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 ."

Comments

Sequence != Understand

[enkidu]

The basic idea behind this article seems to assume that as sequencing and synthesis technology and skills become widely available, there will be a parallel increase in the danger from the misuse of this technology. I beg to differ. Sequencing DNA does not give you that much insight into how things really work. Nor does tweaking out protein structure. That's the easy step. But the dynamic equilibrium of a cell is maintained by the DNA, the RNA and the proteins, all simultaneous interacting in an essentially stabilized chaotic system. Sure we can "knock-out" a gene here and there, replace one protein with another, but doing so is no more a display of knowledge then is pruning a tree. We're still a long (long long long) way from designing trees from scratch or people developing the new "super-bug" in the garage or even university lab.

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...