Posted by
CmdrTaco
on from the this-is-just-swell dept.
jrrl writes "USAToday is reporting that Craig Venter's research group has synthesized a virus from scratch and that it "became bioactive" (started reproducing). Particularly interesting is that it only took them two weeks to build, rather than several years that previous attempts had taken."
Thinking on the computer virus side I like this Hawking quote: "I think computer viruses should count as life. I think it says something about human nature that the only form of life we have created so far is purely destructive. We've created life in our own image."
-- Stephen Hawking
-- X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
Horsefeathers. Matter is not the essence of a thing. Form and function usually (but not always) are. Transformation into another form may not destroy the mass but it most certainly destroys the thing that existed before.
--
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Agreed. If you look at a virus that writes zeroes all over your harddisk all it does is to increase entropy in the universe. Wich restores order. Bad luck if the files in question were your pr0n collection.
Matter cannot be destroyed. Energy cannot be destroyed. Information can be destroyed. In fact, because of entropy, the destruction of information is a requirement of the universe. That is, if you see information as a form of order.
--
There is a reason for everything. Sometimes that reason just sucks.
Resident Evil anyone?
by
Orien
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· Score: 2, Funny
Are we sure this wasn't put out by the Umbrella corporation?
Well, not really terrified I guess, but the whole "We've created life and it's procreating" thing is something that doesn't exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy,. And why did it have to be a virus. Why not a cute little kitten or something?
why not a cute little virus? nothing wrong with em
Re:Scared now
by
monadicIO
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why not a cute little kitten or something? All cute kittens have a fair number of virii inside their bodies. I guess they are just starting with those. Then they'll make the bacteria in their guts, the ticks/germs on their fur, and finally the kitten.
--
The law of excluded middle : Either I'm foo or I'm foobar
Worse, they could have created real-life Tribbles but didn't. How can they call themselves scientists yet not pursue the future laid out before us by Gene Roddenberry?
All they actually did was to take commercially available DNA, link it together to duplicate the DNA of an existing bacteriophage, and pop it inside a cell, and watch it go on. They just demonstrated that they have the technology to make a copy of the DNA of an existing virus.
As anyone can tell you, learning how to copy something that already exists doesn't really mean you know that much more about how it works. Just because I could write out a copy of a Chinese story doesn't mean I know anything more about what the story says, just that I can duplicate the writing correctly.
Creating NEW life forms, not just copying existing ones, is still a ways off.
Theoretically, they should be able to do this with a mammal like a feline. Sequence the DNA, build a copy, and replace the DNA in a freshly fertilized egg, and it should grow up just fine. Though the complexity of the animal would add issues that I'm not educated enough to be aware of, certainly.
-- "You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Re:Scared now
by
bubblewrapgrl
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· Score: 3, Interesting
A virus can't self-replicate. It's a bit like a parasite in that it needs a host. Basically, all that composes a virus is a piece of DNA encapsulated by some protein. It can't reproduce because it doesn't contain the necessary organelles, such as ribosomes to make proteins and mitochondria to provide energy, that a cell has. So, when a virus infects a cell, it incorporates itself into the host's DNA. Then, when the host DNA gets replicated, the virus DNA gets replicated along with it. From there, the DNA will either get turned into more DNA (to make new cells that have the virus DNA) or make proteins (which can cause infection by making toxins and more viruses). The virus DNA can also be dormant in the host for awhile by not incoporating itself into the host DNA.
In regards to this synthetic virus, my main question is whether or not the researchers have looked what happens to cells that get infected by the virus. You can't kill a virus like you can a bacterial cell. Basically, your body has to recognize the virus as foreign and make antibodies to kill it, which is why we have to get immunizations. That's a little frightening to me - the possibility that they've created somthing horrible lytic that no one has ever been exposed to.
Technically it's not life. There is still a bit of dispute as to whether virused are alive or not. They contain genetic material, but are not necessarily living organisms. Or that is what some bio major told me once.
Whether virus is life or not depends on the definition of life. There is no consensus on this defintion, so debates on the matter are rather meaningless, it is really disputes over the definition of a word.
What makes viruses controversial is that they cannot reproduce by themselves; they need to infect antoher cell. But then again, many parasites cannot live without some other organism, and they are usuually considered alive.
I thought you said life... The undead don't count.
Re:Scared now
by
jdavidb
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Theoretically, they should be able to do this with a mammal like a feline. Sequence the DNA, build a copy, and replace the DNA in a freshly fertilized egg, and it should grow up just fine. Though the complexity of the animal would add issues that I'm not educated enough to be aware of, certainly.
One interesting issue with this approach that was only recently brought to my attention is mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria in cells carry their own DNA inherited from the organism's mother (they are descended from the mitochondria in the egg). Currently, it's not known what if any dependencies there might be between the organism's genetic makeup and the mitochondrial DNA. It's conceivable an organism with mismatched mitochondrial DNA might have severe flaws. Or it might not have any effect at all.
I still don't really think the benefits (gene expression research, gene therapy in general) are good enough, considering the potential problems.
I'd like to know who's funding them. Is it civilian or military?
As if there weren't enough virii on the planet already, we have to go making more. Fantastic academic achievement, but wish they hadn't done it. A bit like a nuclear bomb, in its own way...
Can't remember where I found it, but there's a lovely quote about Nikola Tesla's idea for a resonator capable of splitting the planet: "The scary thing isn't that he was crazy enough to think of it, the really scary thing is that he was smart enough that it might well have worked".
Sometimes it feels like this might apply to Craig Venter. I mean his intellectual achievements are staggering, world-class, unimpeachably brilliant. but his choice of topics is sometimes very unnerving.
Re:Chilling
by
Space+cowboy
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· Score: 4, Insightful
There is a very very small difference between a cancerous cell and a normal cell. They're identical except the cancerous one keeps on dividing. Just how much did you want that cancer-eating virus ? Given how often virii mutate ?
You can practically smell the plea for more research money can't you?
I think the full case goes:
'Our new virus could help society meet its energy needs, clean up pollution, bring about World peace, reunite the cast of 'Friends', immunise the World's population against the threat of Jennifer Lopez movies and produce a Starbucks espresso that tastes faintly of coffee.'
Best wishes,
Mike.
Re:Chilling
by
BasilBibi
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The biosphere probably creates billions of harmless 'new' (as in never-seen-before) self-replicating species/entities every day. The chances are vanishingly small this one would become life threatening if released into the wild.
As for the technology, what should we expect? It was only a matter of time before this happened. Big-Pharm & Big-Chem have been funding this kind of research for decades and it's led to really useful technology like um... GM. At the end of the day all we have to fear is the majority vote of their shareholders - our new overlords.
An software anecdote
by
h4rm0ny
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Just to find a metaphor that will bring this home to some of us...
I once had a prolonged discussion on the pros and cons of GM food and the mixing of seperate genetic organisms (as has produced this virus) with a Phd in Computer Science. Eventually I grabbed a textbook on UML from his desk and waved it at him. "Look," I cried, "they're breaking encapsulation!" My friend immediately reversed his stance on Genetic Engineering and wanted more testing.
If they can get it down to seven days then we'll have something;)
--
---
All your old jokes are belong to sigs.
Viruses and weapons
by
Fux+the+Penguin
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think the wonder of any scientific advance should be tempered by a clear-headed analysis of the dangers it might create.
I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.
Imagine a scenario where terrorists could alter a disease or organic biological weapon gene by gene to make it immune to current antidotes. Beyond that, I worry that the US itself might use it for its own cache of new-age weapons.
If WE convert it to a weapon, what's the difference? We can claim we're the good guys and we won't use it. But we can look at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
I hope I'm not fear-mongering here, but, I worry.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
Sheetrock
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You're not. This is a valid point that is all but ignored by scientists seeking continual funding and rationalizing that if they don't do it someone else will.
However, I think this sort of research is as or more likely to radically benefit society as it is to create catastrophe. Look at the genie released when we first split the atom; I'd argue that the current and future benefits from nuclear power alone outweigh the concern about the misuse of this knowledge. But I feel that ethical concerns must become a stronger part of scientific research and funding, not only because of this breakthrough but because of the ones we're about to make (nanotechnology will present similar worrying potential...)
--
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try. -- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
radish
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· Score: 4, Insightful
You're american right? Doesn't it strike you as kind of an odd coincidence that you come up with the US as the only "responsible" country in the world? Whilst you may be right (you actually missed out an entire continent) I'd hardly call your analysis objective.
--
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Den ene knappen er powerknapp, den andre er Bender voice knapp "Bite My Shiny Metal Ass"
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
glgraca
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If those countries are so terrible, why do you keep selling them weapons??
Who sold Saddam chemical and biological weapons?
The US insists on a monopoly on WMD technology not for the safety of the world, but for its own economic interests and to maintain its power.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
Grech
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· Score: 2, Insightful
This is a very easy position to take. However, it falls down on a couple of important points.
Ethics are not the same the world over. If X can be discovered with current technology, then someone somewhere (probably several someones in several somewheres) are busily discovering X as we speak. If X can be used as a weapon, then you can be doubly sure of this. You cannot halt the progress of science. In a 'best case', you can halt the progress of science by law-abiding and well-intentioned people. This is worse than the alternative.
Yes, new technologies do pose threats to our way of life. Usually, these disruptions are for the good. In the case where they are for ill, then it behooves us to understand them, rather than to intentionally blind ourselves to them.
Imagine a scenario where terrorists could alter a disease or organic biological weapon gene by gene to make it immune to current antidotes. Imagine further a victim nation whose biologists shrug their collective shoulders and say, "We know nothing about plague engineering. Try next door, it's legal there."
-- It may not be just, but it is fair, and that is more important.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
Kjella
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Imagine a scenario where terrorists could alter a disease or organic biological weapon gene by gene to make it immune to current antidotes. Beyond that, I worry that the US itself might use it for its own cache of new-age weapons.
Except that with bio-weapons, there's a big problem... There's no "safe haven" for those that release it. Even the wackiest of terrorists want their people to survive. If you ram a couple planes in a building (US), gas the subway (Japan) or even nuke a city off the map (Nowhere... yet), you know where the damage is. But if you release a bio-weapon anywhere in the world, you can suddenly find it in your own back-yard in a week.
Releasing a reproducing bio-weapon with no known antidote requires a level of insanity unmatched in human history. Never before could anything truly endanger the entire human race, not even in the worst nuclear holocaust scenarios of the Cold War. Think something like the black plague, except 100% lethal, air-borne and spreading at 800km/hr by plane until someone realizes just how deep shit we're all in. And yes, I mean all, friends and foes alike.
Kjella
-- Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
TGK
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Gotta clear up a few things here.
1 - Terrorism isn't generaly a R&D effort. The act of terrorism isn't anything new, contrary to what GW Bush Inc. seems to belive. For centuries people have been committing acts of terrorism, but these are not the organizations that develop the new and frightening weapons of war.
Terrorism is, by it's very nature, a low budget enterprise. Until Mr and Mrs Smith can grow little Susie a custom built kitten with neon pink fur by hitting some buttons on the Recombinator (tm) you won't see gene level modifications as something available to terrorists.
2 - We've been making viruses resistance to treatment/immunization for years now. Read Ken Alblik's autobiography on his roll in the Soviet Bioweapons program. Until the 1970s the United States was engaged in offensive biological warfare . Today we still research defensive biowarfare, which means that we use developing treatments as an excuse to weaponize deadly organisims.
The former Soviet Union (according to most sources) weaponized the small pox virus. Weaponization, for the unaware, is a process of making a virus resistant to treatment and immunization techniques while increasing it's kill rate.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, if you have something insanely dangerous and you want to it to fall into the wrong hands, the best thing you can do with it it hand it to the Russian Army to guard.
I have the utmost respsect for the scientific community. The work they do is amazing and valuable research, but this isn't something I'm worried about. Somehow, I doubt that a bunch of PhDs in a lab can come up with anything (much) more deadly than billions of years of evolution and 50 years of cold war has produced.
-- Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
Lord+Ender
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Life is quite common throughout the universe, however, the reason we have not contacted other life is that technology naturally advances until a discovery is reached which causes a planet-destroying chain reaction.
I can't prove it is right, but you can't prove it is wrong.
-- A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
ishark
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· Score: 4, Insightful
If any country had to be in possession of these things, it should be the US. You don't want it to be the US?
Considering the recent record of the US of bombing and invading countries on purely imaginary perceived threats and very real economic reasons, I'd rather NOT have the US be the only one with such a weapon. I'd like a lot of different people to have it. Balance of terror is bad, but I've come to appreciate the advantages of unstable equilibrium compared to a (albeit very stable) death.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
bigberk
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Imagine a scenario where terrorists
Oh geez, terrorists, terrorists, terrorists, we're all so afraid of terrorists. You may be a terrorist, your neighbor might be a terrorist, and I'm petrified by fear. I'm so paralyzed by fear that I think we should pull the plug on any project that might be potentially used by terrorists. Whether it's technological, or medical... hell, who cares that we might be coming up with new biological agents to help fight cancer... throw that research out the window! The terrorists might somehow morph the results of the research and create an Osama-superbug that's even wors that SARS and anthrax!!!
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
mesocyclone
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· Score: 3, Informative
In the same light, the US has never created a weapon it has not used.
This is absolutely not true. The US created many chemical weapons which it did not use (I don't know if we used chem weapons in WW-I, but we enver used them since then).
The US has NEVER used biological weapons (even the recorded use of smallpox against Indians was done by the British before the American Revolution).
The US has never used a hydrogen bomb.
--
The only good weather is bad weather.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
gilgongo
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· Score: 2, Insightful
> I don't think anybody should be making any new > life forms or modifying any existing life forms
My grandfather bred chickens. His father corresponded with Charles Darwin about it (my aunt has the letters). Breeding animals to enhance or supress certain traits has been going on for ages.
> Imagine a scenario where terrorists could
I can imagine any scenario "where terrorists could.." do just about anything (brainwash my children into blowing up their schools... putting poison in the water supply... the list is frickin endless). But that is not a good reason not to conduct this research. If it was, the world WOULD be run by terrorists.
> I hope I'm not fear-mongering here, but, I worry.
Don't worry - you're just being ridiculous, that's all. We can all be ridiculous occasionally:-)
-- "And the meaning of words; when they cease to function; when will it start worrying you?"
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
cens0r
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· Score: 2, Interesting
korea, vietnam, cambodia, libya, panama, columbia (ongoing), iraq, bosnia, iraq again. Sure some of these may be justified. And they weren't technically wars... but try telling that to the people who died.
-- Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Re:Viruses and weapons
by
ross.w
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Do you, perchance, work for Fox news?
Because you sure sound like them.
-- If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
Leroy_Brown242
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· Score: 5, Insightful
You would hope that they take great pains to make access to the virii as secure as possible.
But, things like this are very important in the fight to create vaccines to illnesses. Anyone who has taken apart and built a car, computer, or whatever will tell you that thier level of understanding is now MUCH greater than it was before they did it. Knowing how to assemble a virus, will hopefully allow us to defend ourselves against them.
More than a year ago live polio virus was
constructed from component DNA. This is
not a "artificial" virus but a working copy
of phi X bacteriophage. Note that this is
an infringement of God's copyrights and
patents and trade secrets!
(from NY times, July 2002: Scientists construct virus from scratch for first time, synthesizing live polio virus from chemicals and publicly available genetic information; work was conducted by scientists at State University of New York at Stony Brook and financed by Defense Department as part of program to develop biowarfare) countermeasures... )
Journal Science link, NOT life
by
mfago
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· Score: 2, Informative
The article starts out: It is the stuff of science fiction and bioethical debates: The creation of artificial life.
A virus can reproduce, but does not consume energy -> they are not alive in a technical sense.
Not the first time
by
Brahmastra
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· Score: 3, Informative
This story indicates that it was done more than a year ago.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
oniony
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· Score: 5, Funny
Yeah, I agree -- these people really need to start wearing condoms.
--
Powered by onion juice.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
f97tosc
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Probably the same as in handling any other virus.
Which is perfectly reasonable. People seem to be exremely afraid of anything made in a lab, but fail to recognize that the greater danger (by far) is from natural evolution of new viruses.
By the same token, the dangers of bio-weapons seem to be greatly excaggerated, when compared to natural pathogens. Some anthrax letters that killed half a dozen people seemed to get more attention and resources than the flu and aids, which kill tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone.
I thought the general agreement was that viruses aren't considered life because can't metabolize energy. A virus looks like a simple lego block compared to the complex architecture of a single bacterium.
That may be the case, but I have never been comfortable with classifying viruses that way. They reproduce, evolve, and are definitely not inert. If they're not "life", then they're dead things doing a fairly convincing imitation of life.
-- "You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
What they did, why it is hard
by
sam_handelman
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· Score: 5, Informative
The human genome (which is DNA), contained in each of your cells, contains the instructions needed to make a cell (much like a computer program.)
However, in order to use these instructions to make a cell, you need a cell of the same kind to read them.
Analogy: You have a computer program that tells you how to manufacture computers but this doesn't do any good unless you already have a computer OF THE SAME KIND on which to execute it.
So, even if I assemble an entire human genome, I can't use it to make a person unless I already have a human cell. Kapish?
A VIRUS, which is what was made here, is NOT A CELL. It is a parasitic piece of DNA that hijacks an existing cell and contains the instructions to make viruses. The DNA that the virus contains is, in the best case, sufficient to hijack the cell all by itself, and convert the cell into a factory for making viruses. Viruses CANNOT make more viruses by themselves. The similarity to a computer virus, I assume, is obvious.
So, if you can make VIRAL DNA, this will be sufficient to make the virus, if you have cells that the virus can infect.
Even making the genome of a virus is very difficult. The "commercially available" DNA mentioned in the article is made chemically. DNA is made up of a chain of monomers; each monomer has a 5' end and a 3' end that can attach together to form a chain. In order to add monomer n+1 to a growing chain, this is what you do (description meant to be accessible to people who don't know a lot of chemistry):...(Monomer n-1) 3' - 5' (Monomer n) 3'(BLOCKED)
-> **add reagent to unblock**
-> wash...(Monomer n) 3'
-> add 5' (Monomer n) 3' {BLOCKED}
-> add reagent to attach 5' and 3' together...(Monomer n) 3' - 5' (Monomer n+1) 3' {BLOCKED} and repeat for Monomer n+2. Recursion is good.
Now, this is done in parallel in thousands of molecules of DNA (the 5' end of each molecule is fixed to a plate.)
Every time you add the reagent to remove the BLOCKS, it has a percentage chance, which can be very small, of failing.
So, for example, if, on one paritcular molecule, it fails at position 10, then instead of: ACGTACGTACGT you will get, ACGTACGTAGT.
DNA that makes proteins has something called a "reading frame", consisting of codons which are three monomers long. If you shift the reading frame over by 1 monomer, it completely changes the meaning of the message.
So, a single nucleotide deletion, which I describe above, is disastrous - the synthetic DNA becomes useless.
Even if the chance of failing to remove a block is small - typically about 0.1% - if your DNA molecule is thousands of bases long, the chance of successfully adding every base to any individual molecule is slight.
Of course, you can make two different 100-base long molecules by the above technique and then ligate them together (recursion by splitting the task in half) which is, I believe, what's been done here. This has technical difficulties of it's own, of course, but with refinements it woud allow you to make useful DNA of length n*2^m instead of DNA of length n.
This is a frightening prospect because it would allow you to make ebola "from scratch", or just from the the string of letters that represent the genome (which is so short I could write it out by hand on a stack of cocktail napkins.) We're not to that point yet but it is a scary possibility.
-- The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
B'Trey
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Assembly is not necessarily the same as synthesis. Designing and building a computer (as oppossed to merely putting together what is essentially a kit created by someone else) certainly implies that you have enough knowledge to make intelligent decisions on how to go about protecting the computer.
--
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Re:duh.. I guess humans will do it themselves
by
SlashdotLemming
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· Score: 2, Interesting
We're at the top of the food chain, so we must come up with new and creative ways to eat ourselves. Its all part of Nature's master plan.
Morals Schmorals
by
Pedrito
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't really care about the morality of this. Frankly, from a scientific point of view: Cool! On the other hand, what does concern me was this quote:
The project was funded in part by the Department of Energy, which hopes to create microbes that would capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, produce hydrogen or clean the environment.
Okay, so let's assume we do something like this, with the perfectly innocent intention of cleaning up some level of carbon dioxide. Okay, well you're counting on the virus to reproduce, but what if it gets out of control? It eats up ALL the carbon dioxide. All the trees and plants suffocate and die, but that might not happen before the atmosphere goes up in flames since that carbon dioxide is being turned into hydrogen.
Maybe not a likely event, but my concerns are a bit more on the practical side. Frankly, I'm all for creating new forms of life and bringing back extinct ones, just for the coolness of it. I just hope we don't go doing something foolish, which we always seem to manage to do.
Re:Morals Schmorals
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HarveyBirdman
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It eats up ALL the carbon dioxide. All the trees and plants suffocate and die,
Of course, the microbe would presumably die as well, and much more quickly than the plants, while the CO2 is replenished by mammal activity.
but that might not happen before the atmosphere goes up in flames since that carbon dioxide is being turned into hydrogen.
Well, if they can create a microbe that can transmute a carbon and two oxygens into hydrogen, color *me* impressed.
Hmm... would that require or release energy? Forget about going up in flames, the atmosphere might undergo spontaneous nuclear fission.:-o Hey, wasn't that in Battlefield Earth?:-P
How about a microbe than can split water into hydrogen and oxygen?
-- ---
Ban humanity.
Re:Morals Schmorals
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IgnorantSavage
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Actually, there is no plan to convert carbon dioxide to hydrogen with any kind of organism. That would require nuclear transmutation, which so far as I know has never been done in a biological organism.
I think the plans are for a bacteria or virus that traps carbon dioxide or uses photosynthesis to convert it to carbon and oxygen (lots of stuff that already does this, of course). There are also known bacteria that can split water into hydrogen and oxygen. Sorry, I have not tracked down any references...
The problem with 'eating up all the CO2' is certainly a consideration, but likely not as big a deal as it may sound since the organism would be designed (like existing ones) to reach a balance at an appropriate level, possibly related to an inability to survive with less than a certain amount of CO2 in its environment.
Re:Interesting thoughts...
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Planesdragon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Note: I'm a firm Christian who believes in God, and that He intented our world to look exactly as it did when sentient life first looked at it, AND that He has a stated goal of hiding Himself from us.
That said:
evolution/natural selection is the natural effect when beings are subjected to adversity: only the strong surviveI
Evolution doesn't say that the "strong" survive. Evolution is the simple observation that in any given environment, the creatures most fit for that environment will thrive the most--and, ergo, creatures that thrive the most will be those most likely to survive.
The odds of a mutation creating all parts simultaneously are astronomical, and consequently, the only accepted theory that can sanely describe such a thing is intelligent design,
We don't know what the odds are of any mutation--though we do know that, just in the last 10,000 years, there have been 3,652,500 days. So if the odds are one in a million that a one-day generational organism will evolve a certain set of traits are one in a million, it will have happened three times just since the Neolithic revolution began. And, of course, science believes that Earth is several orders of magnitude older than 10,000 years.
which has been hinted at in many different real-life examples as well as probabistically explained by Pascal's Wager.
Pascal's Wager has nothing to do with evolution, and as a mathematical statement it is flawed based on its treatment of faith as a binary equation. (What if you worship the wrong diety?) God intended there to be doubt in the world, and He is perfectly capable of remedying said doubt when He sees fit.
So as skeptical as I am of intelligent design, I can't help but notice how much of our biological model it predicts.
Intelligent design, like most theories, is little more than untestable conjecture about the past. The uncertainty that must be applied to theroums about archeological past are so great that competetly opposite theories (ID and Evolution) can exist based on the exact same evidence.
Re:Ebola Anyone?
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Jeremy+Erwin
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· Score: 2, Informative
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
Daemonik
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· Score: 4, Insightful
By the same token, the dangers of bio-weapons seem to be greatly excaggerated, when compared to natural pathogens. Some anthrax letters that killed half a dozen people seemed to get more attention and resources than the flu and aids, which kill tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone.
Perhaps bio weapons get more attention than natural viruses simply because if a natural virus kills you, it's an act of [insert deity here] and simply one of the risks of life, like getting hit by a bus.
Bio weapons on the other hand are purposely engineered to maximize the lethality of a disease for the intentional purpose of killing as many people as possible. In other words, it's the intent that matters.
Uh... From scratch?
by
stienman
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Please note that when they say, "From scratch" they mean that they created a synthetic genome (probably from portions of other genomes - I doubt they know enough about the base pair sequences to actually have done it base pair by base pair) and inserted it in a 'living' cell.
The cell then started reproducing. They didn't create the cell. They probably didn't design the genome as much as patch one together from other genomes (though they may have 'created' it - physically manufactured it)
They say it's safe because it only infects batceria. Unfortunately, humans depend on bacteria to survive, so it's not nearly as innocuous as one might like to think.
However, these are nano-machines that might do real work safely (cleaning up chemical toxins, etc) - I'm just worried about mutations and how they will develop. You can't create life and expect it to reproduce itself without change over time. Pretty soon it'll discover that human skin is much more plentiful than the chemical toxins it was eating, and it'll change its diet.
-Adam
human interference....
by
mtrupe
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· Score: 3, Insightful
with nature seems to work so well, why not? I live in Illinois and each fall we are swarmed by millions upon millions of Japanese Lady-Bug-Like Orange Beatles. They were put here to fight Aphids, but they have no predators (birds won't even eat them because they emit this foul stench). They area all over the place and nothing can stop them.
So, what kind of checks and balances will there be on man-made viruses? None- you just cannot introduce anything into nature so quickly. I think the possible outcome is clear. This is downright frightening. I think I'll go rent The Stand this weekend.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
B'Trey
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Anthrax is a natural pathogen, not an artifical one. It's only the vector by which it was spread that is artificial. And what makes it worthy of head lines is that it was malicious.
Right or wrong, an incident that is the result of deliberate intent is seen as much more heinous than an act of nature, even if it does much less danger. School shootings have killed only a handful of youngsers over several years. How many died from traffic incidents over the same time frame? Where is your child safer - sitting in school or sitting in the front seat of a car? You don't see parents panicking over the thought of their child riding in a car but you see huge discussions over how to make our schools safer.
--
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Ok, this is the Craig Venter of Celera fame. Remember the great Human Genome race? Celera wanted "to patent those parts of the genome it thinks are important and useful, charging researchers who want access to the sequences. Celera has already filed preliminary patents for 6,500 genes."
But the knowledge to produce viruses for whatever purpose goes open source. Bizarre - this guy wants to patent the air we breath and then make fusion weapons technology open to everyone, on the theory that white hats will always prevail.
Problem is, some things are not readily defended against, and viruses have to be one of the things we are least effective in blocking. Sorry Craig, I'm not sure we need to turn a thousand tigers loose before we've REALLY learned to tame the ones that are out there already.
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."
Not the first, and is identical to a natural virus
by
Noren
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· Score: 3, Informative
The first reproducing artificial virus was the Polio virus by Wimmer and colleagues.
Ventner's new virus is artificial in the sense that it was created from chemicals- but it is identical to a known natural virus.
Venter's team cobbled together the virus, called phi-X174, following its published genetic sequence.
It's probably not a very effective virus
by
iabervon
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Considering that this virus was synthesized from scratch, it's probably not something very effective. It's a long way from building a virus that works at all to building a virus that targets a particular organism or overcomes natural defenses.
Just because it's man-made doesn't make it more advanced than naturally-occurring viruses. It's been possible for a long time to build viruses from collected stocks, and these are generally much more frightening. What will be scary is when we have some clue as to how to design proteins, and could construct a virus with specific properties. Until then, we're not likely to create anything that doesn't arise in nature.
(Genetically modified foods are a slightly different issue; just because it might arise in nature doesn't mean we'd eat it if it did. Also, most of the organisms involved are much more resistant to mutation and genetic mixing than viruses and bacteria)
Viruses, not virii
by
koreth
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· Score: 4, Informative
This will probably get modded down as flamebait, but someone has to say it: the plural of "virus" is "viruses." It is not "virii" because that isn't an actual English word.
Re:Viruses, not virii
by
xinot
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· Score: 3, Informative
No, not flamebait. Just ignorance on your part. You misunderstand how the english language grows and expands. It's not like the French or German or Italian which have their own institutions to determine the specifics of the words that are allowed. With English we expand the vocabulary as it is used. See email. Or many other words. You may not like virii, but if enough people use it, it is a word.
Deal with it.
Re:Viruses, not virii
by
freeweed
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· Score: 5, Funny
Excuseth me, but I have to go visit the Olde Shoppe now.
I'm all for literacy and correct grammar/spelling, but anyone who doesn't think English is a constantly evolving language obviously has never read a book more than 20 years olde.
-- Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Re:Viruses, not virii
by
koreth
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And until enough people use it, it's still wrong. English changes, but it doesn't change just because a few people can't be bothered to crack open a dictionary. Otherwise "lose" and "loose" would be synonyms, because a hell of a lot more people mistake those than choose a bogus pluralization of "virus."
And since you're clearly an authority on the history of English, you're no doubt already aware that the trend over at least the last century has been toward stricter disciplines of spelling and grammar, not looser. Thanks to mass publication, we're no longer in the era of Andrew Jackson's "It's a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!"
The rules change over time, it's true, but that doesn't mean there aren't any rules.
Deal with it.
Re:duh.. I guess humans will do it themselves
by
TheSync
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· Score: 2, Informative
The challenge here is that you can't have a genetically-targetted race-killer, because race is a social concept and not really a genetic one. Besides the vagueness of race (such as "white" or "black" when both are full of incredible genetic differentiation), even "racial" phenotypes do not always stem from identical genotypes.
There are plenty of examples of people from different races who are closer genetically to each other than to many others of the same race.
Now an individual or family target, that is a different matter...
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
diersing
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· Score: 4, Informative
Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered did a nice piece on it, you can
download it here
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
Waffle+Iron
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· Score: 5, Insightful
People seem to be exremely afraid of anything made in a lab, but fail to recognize that the greater danger (by far) is from natural evolution of new viruses.
Unless somebody figures out how to make an artificial microbe that takes advantage of chemical processes that just aren't found in natural evolution. For example, the human body might not even be capable of attacking a hypothetical microbe that has a teflon or silicone-enhanced outer membrane.
At any rate, natural evolution proceeds at a slow rate, so the defending species has time to adapt. Anthrax, for example, implements a tricky chemical hack to breach animal cells and destroy them. Most animals are pretty defenseless against the special back door that antrax uses, and without it the anthrax bacteria would be no more harmful than a pimple. However, anthrax is a rather obscure organism that mostly lives in the dirt. The reason that animals haven't evolved a defense against its chemical attack is that it just doesn't spread that easily in a natural setting. If anthrax were contagious like a cold, animals would have evolved a defense against it long ago.
Now, people may soon have the knowledge to install anthrax's chemical attack into something like a common cold virus. This short-ciruits the evolutionary process. Instead of just having to resist natural random improvemts in microbes, we may soon also face improvements that take advantage of god-like knowledge of the weaknesses of the defenders.
By simultaneously combining the best parts of various different microbes found in nature, then adding unnatural chemical improvements and using our newly available schematics of human cell defense design, we will certainly be able to create microbes far more dangerous than anything nature is likely to randomly come up with.
I doubt that trying to control this kind of technology is going to do any good, however. Somebody somewhere in the world is going to work on this stuff whether its banned or not. Our only hope is probably to develop means to quickly detect any new microbes, along with adaptive technology to create unnatural defenses to unnatural new organisms in real time.
"Discussion"?
by
AdamHaun
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.
But the problem is that we're not *going* to have a serious societal discussion because that phrase means nothing. Who's talking with whom? Who makes decisions? Who gets input?
When I hear "societal discussion", I get an image in my head of the entire country sitting at a great big table having a little chat about what to do. But in real life, that sort of thing doesn't happen. You have kooks who think that anything that looks like "playing God" is evil, you have people who think that every new invention must immediately be used to aid/fight terrorism, you have people who don't even understand the basic science behind what's going on(like Slashdot...oops, did I say that out loud?). And in the end, after all of these people have "had their say"(who are they talking to?), who decides what will be done? You want the government to say "Sorry, no more research on microorganisms"? Because that's about all it could do. What right does "society" have to control science? Most people will tell you that they don't even understand what "science" is! Who is qualified to do cost/benefit analysis of this sort of thing? Does anybody even *care* about cost/benefit analysis?
I understand(and sympathize with) your concerns, but no amount of talking is going to do anything about this situation. We can't halt our understanding of the world where it is just because a few people might cause problems with it. Hell, if we had taken that attitude to begin with, we'd be lucky to have fire by now!
-- Visit the
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
gorilla
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's not so much that it's malicious, but that it's unusual. An aircraft accident isn't malicious, but it's going to get headlines.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
mAineAc
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· Score: 2, Informative
I am sure they take great pains to be very careful these are bacteriophages they attack bacteria. Just think they can work towards creating a virus that is hungry for cancer cells. We may be seeing the first signs of creating viruses that will eat oil spills or something equally great.
Could help stop biowarfare as well
by
mercuryresearch
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· Score: 3, Interesting
One of the arguments for not destroying the current stock of smallpox is that it might be needed at some future time for research.
With a proven and consistent ability to recreate a virus from its known DNA sequence, the actual viruses themselves could be safely destroyed without impacting the ability to resurrect them in the future. As well, it's probably considerably harder to recreate a virus this way than to steal existing stock.
So while this opens the door to manufacturing viruses for biowarfare, it also makes it possible to destroy current stocks that might be stolen and used for such purposes.
Rainbow Six future scenario?
by
StandardCell
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· Score: 4, Interesting
For those of you who have read Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, you will know that Tom goes into detail not only about what certain individuals will do to bioengineer fatal viruses. Obviously this particular virus isn't much, but what about the radical elements in humanity? There are individuals willing to kill everything on earth in order to advance their political or religious ideology. If someone can engineer viruses this easily, what will happen when someone disgruntled and who doesn't care about himself, much less others, decide to design and manufacture a virus like this?
Thinking about it in slightly different terms, all societies attempt to limit the proliferation of highly destructive weapons among their populace because the arbitrary nature of people would guarantee their arbitrary misuse. Imagine a world where people could obtain nuclear weapons as easily as a box of ammunition. We'd already all be dead.
This is what makes this particular story quite fear-inducing. When we arrive at the point where we can easily contruct very deadly weapons, particularly with the subtlety of viruses, there should be very strict regulation and government supervision. I can only hope there will be a worldwide treaty to that effect. After all, would you want someone engineering a virulent strain of airborne type 4 Ebola because he or she has a beef with a government's ideology?
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
kiatoa
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· Score: 3, Insightful
There are two kinds of Luddites:
1. The "I don't understand it, we're all gonna die" crowd and...
2. The "I understand it, I don't trust those irresponsible buggers, if we don't do something we're all gonna die" crowd.
Large corporations (and some small ones) have repeated proven themselves to be untrustworthy and irresponsible. Crowd #2 have every reason to fear what they fear.
-- 90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
i, for one, would like to *welcome* our virus-creating overlords...
/me looks around nervously, and dons a N100 mask.
-- Just raise the taxes on crack.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
Habbakukk
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Our only hope is probably to develop means to qucikly detect any new microbes, along with adaptive technology to create unnatural defenses to unnatural new orgainisms in real time.
Sort of gives the idea of keeping your virus definitions up-to-date a whole new meaning.
-- Habakkuk
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
EvilTwinSkippy
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· Score: 2, Informative
Probably the same as handling any other virus
No, actually.
Natural viruses live with the constraint that if they kill their hosts outright they can't spread and quickly die out. (Read "The Andromeda Strain" for a great book on the subject.)
And don't think that complexity in virual structure is required to make something lethal. Ebola is a VERY simply virus. So simple that it kills it's host in weeks by rupturing all of its cells from virus production. Fortunately, Ebola generally strikes in isolated regions of Africa where an infected person only has the potential to infect a few dozen people before the outbreak is contained.
If you recall the mouse-killing viruse from a few weeks ago was actually an accident. They were working on something that would sterilize the rodents. What they ended up with is something increadibly lethal.
A simple-self replicating virus that works in human cells could be the deadliest thing we ever produce.
-- "Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The bizzare genome of Phi X 174
by
MagnaMark
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The specific virus that Venter et al synthesized is called Bacteriophage phiX174. They probably chose it because it has such a short genome.
In fact, it's genome is so short that at first it confused researchers. It's genome is shorter than it should be. That is, there are fewer codons in the genome than there are amino acids in the virus's proteins. Normally, there would need to be a 1:1 codon:amino-acid ratio.
This lead researchers to the amazing discovery that phiX174 contains "genes within genes" and "overlapping genes". (Link to Genetic Map of phiX174) In several instances, one gene is entirely contained within another gene. In another, there are two genes (A and A*) that overlap with "reading frames" that are off by one.
This discovery challenges notions of what a gene is. With this knowledge, you can't say that a gene is simply a particular region of DNA.
These overlapping genes also call attention to the improbability of the evolution of phiX174. Commonly when a genetic mutation occurs, one base changes. This could affect one amino-acid in the protein for which the gene codes. In phiX174's case, a single base mutation could change 2 amino-acids in 2 proteins. This means that the evolution of these proteins is interdependent. That two functional proteins evolved in this manner is absolutely extraordinary.
Of course, now that it has evolved that way, it gives phiX174 an advantage of genetic economy. It takes less energy to maintain and reproduce a shorter genome. So phiX174 gets more bang for it's genetic buck by overlapping genes in this way.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
f97tosc
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· Score: 4, Interesting
At any rate, natural evolution proceeds at a slow rate, so the defending species has time to adapt.
Natural evolution is not slow for viruses; their genetic code does not have the copy-protection mechanisms of say mammals. That is why we have a new flu pop up every other year, or a SARS for that matter.
Anthrax, for example, implements a tricky chemical hack to breach animal cells and destroy them. Most animals are pretty defenseless against the special back door that antrax uses, and without it the anthrax bacteria would be no more harmful than a pimple. However, anthrax is a rather obscure organism that mostly lives in the dirt. The reason that animals haven't evolved a defense against its chemical attack is that it just doesn't spread that easily in a natural setting. If anthrax were contagious like a cold, animals would have evolved a defense against it long ago.
With all due respect I think you are contradicting yourself. When a patheogen spreads for natural or not so natural reasons, people may die. Some survive, the resistant genes thus become more common. There may even be mutations of strong resistance that start to spread.
When this process happens for natural reasons, you label it "evolving a defense", or "defending species having time to adapt". When it happens by an act of man, you think of it as man being caught "defenseless". Of course, in both cases the species start out as (relatively) defenseless, and end up with a better defense.
My whole point was that there seem to be no lab-made pahtogen worse than anything evolved in nature. As for spreading it by man, well, anthrax did get an assist by man. But the extent of that "outbreak" was miniscule next to the natural outbreaks that happen every year.
Unless somebody figures out how to make an artificial microbe that takes advantage of chemical processes that just aren't found in natural evolution. For example, the human body might not even be capable of attacking a hypothetical microbe that has a teflon or silicone-enhanced outer membrane.
Possibly. But then again, if such mechanisms were very successful, why did they not evolve for 4 billion years on a planet surface covered in silicon compounds. In general, it is very difficult for people in labs to compete with the lab which is our planet, and time-scales of millions or billions of years.
Tor
Re:duh.. I guess humans will do it themselves
by
glassesmonkey
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Umm, strictly a social concept eh?
There are a great number of genetic markers which are overwhelmingly present in certain populations. This obviously doesn't apply to every individual, but say when 80% of what we call a race has a specific genetic condition, that is probably good enough for the next Hitler.
There are clearly different races (genetically) and until very recently humans were not as mobile as they currently are. Breeding was once a tribal concept and we live in a much different world than we were genetically created in. I hate to be the one to break this to you but people's appearance and the social concepts you speak of are based on their genetics. That's what makes some one 'black' and someone else 'white'.. it's the genes that dictate what social concept is applied. (or more exactly, our obserations about genetics that we have put names to)
Not as worrisome as it seems
by
localman
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think people get mega worried about this because they think that we'll create some unstoppable supervirus. But that would mean that we humans were better designers than nature itself, which is not the case (witness our inability to improve on our own bodies in any meaningful way).
It is likely that any "supervirus" that could exist would have come into existence on it's own anyways. And some have; the bubonic plague, 1918 influenza, and to a lesser extent, aids. But the competition between viruses and hosts goes on and on in a cycle, with no final victor.
In fact, I would guess that any virus we could make would be a weakling compared to the viruses that evolve in the wild.
Cheers
Ho-hum. Big deal...
by
praedor
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· Score: 2, Informative
This isn't amazing at all. It isn't even wondrous or frightening. It is merely the synthesis of enough DNA, duplicated in sequence from an extant bacteriophage, to paste together into a full phage genome. So what? Chemical DNA synthesis (as opposed to enzymatic/biological) is old news and an everyday occurrance. If you wish (and have the money) you could order "oligos" (short stretches of DNA sequence) of ANY sequence and paste them together into an ever lengthening string.
I have pasted together 6 complementary pairs of DNA oligos, each 120 bases in length and designed to have "complementary" ends. First anneal the DNA together (Heat the single strand DNAs to ~95 C in a nice buffer, paired with their complement, and then cool to just below the melting temperature of the base-paired oligos for about 30 seconds to a minute). Next, you mix together the annealed oligo pairs and incubate at room temp (or 16 C for slower reaction) with the addition of ligase (enzyme that glues DNAs together, end-to-end) for about 1 hour (or 4hrs to overnight at 16 C). If properly designed, you end up (as I did) with a long DNA sequence made up of end-to-end glued-together DNAs. In my case, the DNA sequence encoded the gene for HIV integrase, the enzyme that HIV uses to insert itself into and infected individual's DNA. Totally synthetic. Big whup.
What would have been interesting? If I had designed oligos to encode a new protein or enzyme of my own design, unique in the world, that actually functioned at doing something. All I did was produce a copy of a DNA sequence that exists already in nature. You do the same thing when you PCR DNA, fer gawd's sake. The difference is PCR is much easier and faster (yet it requires the chemical synthesis of "artificial" DNA oligos for use as primers). Now extending what I just said to the Ventner virus (phage), he didn't do anything woundrous, he did something difficult and that's it. It is difficult (more a pain in the ass) to synthesis long oligos, anneal them, ligate/glue them together, and in enough volume, to have something to work with. In my personal case, the amount of artificial gene (I changed the way the gene encodes the amino acids that make up integrase so the actual DNA sequence was ~40% different from natural HIV integrase sequence) was miniscule after the above-mentioned process. So I made lots of it by doing a...PCR on it. Simple. The PCR takes a VERY few complete, full-length sequences and copies it into a LOT of copies. At 7500 basepair, this would also be very doable with the "artificial" phage genome. You make what turns out to be very few complete genomes in a mix of mishmash and use PCR to generate lots of the complete genome. Stock molecular biology.
Do you want to know what would have been REALLY newsworthy? If the phage produced was truly artificial. That is, if it was not merely an exact copy of an already extant phage but a new, never before existing phage. Truly "life" generated artificially. As it is, they just did a lot of common molecular biology to generate a short, complete genome for a phage and, low and behold, since it is identical to the natural phage, it reproduces. Expecting otherwise would be like thinking that somehow synthetic vitamin C is different than natural vitamin C (it isn't). The chemical bonds are identical, the actual molecules in it are not different in any way, etc. Same for this phage example.
I could do something simpler. I could cut and paste a bunch of HIV DNA sequences (different strains if you wish) together into a full-length HIV DNA genome, suspend it in a buffer with DMSO and have you apply it to the skin on the inner side of either arm. There is a good chance that this will result in you contracting an HIV infection. MAGIC! If I wanted to spend the time and money to generate all the DNA oligos needed, I could anneal and paste them together and generate an HIV genome (10,000 basepairs of DNA) identical to whatever strain I chose and it would be infectious. Big deal.
-- In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
jimsum
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Let's hope they use some sort of copy protection on these viruses so that they can only reproduce with the permission of the owner. That's DRM I have no trouble with.
-- --
Pot is safer than Beer
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
2short
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I agree that bio weapons get more attention than natural viruses because they involve someone doing something intentionally. But I don't think it makes sense. The way I see it the downside of my getting killed by an intentional attack is that I'm dead. The downside of my getting killed by a natural virus is that I'm dead. Whether or not anyone intended me to be dead doesn't modify that downside at all for me. If society is going to try to do some stuff to prevent me (and others) from becoming prematurely dead, it seems to me it would make sense to allocate more resources to things that are more likely to kill people.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
mcpkaaos
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Designing and building a computer...certainly implies that you have enough knowledge to make intelligent decisions on how to go about protecting the computer.
Not to flame you, but that is an arrogant and inherently dangerous presumption to make. Take for example Ted Kaczynski. Incredibly intelligent, incredibly crafty, incredibly deadly. And he's just one example. Sure, you could argue that he is insane. So take the invention of the atomic bomb as another example. Following your logic, the Unabomber would have seen the devastation of his ways and been deterred, and Einstein would have kept his findings closely guarded from government exploitation. No one needs to be reminded of the outcome of either scenario.
Intelligence does not imply wisdom, and quite often you'll find one without the other, especially in the race for discovery and/or acheivement.
-- It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
I find it interesting
by
dtfinch
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· Score: 2, Interesting
That this biological virus is only 1250 bytes (5000 basepairs) while most of the email viruses I see are in excess of 100k.
Why not Do it on the moon?
by
kalieaire
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think if anyone was really worried about catastrophic release of deadly viral infections on the world, they should just move the labs to the moon or something. That way in an airless environment where it is constantly bombarded by UV radiation from the Sun, Any viral infection that leaves the airlocks of the facility would be erradicated, anyone infected and leaving the facility despeartely can be interecepted.
If anyone from the moon facility gets infected, just nuke it and kill everything that's there. Isn't that real efficient? The Moon is pock marked enough as it is, no one else is gonna notice another zit being popped.
---sounds like a case of DOOM(TM), but on Earth's moon instead of Phobos.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
feronti
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Unfortunately, neither of your examples refute the original statement. While I agree to a certain extent that the original poster's implications are not entirely valid, your examples do nothing to refute his point.
Ted Kaczynski (not sure if either of us spelled that right, and I'm not going to take the time to look it up now:) was indeed highly intelligent. However, I don't think he works very well as an example that intelligence does not guarantee wisdom. In fact, I would argue that his success for many years implies that he was indeed "crafty" (often used as a synonym for wise, or clever). His failure was not in wisdom or intelligence but in the fact that his choices were immoral (some would argue evil) to the large majority of the society. The decision to commit evil acts does not preclude the wisdom of the decision maker. Sometimes evil acts can make more sense than good ones, given the proper moral outlook.
In the case of Einstein, he knew full well the implications of application of his theories. It was a letter signed by him that encouraged Roosevelt to devote resources to building the first atomic bombs. Granted the only reason he wrote the letter was because he believed the Nazis were very close to building their own nuclear weapons, and IIRC, he said later in life that he regretted that decision. But, he never regretted publishing his theories, and anyone who claims the world would have been a better place if he hadn't is a fool. First of all, they would have been eventually discovered by someone else. What if that someone else was someone who agreed with the Fascists, and therefore took the discovery directly to his government, who didn't release it publically, and instead used the research to create atomic weapons. Only this time, no one else in the world had even the theoretical groundwork to be able to develop their own weapons to counter. Also, Einstein's theories created a revolution in physics, allowing us to discover not only nuclear weapons but integrated circuits and other modern technologies. I think more benefits have come out of Einstein's work than bad, and that the wisest decision possible was to publish it and allow it to be referenced freely.
Does this mean that intelligent people are inherently wise? Not at all. There are countless examples of intelligent people doing stupid things--Maxim created his machine gun believing that the massive volume of fire would so frighten people that war would be impossible. Elia Kazan provided names, the names of many of his friends, no less, to McCarthy and the Un-American Activities Committee, names that were promptly blacklisted. These are far better examples of naivete and foolishness among the intelligentsia.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this?
by
4of12
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Knowing how to assemble a virus, will hopefully allow us to defend ourselves against them.
As long as the rate at which the virus reproduces and the level of devastation it causes is not too fast or too irreversible.
Consider the effects of some natural virus and other life forms that have been unleased.
A fungus from the Eastern hemisphere pretty well wiped out the American chestnut tree in short order.
Russian thistle, introduced to North America in the 19th century has likewise become endemic, to the point where tumbleweeds are considered an essential ingredient in any Western film set.
Rabbits in Australia, etc., provide some indication of how rapidly reproducing organisms can spread and how much change they can cause.
Do we trust our knowledge of virus mechanics enough to believe that an inadvertent release of "grey goo" can be undone?
To put it another way:
Even if I'm extremely knowledgeable about cars, have built them from scratch, repaired them, etc., is that sufficient assurance I will be able to stop a speeding car running straight at me in time?
-- "Provided by the management for your protection."
need to see the data
by
bikerguy99
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Let's wait for the paper to come out before we make any conclusions. Craig Venter's commertial interests and huge ego are well known - he has announced "completing" human, mouse and now dog genomes which is far from being complete.
And find a diff mod to deal with molecular biology and genomics/genetics and such - reading idiotic statements marked as insightful makes slashdot look like FOX news.
Can they now patent this virus, or does God's work count as prior art?
--
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Re:One of the advantages...
by
UserGoogol
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ehh... no.
Yes, cells mutate, and this is how they evolve. But genes don't "want" to mutate. (Well, genes don't really want anything, they're just complex molecules, but bear with me.)
Lets say you have a piece of DNA. A gene. Now, evolution says that genes which promote their existance will be more common than genes which do not. Obviously. This means that genes which promote their own existance will be more common.
Now, genes typically have many side effects. They might make a person a little taller, but at the same time it might increase the odds of cavities. It's a very chaotic system. Now, let's say you have two genes which are identical except for one difference: one prevents mutation of the gene, where the other one does not. Obviously, the one which prevents mutation will be more successful, because the other one will be changed to god-knows-what.
So evolution tends to favor genes which prevent mutation, although we still get enough for there to be new variation.
-- "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Slashdot Mirror
Anymore these days, i have to re-read titles like this one to try to determine if it's a organism-disease virus, or a computer-disease virus.
heh.
These guys are writing fork bombs with DNA
do() || do_not();
Are we sure this wasn't put out by the Umbrella corporation?
SCO.com uses Linux
Well, not really terrified I guess, but the whole "We've created life and it's procreating" thing is something that doesn't exactly make me feel warm and fuzzy,. And why did it have to be a virus. Why not a cute little kitten or something?
I want the fire back.
Yeah I know. Luddite reaction. Yadda yadda yadda.
I still don't really think the benefits (gene expression research, gene therapy in general) are good enough, considering the potential problems.
I'd like to know who's funding them. Is it civilian or military?
As if there weren't enough virii on the planet already, we have to go making more. Fantastic academic achievement, but wish they hadn't done it. A bit like a nuclear bomb, in its own way...
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
Just to find a metaphor that will bring this home to some of us...
I once had a prolonged discussion on the pros and cons of GM food and the mixing of seperate genetic organisms (as has produced this virus) with a Phd in Computer Science. Eventually I grabbed a textbook on UML from his desk and waved it at him. "Look," I cried, "they're breaking encapsulation!" My friend immediately reversed his stance on Genetic Engineering and wanted more testing.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
Quick! Lets blacken the skies, they won't be able to live without light!
If they can get it down to seven days then we'll have something ;)
---
All your old jokes are belong to sigs.
I think the wonder of any scientific advance should be tempered by a clear-headed analysis of the dangers it might create.
I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.
Imagine a scenario where terrorists could alter a disease or organic biological weapon gene by gene to make it immune to current antidotes. Beyond that, I worry that the US itself might use it for its own cache of new-age weapons.
If WE convert it to a weapon, what's the difference? We can claim we're the good guys and we won't use it. But we can look at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
I hope I'm not fear-mongering here, but, I worry.
You would hope that they take great pains to make access to the virii as secure as possible.
But, things like this are very important in the fight to create vaccines to illnesses. Anyone who has taken apart and built a car, computer, or whatever will tell you that thier level of understanding is now MUCH greater than it was before they did it. Knowing how to assemble a virus, will hopefully allow us to defend ourselves against them.
Pretty Pictures!
More than a year ago live polio virus was constructed from component DNA. This is not a "artificial" virus but a working copy of phi X bacteriophage. Note that this is an infringement of God's copyrights and patents and trade secrets!
... )
(from NY times, July 2002: Scientists construct virus from scratch for first time, synthesizing live polio virus from chemicals and publicly available genetic information; work was conducted by scientists at State University of New York at Stony Brook and financed by Defense Department as part of program to develop biowarfare) countermeasures
The article starts out:
It is the stuff of science fiction and bioethical debates: The creation of artificial life.
A virus can reproduce, but does not consume energy -> they are not alive in a technical sense.
Also see this news from Science.
Incredibly cool.
This story indicates that it was done more than a year ago.
Yeah, I agree -- these people really need to start wearing condoms.
Powered by onion juice.
Probably the same as in handling any other virus.
Which is perfectly reasonable. People seem to be exremely afraid of anything made in a lab, but fail to recognize that the greater danger (by far) is from natural evolution of new viruses.
By the same token, the dangers of bio-weapons seem to be greatly excaggerated, when compared to natural pathogens. Some anthrax letters that killed half a dozen people seemed to get more attention and resources than the flu and aids, which kill tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone.
Tor
I thought the general agreement was that viruses aren't considered life because can't metabolize energy. A virus looks like a simple lego block compared to the complex architecture of a single bacterium.
The human genome (which is DNA), contained in each of your cells, contains the instructions needed to make a cell (much like a computer program.)
...(Monomer n-1) 3' - 5' (Monomer n) 3'(BLOCKED) ...(Monomer n) 3' ...(Monomer n) 3' - 5' (Monomer n+1) 3' {BLOCKED}
However, in order to use these instructions to make a cell, you need a cell of the same kind to read them.
Analogy: You have a computer program that tells you how to manufacture computers but this doesn't do any good unless you already have a computer OF THE SAME KIND on which to execute it.
So, even if I assemble an entire human genome, I can't use it to make a person unless I already have a human cell. Kapish?
A VIRUS, which is what was made here, is NOT A CELL. It is a parasitic piece of DNA that hijacks an existing cell and contains the instructions to make viruses. The DNA that the virus contains is, in the best case, sufficient to hijack the cell all by itself, and convert the cell into a factory for making viruses. Viruses CANNOT make more viruses by themselves. The similarity to a computer virus, I assume, is obvious.
So, if you can make VIRAL DNA, this will be sufficient to make the virus, if you have cells that the virus can infect.
Even making the genome of a virus is very difficult. The "commercially available" DNA mentioned in the article is made chemically. DNA is made up of a chain of monomers; each monomer has a 5' end and a 3' end that can attach together to form a chain. In order to add monomer n+1 to a growing chain, this is what you do (description meant to be accessible to people who don't know a lot of chemistry):
-> **add reagent to unblock**
-> wash
-> add 5' (Monomer n) 3' {BLOCKED}
-> add reagent to attach 5' and 3' together
and repeat for Monomer n+2. Recursion is good.
Now, this is done in parallel in thousands of molecules of DNA (the 5' end of each molecule is fixed to a plate.)
Every time you add the reagent to remove the BLOCKS, it has a percentage chance, which can be very small, of failing.
So, for example, if, on one paritcular molecule, it fails at position 10, then instead of:
ACGTACGTACGT
you will get,
ACGTACGTAGT.
DNA that makes proteins has something called a "reading frame", consisting of codons which are three monomers long. If you shift the reading frame over by 1 monomer, it completely changes the meaning of the message.
So, a single nucleotide deletion, which I describe above, is disastrous - the synthetic DNA becomes useless.
Even if the chance of failing to remove a block is small - typically about 0.1% - if your DNA molecule is thousands of bases long, the chance of successfully adding every base to any individual molecule is slight.
Of course, you can make two different 100-base long molecules by the above technique and then ligate them together (recursion by splitting the task in half) which is, I believe, what's been done here. This has technical difficulties of it's own, of course, but with refinements it woud allow you to make useful DNA of length n*2^m instead of DNA of length n.
This is a frightening prospect because it would allow you to make ebola "from scratch", or just from the the string of letters that represent the genome (which is so short I could write it out by hand on a stack of cocktail napkins.) We're not to that point yet but it is a scary possibility.
The good and new comes from no quarter where it is looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.
Assembly is not necessarily the same as synthesis. Designing and building a computer (as oppossed to merely putting together what is essentially a kit created by someone else) certainly implies that you have enough knowledge to make intelligent decisions on how to go about protecting the computer.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
We're at the top of the food chain, so we must come up with new and creative ways to eat ourselves.
Its all part of Nature's master plan.
I don't really care about the morality of this. Frankly, from a scientific point of view: Cool! On the other hand, what does concern me was this quote:
The project was funded in part by the Department of Energy, which hopes to create microbes that would capture carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, produce hydrogen or clean the environment.
Okay, so let's assume we do something like this, with the perfectly innocent intention of cleaning up some level of carbon dioxide. Okay, well you're counting on the virus to reproduce, but what if it gets out of control? It eats up ALL the carbon dioxide. All the trees and plants suffocate and die, but that might not happen before the atmosphere goes up in flames since that carbon dioxide is being turned into hydrogen.
Maybe not a likely event, but my concerns are a bit more on the practical side. Frankly, I'm all for creating new forms of life and bringing back extinct ones, just for the coolness of it. I just hope we don't go doing something foolish, which we always seem to manage to do.
Note: I'm a firm Christian who believes in God, and that He intented our world to look exactly as it did when sentient life first looked at it, AND that He has a stated goal of hiding Himself from us.
That said:
evolution/natural selection is the natural effect when beings are subjected to adversity: only the strong surviveI
Evolution doesn't say that the "strong" survive. Evolution is the simple observation that in any given environment, the creatures most fit for that environment will thrive the most--and, ergo, creatures that thrive the most will be those most likely to survive.
The odds of a mutation creating all parts simultaneously are astronomical, and consequently, the only accepted theory that can sanely describe such a thing is intelligent design,
We don't know what the odds are of any mutation--though we do know that, just in the last 10,000 years, there have been 3,652,500 days. So if the odds are one in a million that a one-day generational organism will evolve a certain set of traits are one in a million, it will have happened three times just since the Neolithic revolution began. And, of course, science believes that Earth is several orders of magnitude older than 10,000 years.
which has been hinted at in many different real-life examples as well as probabistically explained by Pascal's Wager.
Pascal's Wager has nothing to do with evolution, and as a mathematical statement it is flawed based on its treatment of faith as a binary equation. (What if you worship the wrong diety?) God intended there to be doubt in the world, and He is perfectly capable of remedying said doubt when He sees fit.
So as skeptical as I am of intelligent design, I can't help but notice how much of our biological model it predicts.
Intelligent design, like most theories, is little more than untestable conjecture about the past. The uncertainty that must be applied to theroums about archeological past are so great that competetly opposite theories (ID and Evolution) can exist based on the exact same evidence.
Ebola Zaire: 18959 base pairs
Ebola Reston: 18891 base pairs
Marburg: 19112 base pairs
Perhaps bio weapons get more attention than natural viruses simply because if a natural virus kills you, it's an act of [insert deity here] and simply one of the risks of life, like getting hit by a bus.
Bio weapons on the other hand are purposely engineered to maximize the lethality of a disease for the intentional purpose of killing as many people as possible. In other words, it's the intent that matters.
Please note that when they say, "From scratch" they mean that they created a synthetic genome (probably from portions of other genomes - I doubt they know enough about the base pair sequences to actually have done it base pair by base pair) and inserted it in a 'living' cell.
The cell then started reproducing. They didn't create the cell. They probably didn't design the genome as much as patch one together from other genomes (though they may have 'created' it - physically manufactured it)
They say it's safe because it only infects batceria. Unfortunately, humans depend on bacteria to survive, so it's not nearly as innocuous as one might like to think.
However, these are nano-machines that might do real work safely (cleaning up chemical toxins, etc) - I'm just worried about mutations and how they will develop. You can't create life and expect it to reproduce itself without change over time. Pretty soon it'll discover that human skin is much more plentiful than the chemical toxins it was eating, and it'll change its diet.
-Adam
with nature seems to work so well, why not? I live in Illinois and each fall we are swarmed by millions upon millions of Japanese Lady-Bug-Like Orange Beatles. They were put here to fight Aphids, but they have no predators (birds won't even eat them because they emit this foul stench). They area all over the place and nothing can stop them.
So, what kind of checks and balances will there be on man-made viruses? None- you just cannot introduce anything into nature so quickly. I think the possible outcome is clear. This is downright frightening. I think I'll go rent The Stand this weekend.
[FromTheMorning]
Anthrax is a natural pathogen, not an artifical one. It's only the vector by which it was spread that is artificial. And what makes it worthy of head lines is that it was malicious.
Right or wrong, an incident that is the result of deliberate intent is seen as much more heinous than an act of nature, even if it does much less danger. School shootings have killed only a handful of youngsers over several years. How many died from traffic incidents over the same time frame? Where is your child safer - sitting in school or sitting in the front seat of a car? You don't see parents panicking over the thought of their child riding in a car but you see huge discussions over how to make our schools safer.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
Ok, this is the Craig Venter of Celera fame. Remember the great Human Genome race? Celera wanted "to patent those parts of the genome it thinks are important and useful, charging researchers who want access to the sequences. Celera has already filed preliminary patents for 6,500 genes."
But the knowledge to produce viruses for whatever purpose goes open source. Bizarre - this guy wants to patent the air we breath and then make fusion weapons technology open to everyone, on the theory that white hats will always prevail.
Problem is, some things are not readily defended against, and viruses have to be one of the things we are least effective in blocking. Sorry Craig, I'm not sure we need to turn a thousand tigers loose before we've REALLY learned to tame the ones that are out there already.
"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals. We cause accidents."
Ventner's new virus is artificial in the sense that it was created from chemicals- but it is identical to a known natural virus.
Considering that this virus was synthesized from scratch, it's probably not something very effective. It's a long way from building a virus that works at all to building a virus that targets a particular organism or overcomes natural defenses.
Just because it's man-made doesn't make it more advanced than naturally-occurring viruses. It's been possible for a long time to build viruses from collected stocks, and these are generally much more frightening. What will be scary is when we have some clue as to how to design proteins, and could construct a virus with specific properties. Until then, we're not likely to create anything that doesn't arise in nature.
(Genetically modified foods are a slightly different issue; just because it might arise in nature doesn't mean we'd eat it if it did. Also, most of the organisms involved are much more resistant to mutation and genetic mixing than viruses and bacteria)
This will probably get modded down as flamebait, but someone has to say it: the plural of "virus" is "viruses." It is not "virii" because that isn't an actual English word.
The challenge here is that you can't have a genetically-targetted race-killer, because race is a social concept and not really a genetic one. Besides the vagueness of race (such as "white" or "black" when both are full of incredible genetic differentiation), even "racial" phenotypes do not always stem from identical genotypes.
There are plenty of examples of people from different races who are closer genetically to each other than to many others of the same race.
Now an individual or family target, that is a different matter...
Yesterday, NPR's All Things Considered did a nice piece on it, you can download it here
Unless somebody figures out how to make an artificial microbe that takes advantage of chemical processes that just aren't found in natural evolution. For example, the human body might not even be capable of attacking a hypothetical microbe that has a teflon or silicone-enhanced outer membrane.
At any rate, natural evolution proceeds at a slow rate, so the defending species has time to adapt. Anthrax, for example, implements a tricky chemical hack to breach animal cells and destroy them. Most animals are pretty defenseless against the special back door that antrax uses, and without it the anthrax bacteria would be no more harmful than a pimple. However, anthrax is a rather obscure organism that mostly lives in the dirt. The reason that animals haven't evolved a defense against its chemical attack is that it just doesn't spread that easily in a natural setting. If anthrax were contagious like a cold, animals would have evolved a defense against it long ago.
Now, people may soon have the knowledge to install anthrax's chemical attack into something like a common cold virus. This short-ciruits the evolutionary process. Instead of just having to resist natural random improvemts in microbes, we may soon also face improvements that take advantage of god-like knowledge of the weaknesses of the defenders.
By simultaneously combining the best parts of various different microbes found in nature, then adding unnatural chemical improvements and using our newly available schematics of human cell defense design, we will certainly be able to create microbes far more dangerous than anything nature is likely to randomly come up with.
I doubt that trying to control this kind of technology is going to do any good, however. Somebody somewhere in the world is going to work on this stuff whether its banned or not. Our only hope is probably to develop means to quickly detect any new microbes, along with adaptive technology to create unnatural defenses to unnatural new organisms in real time.
I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.
But the problem is that we're not *going* to have a serious societal discussion because that phrase means nothing. Who's talking with whom? Who makes decisions? Who gets input?
When I hear "societal discussion", I get an image in my head of the entire country sitting at a great big table having a little chat about what to do. But in real life, that sort of thing doesn't happen. You have kooks who think that anything that looks like "playing God" is evil, you have people who think that every new invention must immediately be used to aid/fight terrorism, you have people who don't even understand the basic science behind what's going on(like Slashdot...oops, did I say that out loud?). And in the end, after all of these people have "had their say"(who are they talking to?), who decides what will be done? You want the government to say "Sorry, no more research on microorganisms"? Because that's about all it could do. What right does "society" have to control science? Most people will tell you that they don't even understand what "science" is! Who is qualified to do cost/benefit analysis of this sort of thing? Does anybody even *care* about cost/benefit analysis?
I understand(and sympathize with) your concerns, but no amount of talking is going to do anything about this situation. We can't halt our understanding of the world where it is just because a few people might cause problems with it. Hell, if we had taken that attitude to begin with, we'd be lucky to have fire by now!
Visit the
It's not so much that it's malicious, but that it's unusual. An aircraft accident isn't malicious, but it's going to get headlines.
I am sure they take great pains to be very careful these are bacteriophages they attack bacteria. Just think they can work towards creating a virus that is hungry for cancer cells. We may be seeing the first signs of creating viruses that will eat oil spills or something equally great.
One of the arguments for not destroying the current stock of smallpox is that it might be needed at some future time for research.
With a proven and consistent ability to recreate a virus from its known DNA sequence, the actual viruses themselves could be safely destroyed without impacting the ability to resurrect them in the future. As well, it's probably considerably harder to recreate a virus this way than to steal existing stock.
So while this opens the door to manufacturing viruses for biowarfare, it also makes it possible to destroy current stocks that might be stolen and used for such purposes.
For those of you who have read Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six, you will know that Tom goes into detail not only about what certain individuals will do to bioengineer fatal viruses. Obviously this particular virus isn't much, but what about the radical elements in humanity? There are individuals willing to kill everything on earth in order to advance their political or religious ideology. If someone can engineer viruses this easily, what will happen when someone disgruntled and who doesn't care about himself, much less others, decide to design and manufacture a virus like this?
Thinking about it in slightly different terms, all societies attempt to limit the proliferation of highly destructive weapons among their populace because the arbitrary nature of people would guarantee their arbitrary misuse. Imagine a world where people could obtain nuclear weapons as easily as a box of ammunition. We'd already all be dead.
This is what makes this particular story quite fear-inducing. When we arrive at the point where we can easily contruct very deadly weapons, particularly with the subtlety of viruses, there should be very strict regulation and government supervision. I can only hope there will be a worldwide treaty to that effect. After all, would you want someone engineering a virulent strain of airborne type 4 Ebola because he or she has a beef with a government's ideology?
There are two kinds of Luddites:
1. The "I don't understand it, we're all gonna die" crowd and...
2. The "I understand it, I don't trust those irresponsible buggers, if we don't do something we're all gonna die" crowd.
Large corporations (and some small ones) have repeated proven themselves to be untrustworthy and irresponsible. Crowd #2 have every reason to fear what they fear.
90% of the wealth is in 2% of the pockets. Bummer to be in the majority.
Just raise the taxes on crack.
Our only hope is probably to develop means to qucikly detect any new microbes, along with adaptive technology to create unnatural defenses to unnatural new orgainisms in real time.
Sort of gives the idea of keeping your virus definitions up-to-date a whole new meaning.
Habakkuk
No, actually.
Natural viruses live with the constraint that if they kill their hosts outright they can't spread and quickly die out. (Read "The Andromeda Strain" for a great book on the subject.)
And don't think that complexity in virual structure is required to make something lethal. Ebola is a VERY simply virus. So simple that it kills it's host in weeks by rupturing all of its cells from virus production. Fortunately, Ebola generally strikes in isolated regions of Africa where an infected person only has the potential to infect a few dozen people before the outbreak is contained.
If you recall the mouse-killing viruse from a few weeks ago was actually an accident. They were working on something that would sterilize the rodents. What they ended up with is something increadibly lethal.
A simple-self replicating virus that works in human cells could be the deadliest thing we ever produce.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The specific virus that Venter et al synthesized is called Bacteriophage phiX174. They probably chose it because it has such a short genome.
In fact, it's genome is so short that at first it confused researchers. It's genome is shorter than it should be. That is, there are fewer codons in the genome than there are amino acids in the virus's proteins. Normally, there would need to be a 1:1 codon:amino-acid ratio.
This lead researchers to the amazing discovery that phiX174 contains "genes within genes" and "overlapping genes". (Link to Genetic Map of phiX174) In several instances, one gene is entirely contained within another gene. In another, there are two genes (A and A*) that overlap with "reading frames" that are off by one.
This discovery challenges notions of what a gene is. With this knowledge, you can't say that a gene is simply a particular region of DNA.
These overlapping genes also call attention to the improbability of the evolution of phiX174. Commonly when a genetic mutation occurs, one base changes. This could affect one amino-acid in the protein for which the gene codes. In phiX174's case, a single base mutation could change 2 amino-acids in 2 proteins. This means that the evolution of these proteins is interdependent. That two functional proteins evolved in this manner is absolutely extraordinary.
Of course, now that it has evolved that way, it gives phiX174 an advantage of genetic economy. It takes less energy to maintain and reproduce a shorter genome. So phiX174 gets more bang for it's genetic buck by overlapping genes in this way.
At any rate, natural evolution proceeds at a slow rate, so the defending species has time to adapt.
Natural evolution is not slow for viruses; their genetic code does not have the copy-protection mechanisms of say mammals. That is why we have a new flu pop up every other year, or a SARS for that matter.
Anthrax, for example, implements a tricky chemical hack to breach animal cells and destroy them. Most animals are pretty defenseless against the special back door that antrax uses, and without it the anthrax bacteria would be no more harmful than a pimple. However, anthrax is a rather obscure organism that mostly lives in the dirt. The reason that animals haven't evolved a defense against its chemical attack is that it just doesn't spread that easily in a natural setting. If anthrax were contagious like a cold, animals would have evolved a defense against it long ago.
With all due respect I think you are contradicting yourself. When a patheogen spreads for natural or not so natural reasons, people may die. Some survive, the resistant genes thus become more common. There may even be mutations of strong resistance that start to spread.
When this process happens for natural reasons, you label it "evolving a defense", or "defending species having time to adapt". When it happens by an act of man, you think of it as man being caught "defenseless". Of course, in both cases the species start out as (relatively) defenseless, and end up with a better defense.
My whole point was that there seem to be no lab-made pahtogen worse than anything evolved in nature. As for spreading it by man, well, anthrax did get an assist by man. But the extent of that "outbreak" was miniscule next to the natural outbreaks that happen every year.
Unless somebody figures out how to make an artificial microbe that takes advantage of chemical processes that just aren't found in natural evolution. For example, the human body might not even be capable of attacking a hypothetical microbe that has a teflon or silicone-enhanced outer membrane.
Possibly. But then again, if such mechanisms were very successful, why did they not evolve for 4 billion years on a planet surface covered in silicon compounds. In general, it is very difficult for people in labs to compete with the lab which is our planet, and time-scales of millions or billions of years.
Tor
Umm, strictly a social concept eh?
There are a great number of genetic markers which are overwhelmingly present in certain populations. This obviously doesn't apply to every individual, but say when 80% of what we call a race has a specific genetic condition, that is probably good enough for the next Hitler.
There are clearly different races (genetically) and until very recently humans were not as mobile as they currently are. Breeding was once a tribal concept and we live in a much different world than we were genetically created in. I hate to be the one to break this to you but people's appearance and the social concepts you speak of are based on their genetics. That's what makes some one 'black' and someone else 'white'.. it's the genes that dictate what social concept is applied. (or more exactly, our obserations about genetics that we have put names to)
I think people get mega worried about this because they think that we'll create some unstoppable supervirus. But that would mean that we humans were better designers than nature itself, which is not the case (witness our inability to improve on our own bodies in any meaningful way).
It is likely that any "supervirus" that could exist would have come into existence on it's own anyways. And some have; the bubonic plague, 1918 influenza, and to a lesser extent, aids. But the competition between viruses and hosts goes on and on in a cycle, with no final victor.
In fact, I would guess that any virus we could make would be a weakling compared to the viruses that evolve in the wild.
Cheers
This isn't amazing at all. It isn't even wondrous or frightening. It is merely the synthesis of enough DNA, duplicated in sequence from an extant bacteriophage, to paste together into a full phage genome. So what? Chemical DNA synthesis (as opposed to enzymatic/biological) is old news and an everyday occurrance. If you wish (and have the money) you could order "oligos" (short stretches of DNA sequence) of ANY sequence and paste them together into an ever lengthening string.
I have pasted together 6 complementary pairs of DNA oligos, each 120 bases in length and designed to have "complementary" ends. First anneal the DNA together (Heat the single strand DNAs to ~95 C in a nice buffer, paired with their complement, and then cool to just below the melting temperature of the base-paired oligos for about 30 seconds to a minute). Next, you mix together the annealed oligo pairs and incubate at room temp (or 16 C for slower reaction) with the addition of ligase (enzyme that glues DNAs together, end-to-end) for about 1 hour (or 4hrs to overnight at 16 C). If properly designed, you end up (as I did) with a long DNA sequence made up of end-to-end glued-together DNAs. In my case, the DNA sequence encoded the gene for HIV integrase, the enzyme that HIV uses to insert itself into and infected individual's DNA. Totally synthetic. Big whup.
What would have been interesting? If I had designed oligos to encode a new protein or enzyme of my own design, unique in the world, that actually functioned at doing something. All I did was produce a copy of a DNA sequence that exists already in nature. You do the same thing when you PCR DNA, fer gawd's sake. The difference is PCR is much easier and faster (yet it requires the chemical synthesis of "artificial" DNA oligos for use as primers). Now extending what I just said to the Ventner virus (phage), he didn't do anything woundrous, he did something difficult and that's it. It is difficult (more a pain in the ass) to synthesis long oligos, anneal them, ligate/glue them together, and in enough volume, to have something to work with. In my personal case, the amount of artificial gene (I changed the way the gene encodes the amino acids that make up integrase so the actual DNA sequence was ~40% different from natural HIV integrase sequence) was miniscule after the above-mentioned process. So I made lots of it by doing a...PCR on it. Simple. The PCR takes a VERY few complete, full-length sequences and copies it into a LOT of copies. At 7500 basepair, this would also be very doable with the "artificial" phage genome. You make what turns out to be very few complete genomes in a mix of mishmash and use PCR to generate lots of the complete genome. Stock molecular biology.
Do you want to know what would have been REALLY newsworthy? If the phage produced was truly artificial. That is, if it was not merely an exact copy of an already extant phage but a new, never before existing phage. Truly "life" generated artificially. As it is, they just did a lot of common molecular biology to generate a short, complete genome for a phage and, low and behold, since it is identical to the natural phage, it reproduces. Expecting otherwise would be like thinking that somehow synthetic vitamin C is different than natural vitamin C (it isn't). The chemical bonds are identical, the actual molecules in it are not different in any way, etc. Same for this phage example.
I could do something simpler. I could cut and paste a bunch of HIV DNA sequences (different strains if you wish) together into a full-length HIV DNA genome, suspend it in a buffer with DMSO and have you apply it to the skin on the inner side of either arm. There is a good chance that this will result in you contracting an HIV infection. MAGIC! If I wanted to spend the time and money to generate all the DNA oligos needed, I could anneal and paste them together and generate an HIV genome (10,000 basepairs of DNA) identical to whatever strain I chose and it would be infectious. Big deal.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
Let's hope they use some sort of copy protection on these viruses so that they can only reproduce with the permission of the owner. That's DRM I have no trouble with.
-- Pot is safer than Beer
I agree that bio weapons get more attention than natural viruses because they involve someone doing something intentionally. But I don't think it makes sense. The way I see it the downside of my getting killed by an intentional attack is that I'm dead. The downside of my getting killed by a natural virus is that I'm dead. Whether or not anyone intended me to be dead doesn't modify that downside at all for me. If society is going to try to do some stuff to prevent me (and others) from becoming prematurely dead, it seems to me it would make sense to allocate more resources to things that are more likely to kill people.
Designing and building a computer...certainly implies that you have enough knowledge to make intelligent decisions on how to go about protecting the computer.
Not to flame you, but that is an arrogant and inherently dangerous presumption to make. Take for example Ted Kaczynski. Incredibly intelligent, incredibly crafty, incredibly deadly. And he's just one example. Sure, you could argue that he is insane. So take the invention of the atomic bomb as another example. Following your logic, the Unabomber would have seen the devastation of his ways and been deterred, and Einstein would have kept his findings closely guarded from government exploitation. No one needs to be reminded of the outcome of either scenario.
Intelligence does not imply wisdom, and quite often you'll find one without the other, especially in the race for discovery and/or acheivement.
It goes from God, to Jerry, to me.
That this biological virus is only 1250 bytes (5000 basepairs) while most of the email viruses I see are in excess of 100k.
I think if anyone was really worried about catastrophic release of deadly viral infections on the world, they should just move the labs to the moon or something. That way in an airless environment where it is constantly bombarded by UV radiation from the Sun, Any viral infection that leaves the airlocks of the facility would be erradicated, anyone infected and leaving the facility despeartely can be interecepted. If anyone from the moon facility gets infected, just nuke it and kill everything that's there. Isn't that real efficient? The Moon is pock marked enough as it is, no one else is gonna notice another zit being popped. ---sounds like a case of DOOM(TM), but on Earth's moon instead of Phobos.
Unfortunately, neither of your examples refute the original statement. While I agree to a certain extent that the original poster's implications are not entirely valid, your examples do nothing to refute his point.
Ted Kaczynski (not sure if either of us spelled that right, and I'm not going to take the time to look it up now:) was indeed highly intelligent. However, I don't think he works very well as an example that intelligence does not guarantee wisdom. In fact, I would argue that his success for many years implies that he was indeed "crafty" (often used as a synonym for wise, or clever). His failure was not in wisdom or intelligence but in the fact that his choices were immoral (some would argue evil) to the large majority of the society. The decision to commit evil acts does not preclude the wisdom of the decision maker. Sometimes evil acts can make more sense than good ones, given the proper moral outlook.
In the case of Einstein, he knew full well the implications of application of his theories. It was a letter signed by him that encouraged Roosevelt to devote resources to building the first atomic bombs. Granted the only reason he wrote the letter was because he believed the Nazis were very close to building their own nuclear weapons, and IIRC, he said later in life that he regretted that decision. But, he never regretted publishing his theories, and anyone who claims the world would have been a better place if he hadn't is a fool. First of all, they would have been eventually discovered by someone else. What if that someone else was someone who agreed with the Fascists, and therefore took the discovery directly to his government, who didn't release it publically, and instead used the research to create atomic weapons. Only this time, no one else in the world had even the theoretical groundwork to be able to develop their own weapons to counter. Also, Einstein's theories created a revolution in physics, allowing us to discover not only nuclear weapons but integrated circuits and other modern technologies. I think more benefits have come out of Einstein's work than bad, and that the wisest decision possible was to publish it and allow it to be referenced freely.
Does this mean that intelligent people are inherently wise? Not at all. There are countless examples of intelligent people doing stupid things--Maxim created his machine gun believing that the massive volume of fire would so frighten people that war would be impossible. Elia Kazan provided names, the names of many of his friends, no less, to McCarthy and the Un-American Activities Committee, names that were promptly blacklisted. These are far better examples of naivete and foolishness among the intelligentsia.
Knowing how to assemble a virus, will hopefully allow us to defend ourselves against them.
As long as the rate at which the virus reproduces and the level of devastation it causes is not too fast or too irreversible.
Consider the effects of some natural virus and other life forms that have been unleased.
A fungus from the Eastern hemisphere pretty well wiped out the American chestnut tree in short order.
Russian thistle, introduced to North America in the 19th century has likewise become endemic, to the point where tumbleweeds are considered an essential ingredient in any Western film set.
Rabbits in Australia, etc., provide some indication of how rapidly reproducing organisms can spread and how much change they can cause.
Do we trust our knowledge of virus mechanics enough to believe that an inadvertent release of "grey goo" can be undone?
To put it another way:
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Let's wait for the paper to come out before we make any conclusions. Craig Venter's commertial interests and huge ego are well known - he has announced "completing" human, mouse and now dog genomes which is far from being complete. And find a diff mod to deal with molecular biology and genomics/genetics and such - reading idiotic statements marked as insightful makes slashdot look like FOX news.
Can they now patent this virus, or does God's work count as prior art?
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
Ehh... no.
Yes, cells mutate, and this is how they evolve. But genes don't "want" to mutate. (Well, genes don't really want anything, they're just complex molecules, but bear with me.)
Lets say you have a piece of DNA. A gene. Now, evolution says that genes which promote their existance will be more common than genes which do not. Obviously. This means that genes which promote their own existance will be more common.
Now, genes typically have many side effects. They might make a person a little taller, but at the same time it might increase the odds of cavities. It's a very chaotic system. Now, let's say you have two genes which are identical except for one difference: one prevents mutation of the gene, where the other one does not. Obviously, the one which prevents mutation will be more successful, because the other one will be changed to god-knows-what.
So evolution tends to favor genes which prevent mutation, although we still get enough for there to be new variation.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor