I’ve built DNA synthesizers and sequencers by hand. I used the engineer viruses for a living. I used to engineer human immune evasion for therapeutic constructs. Who the fuck are you people? Have you ever so much as held a pipette before? You can spaghetti blast an ensemble of DNA sequences at some shitty provider but 1) you still have to assemble it and bootstrap a system for making virions 2) you are not single shotting a viable, virulent viral design without a ton of experimental selection and development. Viral fitness is deeply dependent on codons and cotranslational kinetics - you’re not just gonna obfuscate away from wild type and get something good by magic. You keep treating AI like some kinda god, but molecular physics has computational complexity that scales exponentially in particle number which just crushes the abilities of any classical computer to do end-to-end design of biological functions ab initio. Grabbing a bunch of bacteriophage phi174 hits from a mass ensemble screen in lab microbes is not evidence of some magical AGI bio design ability - it's just a classic spray and pray selection. This is just nothing like building something viable in humans. Goddamn it read some books before you waltz into biomedicine and lecture us on protecting human life.

At least n=2 but it’s not a lot! (synbio for two decades: dna synthesizers, sequencers, cell engineering, viral design and have been scaling transformers at GDM since 2018.) I agree with all of your points - thanks for making them. The biorisk pandemic stuff is straight out of the crackpipe from hucksters who clearly never worked in a lab. No appreciation of the timescales, biophysical complexity, supply chains, or economics.