It's where the legal issues start, certainly. But I would argue that ethically, what matters is how easily any of those 91,012 lives could have been saved. And many could have been saved very easily with malaria nets.
I think this is only a very small update to our picture of spree killer or terrorist demographics. We already know about the enrichment of terrorism with engineers, and Aum Shinrikyo had access to some smart generalists (neuroscience is not a directly deadly field). We also know that such folk are much more likely to succeed at super-simple plans, like this one, than at doing complex technological endeavours for the first time in the face of countermeasures.
How long will it be (if ever) before a typical bio-science Ph.D will have the capacity to kill, say,a million people?
That doesn't have to ever happen. Ubiquitous DNA sensors that identify deadly agents, DNA vaccines, ubiquitous surveillance at the planning stage, tripwires in synthesis machines, and so forth can proliferate. The typical bio-science PhD is pretty crappy (Sturgeon's Law), and likely to fail at something like making the smallpox virus unless there is a cookie-cutter script kiddy style approach pre-packaged. That might happen, but we also might see varied government interference that makes failure much more likely, just as interference at every stage of potential nuclear terrorism makes it impracticable (although that is eased by the rare materials).
Noun and Chyba (2008, "Biotechnology and biosecurity") reviewed the risks of hostile uses of biotechnology in Global Catastrophic Risks (eds. Bostrom and Ćirković).
An excerpt from section 20.7 ("Catastrophic biological attacks"):
...[M]odern society’s experience with bioterrorism has, fortunately, so far been limited to a small number of events that were neither intended to, nor did result in high mortality figures, so they may not serve as good indicators for what a successful major attack would look like. The 2001 US Anthrax scare that caused five deaths, for instance, involved a non-contagious pathogen, and although milled into a fine powder, the bacterial spores were initially contained within envelopes that resulted in only local dissemination. By contrast, the Aum Shinrikyo cult, seeking to stage a mass-casualty attack in order to realize a prophecy, attempted to disperse Bacillus anthracis, from a building rooftop onto the dense urban population of Tokyo. The Aum, which later succeeded in dispersing Sarin nerve gas in Tokyo subways, was, fortunately, unsuccessful both in efforts to procure a pathogenic strain of Bacillus anthracis, and in its attempts to ef
To look at it in another way, it is surprising that someone with that level of knowledge intent on killing people didn't kill far more people. There are lots of simple ways someone with decent chemical knowledge and access to lab equipment could kill a lot of people in a confined space, but instead he chose to use guns primarily.
My leading hypothesis would be that people in this sort of mental state are not motivated by maximising the number of people they kill but by fitting into the mold of a gunman or fulfilling some other psychological desire. So if that is the case we should be comforted that even if the access of people to dangerous chemicals increases they won't use them. What would be really dangerous is if someone psychologically normal decided to kill a lot of people.
Since most of the damage seems (thusfar) to have been by gun rather than by gas this particular event, while tragic, does not seem to be evidence for a particular timeline on this sort of risk question.
preference for mass murdering
My best guess is that this individual has an organic mental disorder, e.g., schizophrenia with paranoid delusions.
My best guess is that this individual has an organic mental disorder...
My best guess is that this individual has an organic mental preference...
What possible experiences would you anticipate if the first statement was true that you wouldn't also expect if the second statement was true?
I would expect to find people with very skewed senses of reality (as seen in schizophrenia). I don't consider that the same as a preference. What's currently called antisocial personality disorder, also known as psychopathy or sociopathy, I might consider more a preference (in that it deals with how they value other people's wellbeing, not from their perception of reality).
I wouldn't be surprised to hear that someone who attacked strangers for no apparent reason was experiencing delusions or hallucinations. I would be surprised to hear that someone with sociopathy did so, because they normally hurt people only for personal gain, and there's nothing to gain from opening fire on a crowd.
Hearing voices is not a preference.
I'm not sure if that's surprising. I've seen somewhere that psycopaths have higher than average IQ, and there were some serial killers who certainly could have managed a PhD program... Wait, Kaczynski?
Actually I'd be more scared of a Kaczynski than of Holmes. Holmes seems to enjoy his mass murder up close and personal. Kaczynski was driven by ideology; that type seems much more dangerous.
The technology already exists for hundreds or thousands of deaths, you will grant; but they are not obviously being used, and instances where unusual methods are being used are low body counts (the 2001 anthrax attacks). Given that the spree killers are not already using them, why would we expect this this change?
Are you arguing either that even a small probability of a spree killer using them is too much when the damage could run into the hundreds of thousands, or that the increasing capabilities themselves will increase the probability?
This is assuming that his goal is just to kill as many people as possible. He could much more easily have set up some kind of bomb in the movie theater and killed as many, if not more, people. My impression is that he wanted the visceral rush of murdering all of those people first-person.
How long will it be (if ever) before a typical bio-science Ph.D will have the capacity to kill, say,a million people?
I certainly think there is a considerable risk, as bio-engineering becomes routine even in smaller labs. One could rely on brute force methods, like creating an array of random compositions of influence viruses for example, attempt to infect a few people, hope something sticks(selection). And then several different strains with non-overlapping surface antigens - you get no overlapping immunity - emerge from your batch, instead of one super pathogen.
How long will it be (if ever) before a typical bio-science Ph.D will have the capacity to kill, say,a million people?
How hard is it to get one's hands on some of the select agents?
A Ph.D student in neuroscience shot at least 50 people at a showing of the new Batman movie. He also appears to have released some kind of gas from a canister. Because of his educational background this person almost certainly knows a lot about molecular biology. How long will it be (if ever) before a typical bio-science Ph.D will have the capacity to kill, say,a million people?
Edit: I'm not claiming that this event should cause a fully informed person to update on anything. Rather I was hoping that readers of this blog with strong life-science backgrounds could provide information that would help me and other interested readers assess the probability of future risks. Since this blog often deals with catastrophic risks and the social harms of irrationality and given that the events I described will likely dominate the U.S. news media for a few days I thought my question worth asking. Given the post's Karma rating (currently -4), however, I will update my beliefs about what constitutes an appropriate discussion post.