Comment by Balgair

Nitpicking: Designing new viruses or bacteria for a neo-plauge is less likely than a 'bad-actor' getting their hands on enough uranium for a dirty bomb. Nukes are relatively easy to understand and make, get enough U238 together and it pretty much goes boom. Little Boy just shot 1 half at the other sub critical half. Blammo. Viruses are not that easy, as the cell is complicated beyond all measure. It's as if we dug up a 4 billion year old self replicating and evolving machine out of the lunar dust in '69 and brought it back for study; we have basics, nothing more at this point, not even a theory beyond Darwinian evolution really (yes, it has advanced a lot recently, but still, it's primitive). Nature is INCREDIBLY better at viruses, so much better than anything we have. If we could engineer viruses like nature could, and exploit the vectors in the way that nature does, a lot more diseases and human frailties would be solved by now. Stem cells are just the beginning here. We have a LOT more to learn about viruses before anyone, even state backed groups, can make a plague in their basement. Heck, we have smallpox saved away precisely because it is so virulent and we haven't been able to make anything so potent since. It took the entire world decades to get rid of it. The methods it uses are of great interest to us for therapeutic purposes maybe. Who knows if there even are any. In the end, viral vectors of human suffering are doing just great on their own now, us trying to make a more terrible one is very far off.