In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology in 2007, a group of scientists and FBI officials called for better oversight of so-called synthetic DNA...
Some biologists argue that anyone wishing to custom-make new organisms, even if it's just glow-in-the-dark bacteria (a popular trick among biohackers), should have to get a license first...
A senior official in the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate says the bureau is working with academia and industry to raise awareness about biosecurity...
George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, says anyone using synthetic DNA should have to have a license, including garage biologists...
In summary: Oooh Frankenstein - scary!
Frankenstein is THE allegory for the dangers of science and it's pretty old.
If you don't like what's going on with biohacking, put your money where you mouth is and give up everything science gave you since Mary Shelley died.
George Church supports licensing because he's on a dozen patents in this area, has significant investments in synthetic biology, and would be first in line to be involved with granting the licenses.
There are valid safety considerations which need to be taken seriously but it's important to consider his motivations when making public statements like this.
Tangentially, I took George Church's class at HMS and it was one of the worst courses I've ever taken. If a synthetic biology licensing committee ever comes into play I hope someone less scatterbrained and arbitrary is chosen to head it.
Although I agree with your viewpoint, I have an inexplicable feeling that your biases lie with the biohackers. To play devil's advocate: licensing makes sense for the type of dna recombination they do at, say, USAMRIID; and in an emerging field like this it's always hard to figure out where exactly to draw lines.
Imagine if Woz had to get a license to do what he did?
The key thing to keep in mind is that a lot, and I mean A LOT of innovation is the result of a brute force search, the more people are searching the faster we find things. And while regulation may have some benefits the costs are often devastating.
I also happen to know that big pharma has a huge backlog of promising potential drugs. But the years and hundreds of millions of dollars necessary for even early stage testing are a suffocating bottleneck. The end result is that there is absolutely no point in trying to find new cures, there's already a glut of them on the shelf.
Suffice it to say, I think the risks are worth it and regulation is a blunt weapon which eliminates most of the bad AND the good.
> Imagine if Woz had to get a license to do what he did?
Let's try to imagine all of the worst-case scenarios for what might have happened if Woz instead created a monumental fuck-up. I can't really come up with much beyond him losing several grand and going back to work at HP. Let's try that same exercise for some hypothetical person who imagines himself to be the Woz of DNA...
> Suffice it to say, I think the risks are worth it and regulation is a blunt weapon which eliminates most of the bad AND the good.
Given some of the potential risks involved, the good would have to be pretty big and explained pretty well to the lay public before you will ever get past some deep-seated fears of what the potential downsides are to this endeavor.
> Your risk equation is overestimating the worst case scenario.
This is a claim that you have yet to back up with anything beyond general hand-waving.
> Super bugs are NOT at all easy to design. And there's plenty of natural super bugs like swine flu, etc. that come around every year.
To cause significant damage a biohacker would not need to actually design the super bug, she would just need to design some interesting sequence that has a novel and unfortunate interaction with the human immune system. Poor lab procedure (like deciding that the sequence did nothing and dumping the results down the drain) could easily introduce this sequence into the wild where other bacteria could pick it up.
The difference between hacking code and hacking biology is that broken code goes nowhere. Nothing it out there picking up the bits you delete and recombining it with existing code to see if the result gives its progeny any advantage. This is not the case with tinkering with biological systems.
This is a claim that you have yet to back up with anything beyond general hand-waving.
Much like Fermat, the time I care to devote to correcting people who are wrong on the internet is too small to contain the full argument which would go beyond hand waving.
Here's a bit more hand waving: Immune systems are complex and dynamic system designed to deal with unknown and novel agents. That's why simply coming up with something new, is not nearly enough. 99.99% of new mutations are deleterious. And the 0.001% that might be something? Like I said, just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout.
Dumping things down the drain does not make bacteria pick them up. You can dump MRSA down the drain all day long, it won't make the bacteria in there antibiotic resistant. Because there is no free lunch, even beneficial mutations are metabolically expensive, and that's why if you dump MRSA in the sewer, over time even they would lose their own antibiotic resistance. Without antibiotics they would be out competed by Staph. which doesn't waste resources on antibiotic resistance.
The difference between hacking code and hacking biology is that with code one single bit can cause the whole system to crash or behave in wildly unpredictable ways. Biology on the other hand is extremely robust.
Imagine if Woz had to get a license to do what he did?
I'm not really an expert on biohacking but it seems like you know a bit more...
Let's say some nutjob bio-hacker synthesizes a nasty little immuno-resistant organism... is it pretty easy to just "reformat" a human being and get them back on track should they get infected? Are there readily available anti-viral vaccines that we can just simply inject to prevent some sort of man-made viral outbreak?
I've got no problem with bio-hacking so long as these biohackers have an easy way to "reformat" my system and quickly get me back to healthy living again.
What you say is true, but like all imagine a super virus/bacterium/foot fungus scenarios it omits crucial information.
The crucial information I am referring to is that the world you live in right now is chock full with nasty things doing their best to kill you.
Every step you take, ever breath you take, you're living in an ocean of things which have been perfecting ways to harm you since before there were dinosaurs.
They are not only trying to eat you alive, they are also viciously competing with each other, it's jungle out there.
And that's why I'm not worried about home grown super Ebola. It's not that it isn't possible it's just that it's like one more bullet in a machine gun fight.
Yes, that could be THE bullet that kills you, but it's not like you're living in a germ free world.
And that's why I'm not worried about home grown super Ebola. It's not that it isn't possible it's just that it's like one more bullet in a machine gun fight.
I, for one, hadn't thought about it in quite that way, before.
> the world you live in right now is chock full with nasty things doing their best to kill you.
Really? For some reason, internet people are always talking about coevolution and not killing the host and all that. I'd assume you know better since you're an actual biologist, but it is still surprising...
Really. Staphylococcus aureus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staphylococcus_aureus is most commonly found up your nose and on your skin. And by on I mean deep inside the grooves, it's practically impossible to wash it away. It's what turns your boogers yellow.
It's also the one most commonly responsible for infections, when you cut yourself. Or someone else like a surgeon cuts into you.
It is also most commonly resistant to multiple antibiotics. It's on us all the time, we take a lot of pills, it adapts.
If you have the multiply resistant strain and you go into major surgery, may God have mercy on your soul.
Also I'm not a biologist, I just write research software for chemists and biologists.
The problem with licensing is that the people who want to do something bad are not going to be stopped by the fact that they don't have a license. If you're driving the getaway car in a bank robbery, does it matter if you don't have your driver's license?
I think the more likely dangers in this case are not people with malicious intent, but people who do something without carefully thinking through the ramifications. Remember, the first internet worm was an accident. (Made by a contemporary of pg.)
What licensing can do is provide an incentive for general practitioners of a particular craft to follow a certain set of standards and guidelines for basic safety. If licensing is required for access to certain materials and maintaining your license requires either passing some sort of "don't be an idiot" safety course (or having your "lab" available for inspection) then this low bar can keep some of the idiots out of the way and can be used as a stick with which to beat upon well-meaning people who engage in gross incompetence regarding safety.
What licensing can do is block competition to the established powers. Do you think it was from the goodness of their hearts that Microsoft was pushing the attempt to license "software engineers" and programmers a decade ago.
I think most people don't realize the amount of genetic recombination and mutation that goes on in nature. It's the reason we have new strains of the flu each year, and similarity the reason behind the evolution which has shaped our global ecosystem.
It's a moot point that these amateur biohackers are able to synthesize different strains of E. coli or yeast. It's done in high school AP Bio classes across the country. I think this will only be a possible threat when genetic sequencing and synthesis becomes so cheap and fast that it can be done on the desktop by anyone. At that point, the same thing may happen to pharmaceuticals and medicine that has happened to software.
Could the methods to make Advil, Viagra, or similar drugs be under the GNU license? Free software -> Free chemistry?
As much as I love free software, free media, and freedom in general, the idea of downloading a non-trivial drug from the internet, ./configure, make, make install, and consuming it sends shivers down my spine. And if it doesn't send shivers down yours, you've got about ten to fifteen more years to build up some more life-saving paranoia.
Chemistry is not the blocker on drug development; testing is. Our system isn't perfect but I can't see how open source can improve anything. Open source can barely scrape together the resources for a usability test and that's orders of magnitude easier than a drug safety trial.
"Open drug testing." If everyone already has little drug-replicator-dispensers attached to their desktops, they can sign up with much less hassle than a conventional drug trial to test something. A lower barrier to entry means that, further, you'll get way more people signing up, and therefore even better statistics and faster trials.
Of course, animal testing and such will still happen, and happen slowly; this will only speed up the trial once the drugs have been declared potentially safe for human testing.
The idea of putting something into my body, which I know nothing about or the ways in which it was synthesized or processed, sends shivers down my spine.
How much do you really "trust" pharmaceutical companies, whose sole mission is to profit at the illness of others?
I hope the same thing happens for drugs that happened to encyclopedias. People nowadays trust Wikipedia just as much as Britannica, if not more in some cases.
As for testing, that is indeed a trickier issue. But I guarantee you that if a person is suffering from an illness and cannot afford the drugs for treatment, they'll be willing to try any sort of chemistry that may help.
"How much do you really "trust" pharmaceutical companies, whose sole mission is to profit at the illness of others?"
You're propagandizing. The correct question is, "How much do I trust the pharmaceutical companies and all relevant regulatory agencies?"
And the answer is... not entirely. That would be stupid. On the other hand, they do in fact conduct drug trials, and so far I have not had a prescription for the mega-profitable drugs, so I'm not overwhelmingly concerned about whether or not they cheated with their antibiotic tests. I haven't needed an antidepressant, cholesterol medication (which I'm unconvinced actually help), or anything else that might actually be a problem. (And at this point I wouldn't touch a weight-loss pill; evidence would suggest at this point that whatever it takes to fool the body into losing weight when it wouldn't otherwise is virtually certain to mess with your heart, which is one of the prime reasons for losing weight in the first place.)
The question is some sort of binary "trust open source or trust the evil commercial interests!". It's actually "do I trust a possibly flawed system that still uses science, or am I so concerned about it that I'm willing to switch over to a system that can't afford to do science at all?" Some science is, all else being equal, better than no science at all.
"But I guarantee you that if a person is suffering from an illness and cannot afford the drugs for treatment, they'll be willing to try any sort of chemistry that may help."
Only if they are in a situation that can't possibly get worse. I support the aggressive deployment of possible cancer remedies in the cases where we can tell somebody has a week to live, for instance, which our government won't do. Very little can go wrong that is worse than doing nothing. But drugs can have arbitrarily bad side effects that only emerge for a small set of people, and throwing more drugs into the mix will only increase that number. And, best of all, while doctors know about the standard drug reactions, they'll know nothing about your home-grown concoction.
I agree with your comment. I /do/ trust drugs like Advil, on a daily basis.
What I'm most excited about is that this sort of technology will hopefully free dependence on overpriced pharmaceuticals and bring the capability for invention to the masses.
Thanks for the thought-out comment. I heard Kurzweil speak a few days ago and the convergence of technology and medicine has been on my mind since.
i use simple chemistry recipes from the internet, like fertilizer, soap, making tofu and other simple stuffs
fear? don't! ... the beauty of chemistry is that you can dilute the concentration
so if a random guy say use a tablespoon of baking soda, try a teaspoon instead or use more water to dilute
the scariest thing i did was cleaning contact lens with baking soda (feaing it will make me blind) ... i'm not blind yet and found you can use saline (nacl) sterile solution to replace commercial solution
overall my costs decreased by a factor of ten
1 kg of baking soda can provide my basic cleaning (soap, toothpaste, contact lense, etc) for a year -- nowadays i don't go to personal health section (i used to go there every week whenever i go to grocery store -> 52 x 5 mins = 260 mins not wasted)
This is hilarious. "My roomates are a little weirded out",since I, you know, grow viruses in the attic... With sewer water.
Having worked in a virus lab in the past, I CAN reassure folks that you can't order dangerous pathogens without all sorts of certifications you won't easily find, say, in your garage. But this is still not a very good idea. Mixing bacterial or viral strains together in a human-like environment... somebody slap that kid. How will he test it's efficacy, anyway? On his roomate with an ear infection?
i used to make liquid fertilizer for my aquascape (google PMDD -- poor man dupla drop)
the raw materials are very cheap (like $1 per kg, agricultural grade) and the end product sells like $10 per liter (by weight, ~100 gr raw material, the rest water)
so the multiplier (price/cost) is like 100, pretty common for chemical products
the whole hobby-industry is like this:
promote nutritionless sand as substrate to replace soil
use the expensive fert (surprise! they sell it too!) to enhance plant growth
use expensive 'full-spectrum' light
use heater to give vertical water movement
co2 tanks (you can make DIY using sucrose and yeast)
and of course without saying, spreading FUD to fuel collaborative manipulation
in the end, i end up just using soil, sun, no fert, no tech ... plants had lived for centuries on those with great success!
hey ... maybe i should go sell some ferts :D ... i still have bags of KNO3, H2PO4, MgSO4, FeSO4, ZnSO4, MnSO4, Na4EDTA lying around collecting dusts
Some biologists argue that anyone wishing to custom-make new organisms, even if it's just glow-in-the-dark bacteria (a popular trick among biohackers), should have to get a license first...
A senior official in the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate says the bureau is working with academia and industry to raise awareness about biosecurity...
George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, says anyone using synthetic DNA should have to have a license, including garage biologists...
In summary: Oooh Frankenstein - scary!
Frankenstein is THE allegory for the dangers of science and it's pretty old.
If you don't like what's going on with biohacking, put your money where you mouth is and give up everything science gave you since Mary Shelley died.