Slashdot Mirror
The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies
bio-droid writes "Several years ago Slashdot covered an essay in Spectrum about Open Source Biology. Here is a follow on academic paper entitled The Pace and Proliferation of Biological Technologies in the new journal Biosecurity and Bioterrorism ."
I KNEW I should have patented my gene sequence.
Doesn't Heidi Fleiss have a doctorate in the field?
I don't wanna be open source! I don't think anyone would patch me if a security hole was found... I don't need script kids gaining root on me and makeing me a zombie...
-You're wasting your time. Alfador only likes me.
Synthesize polio with mail order components? egads! One would expect that this genie can't be put back into a bottle.
This being the case we better figure out how to minimize incentives to build weapons. Thus far we in the good'ol USofA have a rotten track record in this regard.
Which technology will be the first to threaten, or save, or improve, or inconvenience, our lives: biotechnology (gene sequencing/synthesis, retroviral agents, protein analysis/design) or nanotechnology (borg nanoprobes in our blood)?
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
It reminds me of some friends of mine who were constantly challenging each other to slip odd words or phrases into their serious work.
"Hey Carlson, I bet you can't work "Tricorder" into your next paper!"
One man's -1 Flamebait is another man's +5 Funny.
"One indication of this trend is that the parts for a DNA synthesizer --mostly plumbing and off-the-shelf electronics --can now be purchased for approximately $10,000."
Now that's a do-it-yourself project I'd like to see. Come on, one of you guys who spends way too much time on inane case mods can make time for this...
Also, what do you think about the comparison between Moore's law and the rate of genes sequenced. The only negative I see is that you'll eventually run out of genes to sequence on Earth (until the aliens land, that is.)
Why do I h8 apple?
That said, there is a real danger from people using the techniques described above to create hybrid strains (SARS+influenza etc.) to create new virulent strains based on existing virii and bacteria. Of course, even that is much harder than said, primarily because the only way to test which strains work, is to infect people. Any failure and your subject will develop resistance and be useless for future testing. So, you'd need a large number of subjects, or you'd need to develop on a disease which infects both humans and rats (or something) and then hope that the virulence will be analogous for humans. Fortunately, this is rarely the case, what kills rats like, well rats, often doesn't even faze humans and vice versa.
Hmm, I wonder if I should worry about men in dark suits showing up at my door now...
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
"Which technology will be the first to threaten, or save, or improve, or inconvenience, our lives: biotechnology (gene sequencing/synthesis, retroviral agents, protein analysis/design) or nanotechnology (borg nanoprobes in our blood)? "
Actually, midi-chlorians have already ruined a good 3 hours of my life.
so who cares? Getting genetic material across barriers and into an organism is still a challenge. Just because you can buy tools cheap and there are lots more out of work biologists than IT *professionals* . . . . so now we know that it was just some bentonite that is used to disperse an agent. Hell, you use it to waterproof your basement. That isn't something that you couldn't have gotten twenty years ago.
The best way to keep apprised of the activities of both amateurs and professionals is to establish open networks of researchers, perhaps modeled on the Open Source Software (OSS) movement, and potentially sponsored by the government during their embryonic phases. The Open Source development community thrives on constant communication and plentiful free advice. This behavior is common practice for professional biology hackers, and it is already evident on the Web amongst amateur biology hackers.14 This represents an opportunity to keep apprised of current research in a distributed fashion. Anyone trying something new will require advice from peers and may advertise at least some portion of the results of their work. As is evident from the ready criticism leveled at miscreants in online forums frequented by software developers (Slashdot, Kuro5hin, etc.), people are not afraid to speak out when they feel the work of a particular person or group is substandard or threatens the public good. Thus our best potential defense against biological threats is to create and maintain open networks of researchers at every level, thereby magnifying the number of eyes and ears keeping track of what is going on in the world.
Two questions:
1.Where would OSS be with government support in embryonic phases?
2. Slashdot is so powerful??
New year Resolution: Don't change sig this year
First, the article uses references to Moore's Law as though that's an accurate guage of how quickly we should expect bio technology to advance based on the comparison to advances in computer technology.
That premise is inherently flawed. Moore's Law was applicable as an *observation* of the rate at which computing technology advanced... not a rule governing it. I don't think its application is valid for other technologies.
For example, for Artificial Intelligence, one would have expected us to have solved a lot of the problems simply because the base of the technology (computer technology, no less!) can double in power every few years. This isn't the case for AI, however... we've been stuck with virtually the same models and limitations for well over 50 years, despite the availability of better computer power; the fundamental mathematics and algorithms are what stump that growth... how does one apply Moore's Law to that?
In this same respect, suggesting that biotech is also going to advance at the same pace as computer technology is loaded with the same folly. Perhaps the power available to analyze will increase as per Moore's "law" (because of more powerful computers being available), but that doesn't mean the answers to questions will necessarily be made readily available.
We're going to need plain-old experimentation and scientific method to progress through this technology.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
No. What do you mean?
All published science is "Open Source". You publish your methods, your statistical tests - you're even required by most Journals to submit your data to anyone who asks.
Everything you use is referenced. The only thing that's closed is your thought process - and that's supposed to be described thoroughly in your Introduction and Discussion.
So as long as we're talking about Published Science, I have no idea what you're all talking about.
OSS would be without BSD, (developed at a university) without Mozilla, (spawned from a really old web browser I can't quite recall the name of), and without GNU (quite a bit of which came from BSD).
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
so who cares? Getting genetic material across barriers and into an organism is still a challenge. Just because you can buy tools cheap and there are lots more out of work biologists than IT *professionals* . . . . so now we know that it was just some bentonite that is used to disperse an agent. Hell, you use it to waterproof your basement. That isn't something that you couldn't have gotten twenty years ago.
THERE ARE NONE!!only antibiotics,prevention,proper response and knowledge. each agent has its own section,some history on it,the signs and symptoms of exposure,the effects (long and short term).the antibiotics and dosages for differnt kinds of people(adults,kids,etc.).
really. If I recall, Science mentioned that a new technology would make a tricorder-like device to exist. I don't have my subscription anymore. (boo hoo) Perhaps somebody with one would do a search? It was a few months ago.
Was it a robust/durable squid or something?
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
Well technically, she would be around him.
I had an exterminator come to my house yesterday to deal with some termites.
He injected some food laced with A VIRUS to infect and kill the colony.
How messed up is that? There's a WMD in my wall.
Now I don't know if this some engineered virus, or just something they dug up out of the brazillian rain forest, but it's a bioweapon none the less.
Kinda freaky.
My field is microbial genomics and am rather tired of the whole "bioterrorism" angle. The simple fact is that biological agents just aren't very effective weapons, despite what fiction and movies would lead you to believe. That's why just about every country except the Soviet Union abandoned biowarfare programs by the 1960's.
And while good old Ken Alibek tells good horror stories about the supposed successes of Biopreparat, consider for a moment the vast number of unemployed former Soviet scientists -- Ken has good economic reasons to be a prophet of doom.
Similarly, people studying harmless Bacillus strains and who had trouble getting grants suddenly realized that anthrax is caused by a related strain, and shifted focus to anthrax, where grants are easy.
It's just like the physicists in the Reagan admin who got money by tying their reasearch to SDI.
Slightly Offtopic, yet when the article referenced Opensource Biology I got the urge to post about Internet Archive.org's collection of opensourced education material. It has some excellent subjective matter for anyone looking for information to read between your own class books. It's Biology section only has one title "Uses of Waste Water", so anyone with material willing to contribute would indeed strengthen the freedom of information movement.
Yes, the BioTerrorism "is not a threat" angle is actualy becoming somehwhat true. It appears the BioTerrorism slant used by politicians is being used to just put more laws on the books and grasp on none other than freedom? Supporting the "theory", a google cache'd article dug from a student.augie.edu website, and quoted below;
Bioterrorism not a threat at Augustana, professor says Anthrax and smallpox: concerns of the nation since 9/11 scares
By Marcella Prokop
Mirror Assistant Editor
Since last fall's anthrax attacks, students at larger schools who study potentially harmful micro organisms have been forced to abandon their work because of new regulations. This, however, is not the case at Augustana, so students shouldn't see any changes in the way they are being taught, according to Dr. Nola Bormann. "We don't deal with any micro-organisms that are at a high risk for bioterrorism," she said. "So all of the new regulations haven't really affected the way we do research here, [but] it's causing lots of scientists in universities to destroy samples to err on the side of safety." For Bormann, who gave a presentation on bioterrorism in the Gilbert Science Center last month, the anthrax mailings presented an interesting topic - one that she felt needed to be addressed. It was for this reason that she presented her findings at the Biology Department Seminar. In her presentation, she focused on the types of micro-organisms that terrorists can use for bioterrorism and what harm they would cause were they used. Because the anthrax mailings were the only attempt at bioterrorism in recent history, Bormann also focused on why bio terrorism may become more popular. "It was the first somewhat-organized bioterrorism attack in United States modern history,"she said. "It brought the use of micro organisms as international weapons for killing to a more prominent focus - not only for microbiologists but for the general public. That moral boundary has been crossed." According to Bormann, bioterrorism is the intentional use of micro-organisms to cause harm or death not only to humans, but also to plants and animals. "Scientists are also starting to wonder about what types of plant pathogens terrorists might be able to use [on crops]," she said. "That type of use would be devastating." Scientists aren't the only group of researchers concerned about bioterrorism. The government has also launched studies of its own and is providing major funding to the study of bioterrorism. "One of the outcomes of the anthrax letters was that it caused people to look at bioterrorism as a real threat," Bormann said. "All of a sudden, [the government] is pouring more money into bioterrorism defense." Anthrax should not be thought of as a tool for terrorists in every instance, however. The most common form of anthrax, known as "cutaneous anthrax," is contracted through an abrasion in the skin. It is a typical health hazard of those who work closely with animals or animal by-products. People in the meat or leather industry face this type of anthrax. Anthrax is a bacteria, and in its natural form, can lie dormant in the soil where an infected animal has died. A person who comes in contact with this soil usually will not get the "anthrax-letter" form, which is more commonly known as "inhalation anthrax." "Anthrax can survive for long periods in the environment," Bormann said. "If you have some kind of background, some microbiology knowledge, you can grow up that bacteria and prepare it in a way that it can be distr
While Carlson makes the analogy to Moore's law in exponential growth of biological sequence information, the real bottleneck is not the sequence but actually understanding the biology of each gene. Currently all human genes have been sequenced and most are even classified to families. Paradoxically, pharmaceutical companies are finding it harder and harder to find targets. The problem is validating what each gene is useful in the context of thousands of others which form networks. A simple example is how little we know about HIV which has only 9600 nucleotide genome and despite the fact that 110,000 papers have been published on HIV (about 12 paper/nucleotide of the virus!). I don't even want to extropolate that to human genome which is magnitutes and magnitutes more complex. The issue of home grown Biohackers is also very complex. Unlike computer hackers, biohackers need highly sophisticated labs and many many years of advanced training. Biological systems are very fragile and require expensive equipment and reagents to manipulate (incubators, freezers, pcr machines). Unlike computer technology biological experiments are getting more expensive to perform every day. It is true that the cost of sequencing a gene has followed the Moore's law but the actual cost of experiments have not decreased becuase sequence of a gene nowadays is a trival aspect of the biological experiments. An average serious biology labs have yearly budgets in hundreds of thousands of dollars. It is therefore not realistic to imagine a similar open source movement in biology can be established simply by hobbiest. However there is a serious open source movement at the level of biology scientist for publication of results as an online journal PLOS (plos.org). So the real bottleneck in biology is not the lack of information (in fact there is too much of it) but lack technological means and high level concepts to rapidly decode the meaning of biological programs.
Don't you think it's more like pruning a tree's genes? I don't buy this idea that there's some inherent depth that is lost as soon as the technology becomes available at lower costs. That sounds like an outlook that subcribes to the mythology of unknown; anything that is known is somehow degraded. I believe such thinking is based in the religion metaphor of Heaven. It has to be unknown and unknowable to be powerful.
And I'm also quite curious why people are so quick to look at the down side when there's so much up side. What about developing home diagnostic kits and even tailored therapies? Those things can't happen until this technology becomes cheap. I think the sad truth is that academic papers need funding and the money is flowing in defence, not in healing man's ills.
Moore's Law is a synonym for the IC Oligopoly Manifesto. It's lithography for crying out loud. Like they really had to break new ground to figure out how to move up the spectrum. If anything immersion lithography should show you how ridiculous and overly complicated they have made it all sound. Moore's Law is a con game and I completely agree that making reference to it makes you look like a fool.
But of course all big businesses are 100% trustworthy and ethical, and there are lots of things no one would ever do for money.
Even great big gobs of money.
right?