Sure a book that's ten years old is better than 30 year old papers. Doesn't mean that it can't be wrong, especially in the face of technological change. Digging into how modern biotech is constantly breaking ground is difficult, there's no one thing happening. Biocrystallization is used commercially, we produce drugs using modified organism as, we're understanding genetics at genome network/hologenetic levels like never before with new computational and statistical tools. Immune system level effects are getting easier to control. In part I'm not being specific to not oust synthetic biologist friends of mine, in part because the conversation hasn't called for it, and in part it's not my field, just close to it. (Biomedical)

Technological trends at this scale are notoriously impossible (in fact, there's a whole field of research on it trying to figure out how to predict breakthroughs for funding reasons) to predict. We could find out tomorrow that genetics is incomprehensibly complicated in a way that defies most of the use cases for bio tech that we'd like, or alternatively, we find new tools which incrementally make it easier to predict phenotypic effects from genotypic changes. My bet is on the latter, but the prior isn't a ridiculous position to hold.

Here's a cool presentation about where macroscopic synthetic biology is at: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1qRIetbuoH4

It's not for bioweapons strictly, my interests in this field tend to be more about macroscopic synth bio, but perhaps illustrative of why this field is not easily summarized and what sorts of leaps have been made and what challenges are obviously remaining.

Your comments on my rhetoric are frankly, rhetorically speaking, grasping at straws. Vagary isn't always a conspiracy developed by powers that be. Sometimes its because the person you're talking to feels you're arguing in bad faith, is tired when they have opportunities to respond, and isn't planning on writing a white paper for your digestion. This isn't a summit on bio warfare, this was me going "hey bio weapons aren't a technological dud" and you deciding to be "seriously concerned" about someone having the audacity to disagree with your stance. Feel free to elaborate on your "serious concern" or don't. We are here to discuss different things, and you're showing nothing but adversarial participation.