alt Hacker NewsThat’s what I’m thinking. If we can restrict EUV technology to the West then why can’t we restrict DNA manufacturing? Not to the West in this case but to capable governments like with Nuclear power.
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An EUV factory is a moderately sized building in its own right[0]; on the other hand, DNA is manufactured separately inside most of the cells in your body[1], the plant on your windowsill, the mould on your bread…
[0] "43 freight containers and weighing in at 165 tons." - https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2024/12/03/asml-releases...
[1] not in red blood cells
My understanding is DNA synthesis is now like a 2nd or 3rd year undergrad tier challenge and doesn't even require much specialized equipment.
Versus EUV which one could dump literally unlimited amounts of money into solving and still probably fail for decades.
its not really a question of will, its a question of difficulty. if it were easy and cheap to build EUV processes, no amount of complaining and posturing would prevent someone from reproducing that.
Not sure if you realize it but biology is a lot harder to regulate. Most of the secret sauce in biotech is in the manufacturing process, not the reagents itself.
I will give you a classic example, the Lipid Nanoparticle used for the delivery of mRNA vaccine is the real lynchpin of covid vaccines. The media never talks about it. Any biology student knows how lipid bilayers work (they are the basic building block of cells, it's like asking a programmer what a terminal is). But the process of manufacturing those lipid nano particles at scale was the main bottleneck for delivering mRNA to the target cell. That was the trade secret. It's not sexy or hot like mRNA so the media doesn't talk about it. It's why many developing countries tried to make their own vaccines and failed completely. The mRNA was the easy part but what use is a bunch of mRNA if you can't get them delivered to cells?
Any biology student (even high school ones) can describe how a cell membrane works. But designing a man-made one that can be created at scale and be guaranteed to fuse with mammalian cells is mostly a matter of trial and error. It's a bit like finding viable pseudo linear memory use alternatives to the basic attention architecture in machine learning. Every lab has their own take on it.
With AI nowadays the search space of viable biotech ex nihilo experimentation is much smaller given that you can just prompt it to give you plausible protocols.
It’s a tech tree question. Nuclear weapons have some very specific choke points that can be monopolized or policed, eg highly enriched uranium is largely a weapon input. There are also specific technologies you need to crack, which includes ignitions tests.
EUV is the pinnacle of a highly advanced supply chain, you could clone it but it requires many billions of dollars of R&D and massively specialized components; an economy like China likely can support the manufacturing tree required.
I would not be surprised if DNA printers seem end up closer to EUV or even more commoditized, if they are an extension of how all pharma/biotech manufacturing and research gets done.
But this is ultimately contingent on what the technology tree looks like. You couldn’t prevent diffusion of 3D printed ghost guns, even if you wanted to.