Almost 20 years ago, James Randerson ordered a sequence of smallpox DNA. Smallpox is the only human disease to have ever been successfully eradicated — 46 years ago as of yesterday. It’s one of the deadliest infections in human history, killing about 500 million people over three millennia — with 300 million of those deaths estimated to have occurred in the last century alone.  If someone — like a disgruntled scientist, terror group, or rogue nation — were to synthesize and unleash smallpox, we could see the reemergence of a disease that killed three out of 10 people it infected, one...

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