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.
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.
No...that's Open Sores Biology
Everybody dies frustrated and sad and that is beautiful
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.
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
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.
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)
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.