Or, heck, maybe the super virus escapes from a BSL4 lab on accident before the garage phase. :D (There's been precedent, and I'm not alluding to COVID.)
As though virus particles spontaneously pop into existence when you mix the right DNA strands together (a process that gets wildly expensive beyond a couple hundred basepairs and is destroyed if the proteins on your fingers get anywhere near it).
That's notwithstanding the fact that you can't just turn a dial labelled "lethality" to produce a gene sequence.
Edit: I can't reply, so I'll say that an extinct horsepox virus was recreated from sequence, the same procedure in theory should work on smallpox
Not impossible, but hard.
Then you'll still need to assemble the viable viral particles. This will probably require the creation of artificial chromosomes needed for the viral replication, and then innoculating human cell culture with them, alongside with the synthetic viral DNA.
This is a level that requires years of work from a major biolab.
So the tools are there.
However on the other hand - making something the right mix of lethal, but still able to spread I suspect is incredibly hard - if it was easy we'd all be dead already ( from viruses etc naturally evolving ).
Sorry for being pedantic.
That was in 1978! I believe we didn't have biosafety levels back then in the UK.
Edit: at least the BSL levels came 6 years later, but the UK has different names for those
>Over the next two decades, growing CDC, NIH, and OSHA participation in ABSA annual meetings further solidified biosafety guidelines, culminating in the 1984 publication of the first edition of the text, Biosafety in Microbiological and Biomedical Laboratories (BMBL). The BMBL guidelines laid out four levels of increasingly intensive safety practices, equipment, facilities, and engineering controls to be employed in the safe handling of microbial agents: Biosafety Levels 1, 2, 3, and 4 (BSL-1, -2, -3, and -4),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...
Just since 2000 we've had lab incidents, including leaks, with: anthrax, west nile virus, SARS, COVID (not implying China - there was a confirmed COVID leak in Taiwan), ebola, tuberculosis, dengue, smallpox, zika, polio, and more. And they're happening all throughout the world. That includes the US, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Australia, UK, South Korea, Hungary, France, Taiwan, Netherlands, and more. Incidents specified as coming from BSL-4 labs include ebola and SARS, though the BSL level is not specified at all for most incidents.
And I would take that is an extremely incomprehensive list given that many incidents are likely going to be tucked away or classified. There's playing with fire, and then there's this... which increasingly more feels like standing around a fire and seeing what happens if you start dumping kerosene into it, all in the name of firefighting - of course.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_laboratory_biosecurity...