Engineering viruses fails – changing one trait will undermine other mutations – it’s impossible to create an existential virus

Effective altruists often draw attention to experiments in which a single feature of a virus was manipulated: for example, the virus was made more virulent or more transmissible. But that is not what omnicidal actors need. They need a virus which is improved on a great number of dimensions at once: it must be quite virulent; highly transmissible; have the desired incubation time; resist likely treatments and antibodies; survive storage and transportation across the globe; and so on.

The problem is that we do not know how to induce all of these many mutations at once, and indeed there is a good chance that work done to produce one mutation may cut against other desired mutations. A bioweapons expert interviewed by Filippa Lentzos explains:

I do not think that it’s very easy to create weapons of mass destruction with biological weapons.

Ray Zilinskas’ book on the Soviet programmes, for example, points out how very, very hard it is to engineer something which is usable in that context. He lists 12 criteria that you want in your pathogen for it to be a useful biological warfare agent, and they include things like survivability in the air, survivability through whatever mechanical forces are brought to bear during dispersion, resistance to common antibiotics or anti-viral agents so that the enemy can’t simply treat the disease, high transmissibility etc. In evolutionary terms, normally as transmissibility increases, pathogenicity decreases; so you’re having to fight nature in trying to create a perfect biological weapon.

Some of the key lessons that came out of the Soviet programme go to this issue of pleiotropy, where a single gene affects more than one characteristic. And if you change that gene to improve one of the characteristics you’re going for in that list of 12, the chances are you’re going to diminish one or more of the other characteristics that are desirable. So getting something that works is extraordinarily difficult.

(Let me add for legal reasons that the existence of a Soviet bioweapons program is contested. So is the fact that someone cracked Kasparov over the head with a chessboard when he spoke out about certain issues. Make of that comparison what you will.)

How bad is the problem? Bad enough that an extremely well-funded, decades-long Soviet bioweapons program was likely unable to come close to overcoming it. The biosecurity expert continues:

In the 20 years of the Soviet programme, with all the caveats that we don’t fully know what the programme was, but from the best reading of what we know from the civil side of that programme, they really didn’t get that far in creating agents that actually meet all of those criteria. They got somewhere, but they didn’t get to the stage where they had a weapon that changed their overall battlefield capabilities; that would change the outcome of a war, or even a battle, over the existing weapon systems available to them.

Of course, we can insist that designer viruses with all of the characteristics an omnicidal agent would like them to have are just around the corner. But we should not pretend that manufacturing such viruses is an easy task, or that historical programs and experiments provide any significant evidence in favor of the possibility of manufacturing such viruses.