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Really, Buk, the "just one accident in a lab" idea is just as much a fictional scenario as Mutually-Assured Destruction. I don't particularly want to go into the epidemiology of it, but the likelihood of scientific industry tailoring a virus or bacterium into something that can cause a pandemic in the modern context is very slim. Even in so-called "third world" countries, where epidemics pop up in certain contexts (poor santitation, high biomass concentration), there is sufficient awareness and infrastructure to generate countermeasures very rapidly.
Even the cutting edge of biotech right now hasn't figured out how to apply our genome knowledge of the few species we have mapped. Even clandestine weapons-research still relies largely on the methodology of exposing petri dishes to counteragents and resampling the cultures that survive exposure, coupled with biologic tests in live subjects. Also, the objective of biological warfare is to generate a viral equivalent of a "bomb" - something that kills quickly, does not linger in the deployment area (has little airborne vector duration), and evades coventional defensive strcutures (by which I mean bunkers, pillboxes, etc.).
As for nanotech, it's going to be a while before even some basic issues, like microscale power sources or rod logic, have been resolved. As for brain-wiping - we aren't a hard drive, you can't just run a magnet across our skull. Once again, I don't feel like explaining the entire ion-gradient reaction that runs along the axons of nerves. |
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