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Punoxysm comments on What is the most anti-altruistic way to spend a million dollars? - Less Wrong Discussion
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Definitely illegal, by virtue of being bioterrorism, also I believe that you underestimate the difficulty of synthesis and overestimate how fast your epidemic could spread before being re-contained.
If I search for the price of synthesis I find at the moment $0.35/bp. That means the project is probably doable for 100k at the moment.
But there a potential that it will get much cheaper as there a company claiming to develop a 3D DNA laser printer that 10,000x as effective as present DNA printing.
There are probably countries where one could legally assemble the virus and people stupid enough to experiment with the virus in unsafe conditions that it will leave the laboratory.
As far as the topic of preventing re-containment goes, it doesn't make sense to openly speak about it.
I'm not a molecular biologist, but I imagine that the cheaper forms of DNA synthesis wouldn't be capable of synthesizing a virus's capsid. Some viruses also need a lipid envelope or other more complex structures.
If you have the full DNA just inject it into cells. The DNA contains all the instructions for the cell to produce whatever else the virus needs.
You basically take millions of cells and a lot of copies of the DNA and hope that at least one cell produces viruses. When one cell produces them other cells get infected and produce them as well.
It might not work the first time but that's why didn't say 180k*0.35=63k but said 100k.
I'm no molecular biologist myself but I did do some labs experiments doing my bioinformatics studies and given my intuition I don't see why it should be that difficult.
Ah, you're right. I'd actually considered that but thought it'd limit you to a single locus of infection; but now I realize that you could use it to culture the virus under laboratory conditions and then collect the second-generation viruses. Isolating them might be tricky, though.
As to people experimenting with the virus in unsafe conditions, though, Wikipedia informs me that that actually happened in the late Seventies, leading to one death but not a large-scale outbreak. So that's a little reassuring.
Why? I would guess that the right virus cells have a specific molecular mass. That means you just need to run everything you have through a gel.
I must apologize, I only skimmed the second half and took it as just being able to find somewhere there it wasn't explicitly banned like sitting out on a barge in international waters.
So are you trying to find things which are bad but not so obviously bad to everyone that they've been banned? but it's not really limited to any particular country but if you want to apply it everywhere then it would have to be legal in every country, even those where wearing hats in church is illegal?
Intentionally causing a crisis of trust would probably be a good cheap option, so a more complex version of this:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2936
but may not be totally legal everywhere because so many countries have vague catch-all laws like "causing an affray" or "inciting public worry"