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environmental storytelling
(thelemmy.club)
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this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2026
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Is it cool? Yes.
Is manufacturing novel viruses a scientific discovery that we're ready to handle, such that it will help more people than harm them? I'm extremely convinced the answer is no. Thousands of lives will be a drop in the ocean compared to when someone makes COVID-19 2. Or when someone kills all the monoculture corn and wheat in the world.
I get where you're coming from.
We've been able to make new viruses for decades.
Scientists were DNA editing together boutique polio strains way back in 2002.
This news article is about is a machine learning model which you feed bacterial DNA, and it (quite successfully!) generates a genome for a virus that can potentially kill that bacteria.
Pretty much every scientific advance has the potential to be used as a weapon. These scientists have taken very weaponisable technologies technologies (deep learning, virus synthesisation) and used them to create a new technique that can cure people suffering from late stage and antibiotic resistant bacterial infections. Could another research lab try and use a similar technique to develop bioweapons? Sure, maybe. That's not what's been done here, and this work hasn't pushed the frontiers of those technologies in a particularly weaponisable direction. I'm very convinced that their work specifically is going to save far more lives than it takes.