Dumb question, as a layman vaguely scared by easy access to this kind of tech: how easy is it to engineer bad stuff using these kits? (say, drug resistant bacteria)
This kit does not facilitate that kind of work. First of all, the expertise needed for the actual genetic engineering is packed here as a pre-made plasmid that has absolutely no way to be repurposed. Second, bacteria culture is something of an art and also needs expertise and specialized equipment to perform appropriately. What they provide here is not professional-grade at all.
Now, the really scary part is that pretty much any Biology undergraduate would have access to sufficient equipment and understanding to start exploring those ideas. Access to nasty viruses and bacteria is somewhat controlled now, and in theory you have to be part of a lab to be able to properly source and manipulate everything you would need. However, I think it is a much bigger risk than the average person would assume, and also one that is much harder to control because it doesn't leave an easily traceable fingerprint, like nuclear enrichment for example.
It's very easy to give bacteria certain antibiotic resistances, the mechanism is pretty much identical to the one used to make them green fluorescent in these kits. You transform the bacteria with a plasmid, they take this up and produce proteins from the genes on it. Those plasmids in the kit almost certainly have some antibiotic resistance on them anyway, that's the way you filter out the succesfully transformed bacteria.
The good news is that the resistances you can give this way are typically present in nature already. Bacteria are already exchanging these kinds of plasmids. And the bacteria you get in these kits or generally use in the lab are also harmless to humans.
I don't think you could effectively design a bioweapon with the stuff you have in such a kit. That would require a lot more knowledge, effort and material. I think at best you'd be able to create a resistant bacterium similar to those that already occur sometimes in the wild.
Engineering “bad stuff” with kits like this is virtually impossible. Synthetic biology is still difficult and expensive, and what can be done without a large budget for massive , robotically automated trial and error is still very limited.
That said, to help evolve antibiotic resistant bacteria all you have to do is not properly finish a course of antibiotics.
You are underestimating how easy it is to email a lab service to synthesise a plasmid for you... Just first hit from google is this place in the EU https://eurofinsgenomics.eu/en/gene-synthesis-molecular-biol... But you can find them in less scrupulous countries with less well trained people, and in general it's widespread as a service. Almost nothing is done to actually check for how dangerous what's being produced is, other than what you tell someone.
I don’t think so, as a synthetic biologist I usually need to iterate hundreds of plasmid designs minimum to get even simple novel pathways working. What are you going to put on that plasmid that will be dangerous, and how? What are the chances it will work?
I got several of their earlier kits - never got it to work even with most of the prep done by someone else, my bacteria either didn't accept the jellyfish genes or they just died :(.
It takes some skill to do even very simple stuff, but it's certainly plausible that, say, Covidlike events become a common weapon in interstate conflicts. My own hope is that a lot of individuals with access to this knowledge will have a much healthier arms race than a few big labs - most individuals are moral agents, so a few bad actors in a big group of people with mostly good intentions is less scary to me than a few big groups with no bad intentions but zero-sum game theory.
