are currently snatching kids of (illegal) immigrant parents and it is horrible, but who else would protect me against lone nuts in a basement, or robor armies of trillionairs?

It's super cringe and d e c e l to think technological advancement could have any dangers whatsoever.

Just like in a car, the true demonstration of intelligence is closing your eyes and slamming the pedal to the floor.