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 ."
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
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.
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.