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Adding a plasmid to E.coli is absolutely routine work and you wouldn't need much fancy equipment for that. But that is very far from creating bioweapons. Plasmids are not integrated into the genome, they stay separate.

For viruses you'd need cell cultures of human cells, they're much more sensitive than E.coli. If you don't have sterile working conditions there you'll fail.

And you can't add plasmids to viruses, so you need to integrate your changes into the actual virus genome. I don't actually know how difficult that is, but it is certainly a lot more difficult than plasmids into bacteria.

The $100M lab in that Twitter thread is what they think would be needed for AI to develop new viruses. So the main argument there would be that a lot of actual experiments would be needed, not just theoretical calculations. And if AI is supposed to do them, it needs to be able to run experiments which requires automation.

If you're only looking for a generic virus for terrorist attacks, just get some Ebola. There's an outbreak right now, so it should not be too difficult. And it's plenty scary already, even if it isn't as dangerous in a first world country with proper reactions to an outbreak as a hypothetical designed bioweapon.

A description of how GFP was first extracted is at [1] and includes a custom-made "jellyfish cutting machine" capable of processing 600 rings an hour, and harvesting and processing 50,000 jellyfish to create just a single milligram of purified aequorin, with multiple milligrams needed to conduct experiments required to isolate/describe the compounds of interest. It took the scientists 5 years to reach the point where they had discovered the chemical structures and understood what they'd extracted from the goop of 50,000+ jellyfish.

A video tutorial at [2] then explains what to do next once GFP has been obtained from commercial sale and use of modern cloning, to skip the need to own a jellyfish cutting machine. E.g. need an antibiotic to extract the 1% of e.coli which will end up being modified vs. 99% of e.coli that won't be changed by presence of GFP.

To the point of the DavidRBellamy X thread, isn't the suggestion that an LLM wouldn't know whether it's worthwhile extracting some substance from the stomach of a crocodile, or from the beak of a penguin that only lives in Antarctica? And that much of the difficulty rests with hard physical work of the equivalent of cutting 600 rings an hour off jellyfish, for 50,000+ jellyfish, and conducting experiments to isolate and figure out the use of an extracted compound. Or ordering some obscure chemical compound from a supplier that is normally produced at a rate of 1mg/year and instead the LLM wants to order 1kg all of a sudden, raising eyebrows about why someone might be making the order.

[1] https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/shimomura_lecture...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibG9lmuXAEk

The Twixxer thread seems to be arguing that an AI can't do research into novel pathogens without people, which is probably true. I haven't met anyone who is worried about that and I think it's either mistaken or a strawman.

I've mostly heard "what happens if the next ISIS or the next Jim Jones can modify ebola to be waterborne or create super-MRSA because AI simplifies the process?" which is why I ask what it would take to create a more virulent virus on a shoestring budget. Not do novel Nobel-worthy research, just copy some existing paper from ten years ago.

> then infect some immunosuppressed political prisoners and see who dies fastest.

A virus that makes victims die the fastest is not, in fact, an effective bioweapon, because it won't spread much. And the "spreads by itself" part is what actually makes bioweapons worthwhile, if you have to manufacture it in bulk and dump it directly on all targets, you can just use a chemical weapon instead.

You don’t need to kill everyone, just enough people to motivate the target nation in an emotionally charged irrational response.

> I remember genetically modifying E. coli to glow in the dark in high school.

That was a fun class! I haven't encountered anyone else outside a students who went to my one HS in Seattle during the late 90s / early 2000s who also remember doing that, interesting to hear other schools had a similar class.

The two of you were actually in the same class.

In Australia I had to get into a genetics program, which happened automatically because I was the only applicant from my school, and take a four hour train ride to one of the local universities.

Definitely worth it though! We did gel electrophoresis too, and some other bits and pieces.

At that time my city was flush with funding from biotech startups and one or another of them donated a bunch of really nice equipment to my school.

Is it, err, possible to then transplant the e coli strain to one's gut biome?

I don't know, but I bet it would look neat.

Why would you modify E coli for this? Use existing gut friendly bacteria and start from those. There's a wealth of material on the genetics of probiotics.

Um... E.coli is an existing gut friendly bacteria, one of the most common ones present in at least 90% of all humans' gut biome. There are only some specific strains which are pathogenous.