When it comes to viruses, we humans like to pretend we know much more than we really do. It’s understandable. The influenza virus, for example, has only ten genes. It is just a shell that delivers genes and proteins into a host cell, where it hacks the biochemistry to manufacture more viruses. It seems like such an easy biological problem to solve.

Yet the flu and other viruses hide a complexity which virologists have only partly uncovered. The idea that someone could intentionally design a super-lethal virus from scatch–as plausible as it may seem–is, for now, a delusion.

If you’ve been following the news this past week, you may think I’ve just been proven wrong. Reports have surfaced about two teams