Our next speaker is actually probably, I think he may have traveled the farthest out of everyone.
He actually came from Sydney, Australia.
He had to be with us today.
So just a little bit of background.
He is a federal candidate for the Science Party and actually helped found biohacking in Australia.
He recently made international news for implanting a transport ticket into his hand.
He also co-founded Australia's first open molecular biolab,
and in doing so, had to navigate some of the heaviest gene control laws in the world.
This has resulted in Australian biohackers being involved in decision-making processes
for modifications to biosafety laws and have worked closely with federal agents in an open, sharing manner.
And now he will instruct you on using emerging technologies to engineer your own bioweapons.
Fun word.
And without further ado, let me bring on Meow Ludo.
Meow, meow.
Thank you very much, Harry.
I'd like to thank the Biohacking Village for inviting me here.
I'm really excited.
And without further ado, we'll get straight into it.
Okay, so just quickly, can everyone hear me okay?
Yep.
So what are bioweapons?
So they are bacteria, viruses.
And toxic agents that come from biological systems.
Now, these bacteria and viruses exist everywhere.
They become bioweapons when we use them in a weaponized manner as an act of war.
So this can be against people, and it can also be against agriculture.
And I think this is one area in the 21st century we'll see quite a lot of,
things like viruses to take out crops and affect food supply.
Okay, why use them?
Why bioweapons?
So bioweapons can be self-regulating.
They're weapons.
They're weapons of mass destruction for the poor people.
They're hard to detect when they're made, and they're super deadly.
So millions of times more powerful than the most powerful chemical weapons.
And they're bad ass, bad ass.
Okay, so why don't we use them?
So this is a map of countries that are signatories to the Bioweapons Convention.
All the green countries are signatories, and that includes North Korea.
The red countries are generally fourth world countries,
third world countries, except for one notable exception, and that's Israel.
Israel also has a biohacker space in it.
So in there, they're not actually UN regulated to not make bioweapons,
which I think is like pretty terrifying, or exciting.
Okay, so this is a list of countries which have had bioweapons programs.
So it's about 13 countries.
Some you might not expect.
South Africa is one that I didn't know about before I did this research.
And they actually had quite a large,
but unsuccessful bioweapons program.
And places like Japan, UK, Canada.
The big ones were Russia and America, though, in the 60s.
Okay, so what's weaponization mean in the context of biological weapons?
So most of these things exist in nature, but they're not hugely problematic.
There are some exceptions with viruses.
But basically things like anthrax need to be functionalized.
So we can take the spores, make them stick around in the air for longer.
We might want to...
So it's...
How do we increase their virulence?
So one of the biggest obstacles to DIY hackers making weapons of mass destruction
is actually obtaining virulent strains of these things.
This is why we should be more scared of the people working at universities
and secret government programs, which do exist,
because they have the most easy access to the hardest part,
which is obtaining the really, really nasty versions of one bacteria or virus.
Okay, so...
And a lot of the times, these are physical modifications.
So let it sit around the air for long periods of time.
Okay, I'm going to run through a whole heap of ones that exist naturally now
and how we might modify them.
So avian influenza, bird flu.
This one's pretty terrifying.
It...
In its normal state, as we find it, it can't be transmitted via aerosol.
Now, this is really important.
If you want to create a pandemic worldwide, it needs to be aerosolized.
It needs to be able to move through the air.
If it moves through blood or something like that, like Ebola,
it's never going to go worldwide.
But...
You can make the modifications needed to do that very simply
by breeding it inside animals.
So some researchers in the States...
We're in the States. I keep forgetting that.
So researchers here...
Researchers here were able to incubate it inside ferrets,
and within seven generations,
it gained the mutations needed to become a pandemic-level virus.
So this is not...
You don't need anything high-tech to do this.
You need some, like, carrots and lettuce.
And you can get a 60% mortality rate.
That's terrifying.
Like, we think about the flu as this thing that people just get.
Really quickly, this thing can be out of control.
And it's got a very small genome.
This thing has eight genes.
There's probably people in this room that...
Is that 60% untreated or treated?
Ah, that's treated.
Yeah, so...
So it has a small genome, eight genes.
And these can be put onto plasmids, so you can modularize the virus.
Each part of the virus, which is very tiny and very effective,
can be put onto plasmids.
It can be remixed.
And some researchers now are using emerging technology to do this thing.
So avian influenza is bloody terrifying.
I'm just gonna do this one super quickly.
So Ebola, it's kind of...
It's really powerful, but it's got a really short incubation time.
So unless you can increase that,
it's probably never gonna become pandemic-level.
If you can make it have an incubation time of one month,
which is probably not outside the reach of governments or universities,
this thing could take out the entire world.
Once people start moving through airports
and spread it to other people and they can go to airports,
it's all over.
But you have to incubate it inside humans
or have access to stuff which is way out of the leagues of hackers.
So Ebola is, like, a non-issue unless you want to commit suicide
and go to Sierra Leone and bring it back inside your body.
Clostridium.
This is probably my favorite.
If I was gonna make bioweapons,
which, if there's feds in the room, I'm not going to,
this is the one I'd pick.
So it's a bacterium.
It's easy to isolate.
This thing's everywhere.
It's an obligate anaerobe,
so it has to be cultured without oxygen.
Oxygen's toxic to it.
But people culture this by accident.
If you've ever heard of botulism,
this was around in the 20th century a lot.
Cans of food and people who preserve stuff regularly get this.
Without trying.
It's common.
You can find it in the soil around California.
You can find it in Sydney in urban areas.
It's really, really bad.
Super deadly.
Less than 40 grams of crystallized botulinum toxin
could kill the entire human race.
But it's difficult to weaponize.
So it's not easy to distribute.
People have tried.
A terrorist group from Japan tried to use it.
There's some Middle Eastern countries that have tried to use it as a weapon.
But you can't easily aerosolize it
and let it hang around for long periods of time.
If that changed, though,
this would be like number one bioweapon in the world.
And until then, it's a bit difficult.
But there is one other strategy you can use,
and this is poisoning the world.
So if you eat this toxin,
it would kill you.
If you have a drone and a gram of this,
and you can fly that into a water catchment area,
and they don't have the right controls,
which most of them don't.
Like in Australia,
we've had natural biotoxins like Giardia in our water supply before.
One gram could take out a million people.
Easy.
This is what one of the,
one of the weapons manufacturing devices looks like.
And if you want to,
if you want to grow this out,
like this one's pretty easy.
All this stuff is like,
you can get it off the shelf.
You can get it from,
like online,
from places.
The hardest bit to get is the antibiotics.
It's an anaerobe.
If you get a jar and one of those oxygen scavenging packets,
it's very, very close to how we isolate anaerobes in the lab.
Overnight,
you can get exponential amounts of it as well.
So it's pretty,
pretty easy.
Anthrax,
everybody's favorite.
So this is a bacteria.
It's easy to weaponize.
So basically you grind it in with sand.
There's this,
I went and had a look.
It's very easy to find information about how to do this online.
This thing can just stay in the air forever.
Once you get particles that are small enough,
and it's difficult to isolate.
This is the thing that makes it a poor choice of weapon for hackers.
The specialized media,
the petri dishes you need to grow it on.
You have to put an ingredient in there called phallus acetate.
Has anyone heard of this?
Just out of curiosity.
Yeah.
So it's the poison is poison.
That thing is probably more regulated than anthrax.
So you're not going to bother trying to isolate it.
Yeah.
I was like,
is there a way around this?
There's no way around it.
You can't order it from China.
You can't order it from anywhere where you're not going to be tracked.
And even if you do,
bioterrorist groups that have tried to do this couldn't find strains that were going to kill anyone.
It takes a government level funding to get strains that do this.
And this is basically evidence as to why every anthrax attack that's happened
has been caused by a disgruntled academic in a bioweapons programs.
Give them more funding.
Okay.
So a couple of these.
So the clostridium and the anthrax,
they form this thing called endospores,
which is when they,
when they sense danger,
they lock themselves up into a specialized kind of protective device and go into suspended animation.
This means they can survive for really long periods of time.
You can't clean them.
You can't use bleach.
One of the biggest problems I have as,
as a biologist is when we,
we have to sterilize everything in an autoclave,
but some bacterial endospores will survive.
And that's what we're trying to do.
We're trying to get rid of that.
And yeah,
this one has it.
Okay.
Yeah.
So,
and the way that it kills you,
it basically has this,
it has a protective element that stops the body from being able to break it down.
Then it has a three protein lethal toxin that just spreads and it takes you out.
Not good.
Oh yeah.
And basically you can,
you can breathe it in.
You can get it skin to skin contact.
You can eat it.
But the inhalation is the one you're gonna be worried about.
That's 50 to 80% even with treatment.
So it's dangerous.
If you can,
if you,
if you can mass produce it,
it's terrifying.
The thing is,
on that note as well though,
it's not really self replicating.
It's not gonna like spread through populations or anything like that.
It's like targeted.
You drop it on a city or something like that.
Unlike smallpox.
Okay.
So smallpox is really,
really scary.
It doesn't have a huge mortality rate,
but,
you know,
it's,
I think I have some stats in the next slide about how,
how,
it's really deadly.
So it's got 186,000 base pair genome.
It's like,
it's big,
but it's not out of the realms of synthesis from scratch.
It's just gonna be very expensive.
And the highly virulent variola major,
and one of the strands we were most worried about,
is actually online in a database.
So you can just search smallpox genome
and the first two entries are the complete 186,000 base pairs.
What's that?
Yeah.
That's what we're about to go into.
So it's,
it's linear double-stranded DNA.
This is important because this is easy to work with.
RNA is a pain in the ass.
Double-stranded DNA,
oh man,
that's like,
we've got lots of tools to deal with that.
One of them being CRISPR.
So it's got 179,
about 187 open reading frames like genes,
with greater than 65 amino acids.
So these are things that are important for smallpox to do something.
And most of them have a high correspondence with other proteins.
So I don't know if many of you can see,
there's variola here and vaccinia here.
Vaccinia is the cowpox virus.
This is what they immunize you against.
US soldiers are still being immunized against this.
They got started,
it started again in 2002, I believe.
So US perceives this as a threat.
There's over 90% homology in proteins
of over 150 of the genes between vaccinia
and variola.
Meaning if you can get your hands on the vaccinia virus,
you've got 90% of smallpox.
And you can buy it for 450 bucks.
You do need some licenses and stuff like that,
but a lot of people have access to this,
healthcare professionals,
vets.
If you're working with animals,
where you may be exposed to certain viruses,
you can get this.
So that's like,
I don't know what monitoring is on this,
but it's not impossible to get it.
Okay, and then when you get it,
what do you need to do?
So there's NCBI,
it's a database of pretty much everything
that's ever been sequenced.
It's pretty easy to use,
you can automate it.
Once you find the differences
between the smallpox and vaccinia virus,
you can then get DNA synthesized.
IDT is monitored,
but if you're ordering small sections,
which are not obvious
or are shared by a lot of different organisms,
you can escape detection.
We'll talk a little bit more
about escaping detection in a sec.
So you can just type in the G's, T's, C's and A's
into a box,
hit build,
and then in three days,
you get the DNA ordered to your door,
and then you can start correcting the errors
in your vaccinia virus and making smallpox.
You can,
while you're working with the elements,
you can put them into plasmids,
which copy themselves,
and you can make more.
And this means you have a library
of genetic elements in smallpox,
and then you reach the slide.
I actually copied this slide
teaching university students,
on how to do basic genetic engineering,
but I thought the little success flag at the end
still held true for this speech.
Okay.
You can use bacteria as a way to make more virus.
So they're just DNA.
You know,
we talk a lot about whether viruses are alive or not.
Bacteria are just a way for viruses to copy themselves,
the way that we are just ways for sperm and eggs
to copy themselves.
So I think they're well alive,
and you can use them to do all of your copying work.
Okay.
And people are doing this.
The Guardian was ordering sections of the smallpox genome,
and they weren't detected.
They made some small modifications.
But this is journalists that are thinking about this.
So if they're thinking about it,
terrorists are most definitely thinking about doing this.
I'll make these slides available as well
to anyone that might be interested.
And as Keone was talking about before,
they just made horsepox.
Oh, sorry.
Horsepox.
Yes.
They said,
they synthesized something that's basically as difficult as smallpox from scratch.
This is researchers that have done this.
But the methods they were using and the amount of money they had
is not outside the realms of really dedicated terrorists or biohackers.
So we know,
we've got basic proof that we can make smallpox again.
The researchers who did this work are reported to have gone through
all appropriate national regulatory authorities.
That's the thing which really terrified me.
And there clearly needs to be an international cooperation
component to these policies.
And I'll talk about that in the regulation section.
We're just going to zip through these slides
because I'm running out of time.
So the baby boomers are obsessed with millennials killing everything.
Like killing the napkin industry, killing Blockbuster.
So I thought,
maybe we should turn it around.
There's one more to go.
So when we're looking for genetic,
targeted genetic bioweapons,
we're looking at exploiting difference.
Turns out,
across your lifetime,
10% of your DNA gets hacked.
It's heavily methylated.
It gets methylated.
So it's actually one of the easiest things to target,
but no one's worked out a way to weaponize that yet.
But if they do,
it could fix the economy and give me a chance to buy a house one day.
Okay, so this quickly is gene drives as a bioweapon.
I'm not going to go through the mechanisms of how it goes,
but basically,
when you put a gene drive in,
it increases the chance it gets selected by copying itself to another genome.
How do you use this as a weapon?
Fun stuff.
So if you can get access to an IVF clinic,
and infect 10,000 people,
within 16 generations,
that allele becomes 100% dominant in the population.
It's slow,
but it's effective.
So for ethnic cleansing,
if you have someone of like,
I don't know,
like a redhead or ginger,
you don't like them because they don't have souls or something like that,
you can go in and,
like you couldn't do this as a hacker.
You could do it as a government though,
you can implant genes,
they'll copy themselves across,
and by the time anyone knows,
it's too late.
So it's already so spread in the population,
you can't undo what's happened.
Especially if there's groups with isolated genetic diversity.
So if there's a group of indigenous people,
for example,
that might not breed heavily outside their thing,
it increases the chances you could use a gene drive as a weapon.
We know that countries do things like this,
because Israel has forcibly given birth control without consent to Ethiopian immigrants,
refugees.
Really interesting case.
And if they're thinking things like this is not outside of their control,
there's also rumors unconfirmed of anti-Arab bioweapons being developed in Israel.
The reason I don't think you can make one is because Israel hasn't released one.
In South Africa,
there's rumors of an anti-black person bioweapon in development.
Their bioweapons program is shut down now.
The problem though is that humans are only 0.4% different from each other.
It's almost impossible to make it targeted enough
that you won't have collateral damage.
Okay, so I'm just going to quickly run through.
The easiest bioweapon of all though is vaccination plus malicious attack.
We can modulate our immune systems really easily.
That means we can protect ourselves.
So with smallpox,
if we immunized ourselves and then released that into a place that we didn't want,
didn't want to have people,
we would be protected against it.
And I think this is one of the easiest routes.
We can make vaccines really easy.
Okay, regulation.
So I can order DNA really easily online.
That's actually a section of the smallpox genome.
This might have got flagged if I'd actually gone through and purchased it.
But there's plenty of ways that you can skirt around this.
So someone was talking before about DNA synthesizers in the last talk.
So DNA synthesizers on LabX,
I picked this up just a couple of days ago.
I can buy this machine for $2,000
and I can completely circumvent any monitoring that can happen.
I know that this happens.
Plenty of hackers get turned down by companies like IDT
to get their DNA made.
So they have to find alternate sources.
And there's plenty of people happy to make you DNA for money.
They don't even ask what you're making.
And we're moving towards this,
which is completely integrated desktop environment
where you have a closed loop system.
You don't ever have to contact anyone.
You can synthesize your own DNA.
You can sequence your own DNA.
There's microfluidic tools around now
that you can do this with.
This is actually a microfluidic lab that people are building.
It's only in academia at the moment,
but I've got plans to make a DNA synthesizer in my inbox
from a guy at university who sent them to me.
It cost me about $10,000,
but I wouldn't have to tell anyone.
So my recommendations for regulation
are actually to monitor this chemical.
So this is the precursor to DNA.
It's expensive.
It's hard to make.
And it's completely necessary
if you want to have any kind of DNA.
You've got to have a workflow.
So even in isolation and things like this,
you're going to need to access this at some point.
If you can monitor worldwide the traffic of this chemical,
you know who is interested or is making things with DNA.
From there, you can monitor even more,
like are they likely to be a bioterrorist.
You also don't have to implement any regulation.
I think this is important.
So that's the only way that I can't make bioweapons,
is if I can't get access to that chemical.
It needs to be international,
and it also increases the ability for covert surveillance further on.
So if you know these people are making a bioweapon,
you can let them go until you want to shut them down
and find out even more about their organization.
And it's the bottleneck I encountered
where I was going to try and get around the system
rather than get access to that chemical
because it was too hard, too expensive.
Now time for the practical.
No? We're not going to make any bioweapons?
Okay.
Thank you very much for inviting me along.
I'll take questions if we have time.
Beautiful. Fantastic.
If you do have questions, please come to the mic.
What do you think about...
Do you think it's likely that the digital to biological converter
where you have a completely automated synthetic biology lab
will become cheaper in the next decade?
Like, is this actually going to become a thing
that's going to be in hospitals?
Yeah, I think we'll see it.
Like, DNA synthesis, we were talking before,
is exactly where it's at.
That's the next big thing that we're looking at.
We're seeing companies come out of IndieBio
that are doing things like long-term DNA storage on DNA.
DNA synthesis is quick.
If you have the machines, it's cheap.
But the infrastructure is hard.
Like, actually getting the machine or building it,
building the machine.
No hackers have built a DIY gene synthesizer yet.
But it will happen very soon.
But, I mean, Craig Ventures' company made
the synthetic biology lab automated thing
where you could produce a phage without having to touch a lab.
And that's the technology that, to me, seems crazy.
Definitely.
And if you have access to DNA synthesizers,
you can do this type of stuff.
And I think you'll see it,
especially with personalized medicine and things,
you'll be able to print off DNA in a GP's clinic
or something like that pretty easily.
We have time for one more question.
Beautiful.
What about DNA recycling?
So, like, what about disassembling DNA
that you've already collected from plants or whatever
and then reusing the nucleotides?
Yeah.
So, you could.
Like, I looked at all...
Man, you could do all sorts of stuff in this space.
Like, if you really want to do it,
no one can stop you.
Like, there's Ebola elements in the human genome
you can pull out.
So, like...
But, yeah, recycling would be it.
The hardest...
So, you can go and rip out individual cells.
You can rip out sections of other things.
You're still going to need primers.
Because even with the nucleotides,
unless you can put them together in an ordered way...
Yeah.
So, you need to modify the nucleotides
to make them phosphoramidides
and it's hard and expensive.
This is why it's a good bottleneck, right?
Like, there's no way around it.
At some point,
you're either going to have to learn chemistry.
No, thank you.
I took this to a chemist and said,
how hard is this?
He's like, just buy it from China.
So...
Yeah.
Okay.
Thank you very much, guys.
I'm going to turn it around a little bit
if anyone wants to speak to me afterwards.