My father is a semi-retired professor of electrical engineering at City College of New York. (He currently teaches one course.) I'll send this to him and see what he has to say.
If your benchtop device user can modify the hardware to attempt to defeat the screening mechanism, the problem becomes orders of magnitude harder. I imagine that making a DNA sequence generating device that can't be modified to make smallpox even if it's in the middle of Pyongyang and the malicious user is the North Korean government is an essentially unsolvable problem - if nothing else, they can try to reverse engineer the device and build a similar one without any screening mechanism at all.
I would like to nominate the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist as one of the most EA things I've ever read. If the whole thing by itself is too long, Issue 3 can stand in for the entire work.
My father is a semi-retired professor of electrical engineering at City College of New York. (He currently teaches one course.) I'll send this to him and see what he has to say.
If your benchtop device user can modify the hardware to attempt to defeat the screening mechanism, the problem becomes orders of magnitude harder. I imagine that making a DNA sequence generating device that can't be modified to make smallpox even if it's in the middle of Pyongyang and the malicious user is the North Korean government is an essentially unsolvable problem - if nothing else, they can try to reverse engineer the device and build a similar one without any screening mechanism at all.
I would like to nominate the webcomic Strong Female Protagonist as one of the most EA things I've ever read. If the whole thing by itself is too long, Issue 3 can stand in for the entire work.