Synthetic Biology May Spawn Biohackers

nusratt writes "EE Times reports 'Design automation systems tailored to the task of genetic engineering . . . can lead to the accidental or deliberate creation of pathogenic biological components.' Design of molecular machines is analogous to doing system-on-chip work, and hackers 'will not need a detailed knowledge of biochemistry to effectively create complex biochemical machines.' A Harvard genetics professor says, 'Even if we don't have bioterrorists and teen-age biohackers, we will still create things that do not have the properties that we thought they would . . . Even if you are genetically resistant and recently immunized, you will have problems with artificial biological agents.' He also says that there are two big differences between this risk and nuclear weapons: (1) building weapons is harder; (2) synth-bio work is more accident-prone. Oh great, just great: script-kiddies with smallpox . . ."

Comments

Just what the world needs

[foidulus]

A 3 breasted blue haired girl with a nymphomaniac obsession for men with glasses and a fetish for Moutain Dew....

Re:Just what the world needs

[Anonymous Coward]

And when you squeeze her, she says "I love you"

Re:Just what the world needs

[Ag3nt]

I don't know about the three breasted part, but everything else sounds good. And if you think about it, how are they going to protect the automated process from viruses, worms, etc. What happens if the "bio-hacker" unplugs the machine? Even if they have passworded security safeguards, all he/she would need to do is reset the machine by manually draining any back-up batteries they have plus the one on the system board. All the power-on password settings etc. would be lost and free to be tampered with.

Re:Just what the world needs

[JPelorat]

Nymphomania isn't all it's cracked up to be. It's the equivalent of flogging it every 15 minutes whether you want to or not and having to deal with it getting whiny and bitchy when you don't.

Re:Just what the world needs

[WormholeFiend]

well, depends on your situation... if the said nymphomaniac is not living with you, then you can go over to her place whenever you feel horny and find a receptive, uh, partner.

Re:Just what the world needs

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the equivalent of flogging it every 15 minutes whether you want to or not and having to deal with it getting whiny and bitchy when you don't.

But you live with any woman, you'll have to get used to the whiny and bitchy (and naggy) part anyway.

So, in the end, living with a nymphomaniac is the same as with any other woman except that you'll have sex - a lot of sex.

Re:Just what the world needs

[CodeWanker]

Do you know what this means? The bad guys are going to be... ANIMAL CRACKERS!!!! Bwaaa haa haaa haaa haaa haaa

Re:Just what the world needs

[JPelorat]

Oh goody, a recursive argument.

Yes, that's my point. A lot of sex. You have obviously never been exposed to an oversexed female for any length of time. In the short term, yes you're missing out, but in the long term, just be glad you can still walk properly.

Re:Just what the world needs

[Anonymous Coward]

She doesn't even have to be a nympho, just have a higher sex drive than you. If 3 times a week keeps you satisfied, but she wants 6, eventually you are going to either have to learn to
a) put out when you don't really want to, or
b) deal w/ whining/nagging "why don't we have sex more often??" comments

I know, I know, a hungry man fantasizes about a feast, but once you are full, the tastiest food in the world loses a lot of its appeal.

Re:Just what the world needs

[Anonymous Coward]

To me, that still sounds like a rich person complaining they can't find anything else to spend money on...

Re:Just what the world needs

[cayenne8]

"But you live with any woman, you'll have to get used to the whiny and bitchy (and naggy) part anyway. "

There's the problem....you DON'T live with them...or at least you don't marry them. If you have to, just live with them a short period of time, like 'leasing with an option to buy'...but, when she starts whining....trade for a newer model..and you don't lose half your sh*t...

But, best of all..don't live with them...you can hang at each others place all you want, but, when you want her gone...she/you CAN leave, something that many people underestimate...until too late.

Re:Just what the world needs

[Anonymous Coward]

(Posting as AC to avoid potential embarrassment with present GF...) I once made love to a woman with 3 breasts (seriously, this is not a joke). She had 2 normal breasts and a 3rd smaller one (maybe 1/4th the size of the others) growing 3-4 inches below her left "normal" breast. I guess some women would opt to have it surgically "corrected" but she was kind of proud of her difference. Her earlier boyfriends found it fascinating, she said (as did I of course).

Re:Just what the world needs

[Anonymous Coward]

(This is the parent AC again...) To satisfy the morbidly curious: Yes, it was functional (it produced milk when she had a child by an earlier marriage). No, she could not wear a skimpy bikini top (well, without risking arrest for indecent exposure I suppose...) but had to select tops with more coverage that effectively tucked it in with the other one.

Re:Just what the world needs

[monkeyfinger]

Wise.

Re:Just what the world needs

[JPelorat]

Ok, well, I really do hope you get a chance to experience my POV someday - it's fun, but not exactly what you think it's going to be.

Script kiddies...

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anybody else read that as "script kiddies with smallbox"?

I need vacations.

Re:Script kiddies...

[wisdom_brewing]

and perhaps a vaccination... ;)

Re:Script kiddies...

[tchdab1]

Not script kiddies - there's no script involved.

Biohackers are spit kiddies.

Isn't that...

[Short Circuit]

...what they have airtight labs and testing procedures for?

Re:Isn't that...

[override11]

havent you seen 'The Stand'? Its the 1 in 1 million'th chance that something gets out that kills us all..

But dont think I'm against it, I wanna hack my own genome, get rid of these damn allergies....

Re:Isn't that...

[Short Circuit]

The counterexample to "The Stand" would be "The Andromeda Strain" ...

In The Stand, destruction of the facility required a specific individual to sacrifice himself and initiate the destruction of the facility. In The Andromeda Strain, the arming of the system was automatic, and only a specific individual could abort it.

I'm not sure either is relevant to present-day bio-hazard facilities, though.

and.....

[millahtime]

A 3 breasted blue haired girl with a nymphomaniac obsession for men with glasses and a fetish for Moutain Dew....

A boss that looks just like her and will let you "work" from home every day

Re:and.....

[ZeroGuard]

This made me chuckle, thank you. I needed that.

Re:and.....

[Alranor]

Dear God man, if you had a boss like that, why would you want to work from home?

Re:and.....

[IBX]

(...if you could work from her home)

Yikes

[amliebsch]

Really gives "anti-virus protection" a more sinister meaning. Hopefully the white hats can produce counter-agents as fast as the black hats can make harmful strains.

Re:Yikes

[khrtt]

This is the situation with computer viruses, and, despite all the antivirus laying around, it's still hard to come by an uninfected computer. Of course, you can always reinstall the OS. And how do you propose I do that with my body? Get a new reincarnation?

Re:Yikes

[amliebsch]

True, but current (computer-based) AV relies mainly on passive defense. Since people cannot conveniently be hermetically isolated from the world, an organic, human-based AV would have to probably be based on counter-agents that actively seek and destroy the harmful agents.

Re:Yikes

[shotfeel]

I wouldn't worry too much yet. IMO the article reads like a FUD/Science Fiction cross.

So what if the circuit designers don't need to know all the physics behind what they're doing. They do need expertise in circuit design. In fact it amazes me sometimes how many people doing molecular biology don't even understand the chemistry behind what they're doing -they just follow the recipe. They do, however, know how to "design" what they're doing.

Yes, many proteins have a somewhat "modular" structure, but just sticking these "modules" together is most likely going to give you a misfolded protein that does nothing but get immediately degraded or end up in the cellular equivalent of the junk heap (if it doesn't kill the cell expressing it first).

There's all kinds of information in the article that IMO sounds much scarier and easier to do than it really is. From my vantage point it seems like it would be much harder to build a single working protein from pieces than to build an atomic bomb. It can take months to engineer a simple mutations and get a protein that's properly expressed.

Considering how much hard work it takes for experts, using very expensive equipment an reagents to do this kind of thing, I'm not too worried about BioHackers quite yet.

Re:Yikes

[Carnildo]

Really gives "anti-virus protection" a more sinister meaning. Hopefully the white hats can produce counter-agents as fast as the black hats can make harmful strains.

There's this thing called an "immune system". Computers don't have 'em. People do.

Designed vs Evolved

[Space cowboy]

Even with a 'designer' bio-machine, the components will be similar/identical to already existing ones in normal life-forms. We know just how adaptable life can be, so even an unintentional slip-up could produce a noxious result :-(

The problem is that a nuclear weapon needs an enormous number of things to be 'just so' before it'll go bang. You may be able to bodge together a 50% solution far easier when your building blocks are so much more adaptable...

To draw a parallel with FPGA's, it's relatively easy to write a few hundred lines of verilog, which synthesize the gates wthin the adaptable fabric of the FPGA into a 60-80% solution. The hard bit is squeezing the last nanoseconds out of the device using technology mapping and hand-placement.

The creation of tools to make bio-machines similar to verilog/VHDL would indeed potentially have grave consequences, but I can't see it going any other way. In both cases (Biology & chip-design) you have an enormous task to create something from scratch (enzymes/bases for biology, LUTs/LC's for FPGA's), so you write a description language and model in that instead. Far far simpler once you can map from the description to the reality...

Simon

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Short Circuit]

That reminds of a software application I'd heard of a while back. Basically, you chose the options you wanted, and this application would create a computer virus out of pre-written parts to fit the bill.

Antivirus software was particularly effective, though, as a whole new family of viruses had common components you could detect.

I bet the body's immune system will respond in the same way. If you re-use the same formula for the virus shell, the same antibodies will react to a variety of viruses.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[nounderscores]

there's a really good reference on the human immune system here at http://uhaweb.hartford.edu/BUGL/immune.htm

The two really interesting parts are the adaptive immune system where there are the cell mediated (killer T-cell) and humoral (antibody) immune responses.

Both use the principle of making molecules that will stick to bad molecules, and if they do triggering a cascade of events that eventually winds up destroying the bad molecule and the things affected by it, and leaving healthy tissue behind untouched (we hope).

The really really good part is that you're right, if the viral coat proteins have the same chemical surface at specific regions called epitopes, then the same antibodies will be able to bind all of them, even if they're different in other places.

Most molecules have several epitopes on them, although sometimes you have to bind most or all of these before a response is raised.

Viruses in the wild beat this by mutating every time they reproduce inside a cell by using error prone replication techniques. After all, if you make a billion particles and only 2% work, you can still infect your next host quite smartly.

That means that two individuals with the same disease, one catching it off the other, might have sufficiently different viral particles that an immunisation against one set of epitopes is ineffective. That's what happens with the common cold.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[October_30th]

After all, if you make a billion particles and only 2% work, you can still infect your next host quite smartly.

Couldn't this be countered by a similar "shotgun" inoculation consisting of billions of dead viruses each with a different structure? If only 2% of them would activate the immune system against the infecting HIV, you'd still get a fighting chance.

Now I know it won't work because otherwise the pharma-giants would already be making money like crazy on it, but still I'd like to know why it won't work.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Is this why (luckily) most virus that are very infective (e.g. a cold virus) are not very damaging and those that are very damaging are not very effective?

Things like the cold virus perhaps don't do much damage because perhaps their replication is very "lossy" - but that makes them much more infective.

Or I could be wrong about this, this is just a theory.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[nounderscores]

Good question. I don't know the answer to that - you'd have to subscribe to the Nature Immunology journal to hear the latest.

My guess would be that it takes lots molecules of the same protein to raise an immune response, and only one viral particle is required to start an infection. A shotgun vaccine might have to include large quantites of protein injected into your blood to work, more than your body could tolorate.

That's only a guess though. A modified version of the idea (like getting a lot of different haptens each bearing one epitope conjugated onto a carrier protein to raise an immune response) may yet work.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Sgt York]

nounder is on the right track. It takes a certain load to trigger an adaptive immune response. The problems with the shotgun approach to vaccination are that

(1) you don't get an overwhelmingly higher concentraion of the effective antigens over the ineffective ones, so the system is not effectively triggered.

(2) Even if it was possible to immunize against 100s of pathogens at once, it wouldn't be desireable. Clonal selection is a great tool the body uses to keep a vast reserve library in storage until needed. Inducing a memory response for certain antigens could remove (or reduce the incidence of) memory cell sets for other antigens. So, with the shotgun, you are now immune to a few hundred antgigens that don't realy pose a threat, while you have now lost your memory cell sets to a dozen types of rhinovirus, rotavirus, and a few strains of influenza (theorectially, and my apologies for the oversimplification).

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[JDevers]

Well, effective from your standpoint (killing the host) or the viruses standpoint (reproducing). No virus "wants" (no intelligence, but you get my point) to kill it's host...but from a human perspective it seems like the "best" viruses are the ones that kill the most people. Rhinoviruses (common cold) are EXTREMELY successful BECAUSE they don't kill the host, not in spite of it. Most viruses that kill the host though are never really transmitted to all that many people though unless a lot of very lucky (or from our perspective, unlucky) things happen. This is why something like Ebola hasn't gotten out of hand, it kills the infected people before they infect anyone outside of a small area.

Numerous studies have shown that when a virus first infects a human it is generally pretty deadly, but over time they adapt to NOT be so deadly. Afterall, the less deadly/less severe the symptoms the more likely the virus will be passed on...simple evolution. Of course, somethings work like HIV which is naturally nearly 100% fatal, but doesn't kill or cause any symptoms to appear for a long time. These would have to be considered very successful viruses as they allow the propagation of both the host species and the virus.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[October_30th]

Ah. That makes sense.

Thanks to both of you.

So, in essence, immunization is out of the question and in the case of an infection one would have to be able to resolve and target one particular HIV virus variation.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[k98sven]

The creation of tools to make bio-machines similar to verilog/VHDL would indeed potentially have grave consequences, but I can't see it going any other way.

If all you have is a hammer..

Sorry, but this analogy is weird. Biology does NOT follow any simple rules of logic. In fact, we don't even know the rules.

A DNA sequence maps to an amino acid sequence, we've got that part pretty well figured out.
The AA sequence maps to a protein or peptide. Right there, we're screwed. There is no ab initio method which accurately predicts protein folding. There are no reliable empirical methods either.

You can't really rely on existing structures for predicting new ones either; Even a single mutation can give you a completely different structure. (Compare an ordinary hemoglobin to a sickle-cell mutated one)

Ok, but just assume we can find out the structure, how do you determine the function of that protein?
Again, there is no method of doing that. There is an entire world of chemistry which can go on. And in the enzymes for which we know the structure and function, there are a huge number in which we still do not know the mechanism. If chemistry was easily predictable, there would be far less for chemists to do!

Given you know the function of a single enzyme, can you predict how it will interact in a complex biological system with millions of other proteins, organic substances and whatnot?

There is no room for making the kind of abstractions which are done in the world of computers and engineering. Things are far more complex, and what is worse, they are not self-contained.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Sgt York]

Immunization against HIV is most certainly not out of the question. It mutates a lot, but there are conserved portions of the virus that do not, and cannot change and still have an infectious virus. We hope to make effective antigens from these portions.

Each HIV has dozens of antigens, each with potentially scores, or even humdreds, of epitopes. Some of these epitopes can only be altered so much before the function they happen to serve is lost (loss of one function of one gene in a bug as streamlined as HIV would make it ineffective). If we can target the small number of functional variations of that antigen or epitope, we could have an effective vaccine. It's just that we haven't found one yet, and people are quite reluctant to be guinea pigs for an HIV vaccine.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[October_30th]

quite reluctant to be guinea pigs for an HIV vaccine.

I can see why that is a problem, but are there other more technical problems? Instrumentation for synthesis and characterization, for instance?

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Sgt York]

It's pretty well known how to analyze the stuff, and synthesis is (normally) quite easily done in various biological systems. It's just that the whole process is very labor intensive, and difficult to automate. The structure and function of individual proteins are analyzed and important regions are identified in silico, then mutated to see if they are required. If they are, they try to find out if there is anyway that the organism can compensate for its loss. If not, they try a vaccine made from it. Historically, each time one has been thought to have been found, it is tested and it fails in culture. Others have proven to be unstable, and others have proven to just be ineffective antigens for some reason or another.

Some have proposed systematically introducing single base pair changes (SSNPs) into each base pair and screening for nonviables. The trouble with this is that it's a dangerous fishing expedition that many scientists are loathe to do. I wouldn't do it; too much risk involved.

HIV is a particullarly bad bug because it infects the very cell that would be the crucial link in the viruses destruction. It's a very strategic mechanism. Furthermore, HIV is more mutation prone than most viruses, and it has therefore developed very good redundancy. We are left with the task of finding the small number of redundancies that natural selection has missed.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Sgt York]

The AA sequence maps to a protein or peptide. Right there, we're screwed. There is no ab initio method which accurately predicts protein folding. There are no reliable empirical methods either.

The tools are actually getting quite good. I just went to a seminar last week where a student here had found that her folding prediction based on these worked out very similar to the X-ray crystalography that was later done. The changes were not very significant, and very close to the tolerances that were in the crystal.

There are ways to determine the function and regulation of a protein, though. None are in silico, and few are simple, but they do exsist. They are done all the time.

I think you're wrong when you say that 'Biology does NOT follow any simple rules of logic'. It does, and we know what most of them are. The problem is that it is a n-body problem. Give an astrophysicist a 200-body gravitational problem and he'll give yo a blank stare. A cell is a billion+ body problem, and there is more than just one interacting force. We know the rules, the system is just too complex to look at effectively. But I agree that the comparison to computers is a weak one. Biological systems are infinitely more complex than computers. Just to take the brain into consideration, there are 6 orders of magnitude more connections in the human brain than in a P4*. And that's just looking at a simple structure (synapse) as a single functional unit; within each synapse are dozens, if not hundreds of different kinds of players. With 100s to 100000s of copies of each player. And beyond that, you have long term regulatory effects,

*avg of 2000 synapses at each CNS neuron, and ~10^11 neurons in the human brain. Gives 10^13 connections total.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Short Circuit]

A shotgun vaccine might have to include large quantites of protein injected into your blood to work, more than your body could tolorate.

You'd have to test everything you put in for toxicity. And randomly generating proteins (by shredding viruses or whatever) sounds like the fastest way to produce something operating the same way Mad Cow disease does...

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Zaak]

Numerous studies have shown that when a virus first infects a human it is generally pretty deadly, but over time they adapt to NOT be so deadly. Afterall, the less deadly/less severe the symptoms the more likely the virus will be passed on...simple evolution.

The reverse also happens, however. If conditions change so that a disease is easily transmitted (cholera during the industrial revolution), it can evolve into very deadly forms.

TTFN

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[JDevers]

Cholera itself isn't really all that dangerous though, the diarrhea/dehydration is what is dangerous in a developing country (or the now industrialized world during the revolution...).

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Two comments on that:
1) Folding predictions sometimes can work - but these are mostly on the basis of sequence homologies - so no real ab initio methods, as the grandparent stated. Even in the case of homology based modelling the accuracy is rather low.
2) We may actually know most of the rules governing biological systems, at least at atomic/molecular resolution. The problem is not only, as you correctly said, that we are dealing with many-body systems. An additional problem is the scale on which the proteins operate. Let us take electrostatics for a simple example. While we know the basic physics of electrostatic interaction, application of these knowledge on modelling electrostatic interactions in proteins suffers two problems. First, we have large problems modelling the dielectricum between two charges in the protein. Second, and perhaps most important, we are dealing with systems on a scale on which quantum mechanics are important - but the systems are far too large for analytical solutions of their wavefunctions.
So all modelling tasks, if they involve folding or simple modelling of protein dynamics or interactions, are necessarily a crude approximation at the moment.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Sgt York]

1) Folding predictions sometimes can work - but these are mostly on the basis of sequence homologies - so no real ab initio methods, as the grandparent stated. Even in the case of homology based modelling the accuracy is rather low.

These do exsist. They are thermodynamically based, and not based on sequence homolgy. And the accuracy is getting a lot better. Like I said, this girl just presented a few weeks ago that her predicted sturcture (based on thermodynamic modeling, not seqence homolgy) was very close to the crystallography that came out. She says she has done modeling on other structures as well to test the validity of the model, but didn't show all the data. These modeling systems are out there and they do work. They need improvement, and for the time being they need crystallography to verify them, but they do work.

As for additional forces (electrostatic, etc), that is what I was referring to when I mentioned "more than one force". As for dielectrics on proteins, this is just another example of large systems. It's easy to figure it out for an alkene with a single hydroxyl on it, but add in a couple of hundred partially charged groups on a peptide backbone and it gets really tough.

I don't know much about how quantum mechanics come into biochemistry; I've never read anything discussing it's effects on folding or activity, other than bond formation. Can QM interactions act over distances beyond the electron shell? I do know that most ligand-protein, protein-protein, etc interactions are mostly governed by electrostatics, though. And charge densities can be predicted once the structure is known.

I'll talk to my friend, and find out when she plans to publish. If it's soon, I'll post a link to the abstract when it comes out.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Dr. GeneMachine]

I'll talk to my friend, and find out when she plans to publish. If it's soon, I'll post a link to the abstract when it comes out.

This would be appreciated. I'm working in the field of molecular dynamics myself. The link you gave in your previous post referred to the group working on the NAMD molecular dynamics package. As far as I know accurate folding modelling on the level of free molecular dynamics has never been successfully done up to now. Would be a great accomplishment if your friend succeeded at this.
Regarding the role of quantum mechanics in folding, there are certainly influences of QM phenomena on structure, dynamics and activity. QM interactions extend farther than the electron shell of single atoms, and govern for example the distribution of bond angles throughout a molecule - one of the major degrees of freedom of a polypeptide chain. This has of course implications for folding and interaction. The actual extent is unclear, though.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Sgt York]

I'll send her an e-mail today. As for the QM effects, I'd be interested in learning a bit more about it. I'm more interested in interactions within and with the lipid bilayer, but the same principles would apply. Do you have any good review articles I could start with?

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Salis]

I'll shuffle into the conversation... :)

There's a guy at Stanford who was able to correctly fold a small protein (80 AAs) by performing _numerous_ MD simulations for small times. There is a small, but non-zero probability of the protein folding within a small time (if the folding process is first order). The guy organized a massive distributed computing project to perform like 100,000 MD simulations of 1 nanosecond or so, along with some intelligent (re)sampling of initial conditions.

Btw, if you're interested in MD simulations of protein-lipid interactions, please check out Himanshu Khandelia/Yiannis Kaznessis of the University of Minnesota (one of my group members). He does MD sims of antimicrobial peptides and their effect on bacterial lipid bilayers.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Anonymous Coward]

Also remember that the human immune system tends to identify HIV innately, no vaccine needed. It's just not good enough in multiple ways, from the strength of the identification (which includes the initial response to weakness even if everything goes well, so this problem compounds) to the "boosting" response.

For example, a fair amount of work was done with gp120 many years ago now. Didn't work. The last decade has shown a lot of improvement, but nothing yet. This is one of the reasons why there is a group that thinks a vaccine will not be available for quite some time. The virus has already circumvented the immune system by its base design as well as its high potential to evolve. Vaccines largely depend on boosting the immune response itself. Even if they find a strong response, the virus evolves quickly. At that point, it becomes a numbers game of multitudes of strong responses countering the evolution of the virus.

If a vaccine is found to be usable, it likely will have a small percentage of protection. Strange as it sounds, in such a case, it will likely be of little use in developed countries and/or more so for high risk populations. Expect Africa and China to be areas that would benefit hugely from a vaccine.

The reason is that you have to counterbalance the ill effects (and cost) of large vaccine distribution to the general population (there are nearly always side effects; do no harm principle) compared to prophylatic drug treatments (for those who know they've been recently exposed, shown quite effective) and the effectiveness of treatments known then (treatments have consistently improved) (as well as the political climate, such as whether disease tracking limitations on HIV/AIDS are lifted (understandably unlikely)).

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Unfortunately, I don't know of any decent review on the subject. But I can give you some publications regarding the role of quantum effects on protein interaction and structure:

• Pichierri, F., 2004
• Xiang et al., 2004
• Schiffer et al., 2003

This should be a good starting point. I can't give you anything regarding membrane environments. As I am working with systems where NMR spectroscopic dynamics data have to be available, I don't get in touch with membrane proteins too much.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[k98sven]

but the systems are far too large for analytical solutions of their wavefunctions.

The only system which can be solved analytically is the hydrogen atom. After that, it turns into a multi-body problem (and a rather nasty one at that, since the electron-electron interaction is not only governed by coulomb repulsion, but also the Pauli exclusion principle) and and there are only approximate solutions.

The big problem is that chemistry, in essence, is a very subtle effect. The effect of chemical bonding on an electron is several orders of magnitude smaller than its total energy. This means that any approximate solution must be very accurate. And the methods of approximation don't scale well.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[4of12]

The problem is that a nuclear weapon needs an enormous number of things to be 'just so' before it'll go bang.

And then it's basically all done. Except waiting for the radioactive dust to clear.

But the Bio Energizer Bunny keeps going and going and going.

A biological organism that can replicate will keep eating and replicating until the world is depleted of food sources, or it becomes a food source for something equally voracious, or it re-evolves into something different.

Humanity has been one of the most significant organisms to cover the globe lately, mostly due to intelligence and social organization. It would be most ironic if that same intelligence and social organization gave rise to a new species, gray goo or whatever, that ultimately displaced humanity.

Re:Designed vs Evolved

[Sgt York]

Just wanted you to know I haven't forgotten about the references for the folding simulation. I sent my friend an email last week, but as it turns out, she is on vacation through this weekend. I'll let you know when I hear from her.

I don't know about the 3rd breast,

[Trigun]

but Realdoll comes close to filling the rest of your requirements, if you substitute the blue hair with pink.

Perfect for the Anime Nerd everywhere.

Re:I don't know about the 3rd breast,

[Anonymous Coward]

We won't ask how you know this!

Re:I don't know about the 3rd breast,

[Trigun]

It was featured on Fark.

Hey, I can't spend all my time here.

Explain it to me

[HarveyBirdman]

Why the geek opbsession with three breasts?

Is it secretly a desire for a third testicle getting projected?

Re:Explain it to me

[Zocalo]

Shame on you; it's from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, specifically Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon VI.

Re:Explain it to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Three breasts? That's odd.

Re:Explain it to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not really sure. Four is much more biologically likely to evolve.

Re:Explain it to me

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, there are so many other design alterations that would be better then just a 3rd breast.
[southpark]like four asses![/southpark]

what do you men plan to do with 3 breasts and 2 hands?

personnally here is a list of alterations i could see working well. (ignoring the whole color issue)
-a couple of extra muscles in the vagina to give it a tighter feel.
-add suction to the different parts (atleast i imagine this would be a good thing...).
-increase the number of nerves in the vagina so that size really doesn't matter, just having anything there will be enough for her. (ego is an important thing to us men)
-a g-spot (er an improvment on their current one)
easy to find spot, press it for a brief time cause orgasim. no foreplay required.
-add something about not needing so much attention when their man is working on something and being ignored for a period of time not causing questions like 'do you still love me?' and 'do i look fat?'
-finer control over the reproductive nature. like requiring a chemical agent to cause fertility. sometimes you want another child, many times you don't, and current methods have either a moderate fail rate or side effects. even if protection works 99% of the time, if you do it only 3 times a week, that is 156 times a year, i'm sure someone can calculate those odds.
-smaller areas of hair growth. only hair growth on their head and other selected areas (i'm more of a shaved/trimmed-pussy man, but i know there is someone out there that those hairy-pussy porns are marketting to...) perhaps another requires chemical agent to grow in spots other then head (or including head?)

but another biotech that would be really sweet is an Anti-BodyOder virus. (see that stinky co-worker who has his own seperatly ventilated office, but rides the same bus as you) or maybe a Bath bacteria (eats dead skin and other misc things you normally have to wash off)

Re:Explain it to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Married With Children once explained the third breast... "On the back, for dancing."

Re:Explain it to me

[rhakka]

what do you men plan to do with 3 breasts and 2 hands?

Top ten things to do with 3 breasts and 2 hands:

10.
9. Smack side breast, watch force transfer between breasts in an organic approximation of a perpetual-motion ball toy.
8. Use center load-bearing breast, outside breasts for stability
7. Push in two outside breasts, watch them force middle breast into a humorous "Breast erection"
6. Frantically twist nipples playing "mad scientist time machine" while laughing maniacally.
5. Make a killing designing exclusive three breast bikini tops with the see/hear/speak no evil monkeys.
4. Open fetish site to profit from thousands of three breast obsessed slashdotters
3. Profit!!!
2. ?????
1. Use your mouth, dipshit.

Re:Explain it to me

[rhakka]

doh, PREVIEW, PREVIEW POSTS before posting.

10. Increase nipple clamp inventory and sales by 50%

Re:Explain it to me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm pretty sure both occur naturally-- very rarely.

Re:Explain it to me

[nmk]

Actually, it makes perfect sense. Sqeeze the left and right one, suck the one in the center. mmmmmmm, that sounds good.

Re:Explain it to me

[HarveyBirdman]

Well, there's also the Total Recall reference, and others.

That doesn't explain the obsession.

Risk with any technology

[macklin01]

On the one hand, that's the inherent risk with any technology as it becomes increasingly accessible and "user-friendly".

On the other hand, are these systems going to be cheap enough that we have to worry about script kiddies? If computers still cost $5000+, I doubt script kiddies would be such a rampant problem on the net. -- Paul

Re:Risk with any technology

[nounderscores]

How much does it cost to connect medical grade solenoid valves and pumps to a serial port of a PC?

Re:Risk with any technology

[kjeldor]

Well, because of Moore's law, these systems will eventually be cheap enough. It's just a matter of time.

Re:Risk with any technology

[Choco-man]

I could weaponize anthrax for $25,000. The US gov't did a study a few years ago indicating that for less than the price of a new car and using off the shelf equipment, one could manufacture enough bio agent to do very significant damage, in a space the size of one's bedroom.

The question isn't will it be cheap enough for everyone to have the ability to do it. It's will it be cheap enough for the crazies to do it, as well as what are the implications of doing it (by crazies or by well thought out researchers).

You better believe that if the crazies could inflict this type of damage for $5000 they'd do it in a heartbeat.

Re:Risk with any technology

[Tackhead]

> Well, because of Moore's law, these systems [medical grade solenoid valves and pumps] will eventually be cheap enough. It's just a matter of time.

Moore's law doesn't apply to every technology. Compare the cost of a unit of performance (kilobyte, megahertz, MFLOP) with the cost of the chip fab used to build the chips that implement the performance.

It's been 35 years -- and I still doubt very much that I could afford to build 1-kilobit DRAMs on 3mm dies cut from homegrown 50mm silicon wafers "from scratch".

Biotech will likely be subject to similar limitations: You're not manipulating information, you're manipulating atoms. The cost of manipulating atoms isn't subject to Moore's Law.

Re:Risk with any technology

[mangu]

On the third hand, if systems become cheap enough, and they will become sooner or later, the white hats will afford them too. We may get enhanced germs, but also enhanced++ immune systems.

What I really fear is government regulation on the technology. We saw in 2001 how someone apparently can produce and release "weaponized" anthrax without getting caught. That person obviously had access to some kind of facility that's out of bounds for the normal hacker. I would feel much safer if I could at least have the same tools as the bad guys.

Even worse is the fact that biological research produces some of the most valuable intellectual property in existence. We may see laws restricting access to research labs based not on the danger of releasing dangerous germs, but on the danger of releasing commercially valuable knowledge.

Re:Risk with any technology

[ndrw]

Doesn't this kind of point to the need to help reduce the number of "crazies?" Wouldn't that lead us to study what makes these "crazies" the way they are? And wouldn't we probably then notice that it's not as simple as "crazy" or not, or good or evil? It seems like we call someone crazy or evil when we don't understand their motive, even though that motive may make perfect sense for someone with a different perspective.

I guess what I'm really getting at is that we have all experienced advanced technology getting cheaper and cheaper, allowing more and more people access to it. The more people who can use the technology, the better chance they will use it for what we would consider evil. Ergo, we must reduce the number of people who would consider using new technologies for evil. To get all political, I would say this would be best done on a global scale by encouraging all nations participation in global governance and reducing the VAST wealth disparities that have been generated between the developed and developing (1st and 3rd worlds?) nations.

So, to wind up my little rant:
International governance and organizations that promote fair trade - good.
Pre-emptive war, slashing aid budgets, and ignoring the UN - bad.

Re:Risk with any technology

[Choco-man]

Understanding someone's motive to mass murder thousands of innocents doesn't make them any less crazy. Their acts define them as crazy, not their motivations. Understanding their motives, while perhaps helpful in reducing or eliminating future acts, does nothing to change the fact that they've earned their title of crazy by past acts.

There were crazies long before preemptive wars and UN, and there will be crazies long after those things have passed.

In fact, some people have no motivation other than the act itself. Wouldn't such irrational behaviour be the defination of crazy?

Re:Risk with any technology

[ndrw]

Understanding someone's motive to mass murder thousands of innocents doesn't make them any less crazy. Their acts define them as crazy, not their motivations. Understanding their motives, while perhaps helpful in reducing or eliminating future acts, does nothing to change the fact that they've earned their title of crazy by past acts.

To play the reductionist, then there's no difference between the murder of someone who ran over your dog and just randomly walking into McD's and shooting someone?

Or, put another way, those responsible for the US's current war in Iraq are crazy because the deaths of thousands have been caused, despite the fact that we had evidence of WMD's (well, or maybe not, but that's beside the point?).

And to be even more "liberal" or whatever, governors whose states allow executions, and don't stay the execution are crazy and guilty of mass murder? Despite the motive of punishment and exacting societies justice?

What I'm getting at is that we in the western world have sanctioned mass murder and devastation based on the motives (whether protection from WMDs or communism), so I don't agree with your argument. I'm not saying there aren't crazy people in the world.. there are, I've met some, but the reality is that there are people who are not crazy in their societies view that we would call crazy, and that is what the US is up against - and the way to defeat it is not by attacking it head on, but by understanding the causes of anger, the depth of inequality, and moving toward a more just system of governance for the world. If the motive is to stop your society from being exterminated, then most of us would consider mass murder to be warranted. I would agree with you though, that if the act itself is the motivation, it's probably the act of a crazy person.

wow, its almost like they read /.

[Anonymous Coward]

/. posters say almost the same thing everytime there is a dna/biotech story.

how is this news?

in other 'news' welders can be used to make bad things.

Re:wow, its almost like they read /.

[millahtime]

in other 'news' welders can be used to make bad things.

Maybe Some Bad Ass things

Dreams fulfilled

[Apocalypse111]

Finally, my dream of having a large-breasted subservient cat-girl sex-drone can be a reality!

Maybe I'm sharing too much with you people...

Re:Dreams fulfilled

[ctishman]

No, I'm pretty sure there's a furry fetishist in all of us.

Re:Dreams fulfilled

[Apocalypse111]

In that case, I think it would be best if we open-sourced this project, get it under GPL, etc.

Anyone out there good at splicing feline/human genes?

Re:Dreams fulfilled

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll see you in line for Catwoman which comes out in a few weeks ;)

Re:Dreams fulfilled

[No Such Agency]

I was with you up until "cat-girl".

Re:Dreams fulfilled

[Apocalypse111]

No problem, when we release the final version you can replace those parts with parts of your choice. Or, if you'd like to get in on the project, you could help us by designing alternative genus mixes or by perfecting the "vanilla" pure-human model.

Re:Dreams fulfilled

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone out there good at splicing feline/human genes?

If they are, they certainly don't have time to talk about it on Slashdot, what with the "experimenting" going on.

And yeah, you know exactly why I put experimenting in quotes.

Re:Dreams fulfilled

[hawkfish]

Maybe I'm sharing too much with you people...

That depends. Since this is /., will you be sharing the source as well?

Re:Dreams fulfilled

[tehcyder]

Species-ist!

Advance of Knowledge cannot be stopped

[Anonymous Coward]

Hackers or no hackers, the progress of science and the advance of the frontiers of knowledge cannot be stopped.

Over a period of time, it is going to get progressively easier to develop synthetic biological agents. I would prefer that the good guys get their hand in before the baddies (terrorists, bio-script kiddies, bio-black hats...). And yeah, hope they also focus on how to contain fallouts from accidental mistakes, experiments gone wrong, bio-script kiddies etc.etc.

no-one is safe

[surreal-maitland]

teen-age biohackers

"yeah, man, last week i hacked into my parents genome while they were sleeping. dude, there's some fucked up shit there. did you know my mom once had the clap?"

"dude, that's nothing. i hacked professor katz the other day. dude, that guy has had *everything*"

Re:no-one is safe

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO, the concern is for those who start messing around with stuff just to "see what happens".

Shouldn't be too long after that for someone to come up with a cookbook of wonderful critters. Better yet, a BioWizard that walks you through the process till you click FINISH, the voila. End of civilization. I bet those new Overlords are gonna be unhappy we screwed up their new underlings.

The random lets see what happens stuff is the scariest.

Re:no-one is safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess what nature's been doing for millions of years with that "evolution" thing.

Re:no-one is safe

[Anonymous Coward]

If people think Goatse links are bad on websites, imagine when some genetic hacker creates a real life Goatse virus! You'll be tricked into drinking something that will cause widening effects...

Re:no-one is safe

[October_30th]

The random lets see what happens stuff is the scariest.

That's what evolution is all about: crawling towards imperfection.

With science we can at least accelerate and control the process to some extent.

Licence required?

[Ced_Ex]

Yeah... I'm sure that's going to be a big deterrent for those that are creating malicious bioware...

Tracing oligonuecleotides is pretty hard to do, considering a simple biology lab could extract/synthesize them with relative ease. Plus, transfering these bioware could be a easy as sneezing, are they going to trace down everyone with a cold?

They already has a difficult time with SARS, this isn't going to be any easier.

Re:Licence required?

[gr8_phk]

A license will not prevent mistakes. People will not be able to predict all implications of a given modification to a biological system. Most programmers can't predict all consequences of a software change (bugs, ever heard of em?) and humans wrote that software. I'm not saying no one can ever predict the results accurately, but even the professionals make mistakes sometimes.

Re:Licence required?

[aqkiva]

having heard part of that panel at the Synthetic Biology 1.0 conference, the article is a bit misleading in the respect of licensing. Church suggested the licensing of the technology, such as DNA synthesis. The design of systems shouldn't be licensed. Anyone can and should be encouraged to design systems, but if it requires a license to actually build the system, then it becomes easier to control what gets released. Currently any lab could in theory synthesize oligos but few actually do it themselves. If we require licensing for DNA synthesis technologies and make unlicensed oligo synthesizers illegal, then personal oligo synthesizers will no longer be sold on ebay.

Re:Licence required?

[Sgt York]

I was wondering the same thing. Making an oligo is nowhere near as difficult as making weapons grade plutonium. If you have the time, patience, access to raw materials (they are not currently regulated) and training, you can literally do it in your kitchen.

Besides, it's easy to monitor a nuclear pile. If a gram is missing, then there is a gram out there. If a picogram of a plasimd is missing, it could potentially be amplified into milligrams in a matter of days.

The upside is that in order to put these together, you will need a large variety of "parts"; one or two won't help. Think about building a computer with just screws and an empty case. Furthermore, this equipment is quite expensive and bulky. We don't have to worry about script kiddies doing this just yet.

Re:Licence required?

[Dr. GeneMachine]

Making an oligo is simple - designing the sequence so that this oligo carries the information you want and ultimately leads to a certain phenotype if cloned and expressed is quite difficult. Depending on the phenotype you want to create, I'd say it may be more difficult than making weapons grade plutonium in many cases. It requires less sophisticated technology, but vastly greater knowledge in many cases.

Re:Licence required?

[Sgt York]

designing the sequence so that this oligo carries the information you want and ultimately leads to a certain phenotype is quite difficult

Certainly, in cases where neither is known. But if your take a CMV promoter, put it in front of GFP, and slap into HEK293, what happens? Granted, that's a simple example, but as these things are discovered they are published.

If I understand correctly, the idea behind this technology is to go ahead and do the characterization & sequencing steps, giving parts that have known activities & regulation. That takes away the difficult part. To use the tired computer metaphor, you don't need to know how to design a hard drive to build a computer. Right now, you have to know how to characterize genes & bash promoters to build a construct. This technology seeks to remove that difficulty. This is a good thing, it's a great tool. It just needs to be kept from the wrong people.

Re:Licence required?

[Dr. GeneMachine]

But if your take a CMV promoter, put it in front of GFP, and slap into HEK293, what happens?

Ok - but this is really simple. On this level one might design some dangerous concepts - say, by transferring enterotoxin genes or other pathogenicity factors to formerly harmless bacteria. This might cause some problems, but it's far from the easy design of some "superbug" posing a serious threat. If you wanted to design something that is utmost pathogenic, evades the immune system and is resistant to all known antibiotics while being spread rapidly through the air, this "modular approach" won't take you too far. You have to take into account the interactions between the single modules, which is vastly more complicated.

Re:Licence required?

[Sgt York]

You have to take into account the interactions between the single modules, which is vastly more complicated.

Damn, you'd need to know a lot more than THAT ;).

I'm not so concerned with some superbug as I am with an idiot that causes some localized problem (some bacterium that outcompetes local soil bugs due to some immunity and causes drops in crop yeilds, for instance). This could be damaging not so much from an actual direct impact as it would be from the Frankenstein effect.

I am a biochemist, and work with a lot of (too much, IMHO) molecular biology, so this kind of technology looks very, very cool to me. So don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to it at all. I just think it should be controlled, so that idiots don't get their hands on it to make the next round of GM wheat or corn, and then screws it up with poor containment and bad experimental design. Make a system even an idiot can use, and idiots will use it.

pwn3d!

[Zorilla]

You got pwn3d! Now you have two cocks!

Great, the world gets better every day.

Re:pwn3d!

[proj_2501]

i don't think that would be as big a problem as say, four asses

Re:pwn3d!

[liquidsin]

Maybe we could give Darl four asses and lock him in a cell with the guy with two cocks...

Re:pwn3d!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, just wait until people get turned into zombies. Spammers use zombie networks to email you today - imagine if they could hack your spouse so that they constantly tried to persuade you to get penis enlarging pills...

Re:pwn3d!

[Tackhead]

> Maybe we could give Darl four asses and lock him in a cell with the guy with two cocks...

Naw, give the guy five cocks. And tell him Darl's pants fit like a glove.

Re:pwn3d!

[mangu]

imagine if they could hack your spouse so that they constantly tried to persuade you to get penis enlarging pills...

Well, I suppose that, by then, penis elargement pills will actually work. And, of course, women will want vagina enlargement pills. Think of the resulting arms race...

Re:pwn3d!

[Anonymous Coward]

i don't think that would be as big a problem as say, four asses

I've always thought that "Four Assed Monkey" would be a decent name for a new ska band.

The biggest hack is in: +1, Patriotic

[Anonymous Coward]

The White House

Why does President Cheney overlook Israel's WMD?

Thanks in advance,
Kilgore Trout

Re:The biggest hack is in: +1, Patriotic

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Israel is not run by religious madmen hell-bent on the destruction of those of different religion or ethnicity... oh wait! Nevermind.

Your friend,
Axel Schmidt from Old Europe

Script-Kiddies will program a virus

[Anonymous Coward]

...that lets the word "p0wned!" appear on the forehead of whoever gets infected with it.

Re:Script-Kiddies will program a virus

[Anonymous Coward]

Real script kiddies would never say "p0wned". it's either "pwned" or "0wned", not both.

Biohacking is not easy

[DamonHD]

Many years ago I did some work in a genetics lab and made some recombinants (variations on the E.coli pCNB plasmid FWIW), and accidentally swallowed a billion or so of one of them (but that's a different story B^>).

The point was that it was slow, laborious work with lots of hardware support (agar, incubators, restriction enzymes, etc) needed and a danger of getting various sorts of stuff on yourself. And we're still (sadly) profoundly ignorant of what really makes bugs tick...

So the first DNA-script-kiddie is still as far off as the nanotech grey-goo horror IMHO.

Damon

Re:Biohacking is not easy

[Madcapjack]

I did simple genetic recombination in a highschool lab. Of course, I had a little help from the proclivities of E. coli...

in any case, not so hard

Re:Biohacking is not easy

[nounderscores]

There's a big difference between that fun expreiment of changing F- E.Coli into F+ where the bacteria help you to infect them with the plasmid in question, to making your own plasmid of arbitary sequence, putting it into the bacteria, screening them to see if your plasmid took, checking if they have the properties you want...

Re:Biohacking is not easy

[Biogenesis]

Maybe it's far off but how long ago was it that computers were just starting to be used and required vast amounts of storage space and money? It's only by ~40-50 years man, if the same rapid development in technology comes about with this it could happen in your lifetime.

That is of course assuming rapid technological advancement...But even so it could still happen in future generations. Remember: you don't inherit the Earth from your parents but borrow it from your children.

Re:Biohacking is not easy

[Sgt York]

You SWALLOWED your bugs? That makes me feel a lot better about my lab accidents.

The thing is, though, that these blocks make that whole process a lot easier. You can make LB & agar plates with stuff in the grocery store. Incubators can be made or bought with no difficulty, electrophoresis boxes can be rigged up with stuff from the hardware store. The restriction enzymes are a bit expensive, but anyone can call up NEB or Promega and buy some with a credit card, and have it sent to their home (I've done it before, purchasing was taking too damn long).

That said, script kiddies probably won't mess with this. I doubt we have to worry about some kid in his mom's basement making uber-anthrax. The odds of finding a lethal combination randomly are pretty damn high. It also is a big jump from "I will wipe your computer's hard drive!/Deny access to your web server" to "I'm going to KILL YOU!"

Defenses

[nounderscores]

Good points: anything that we design that is made of protein could be countered by our immune response.

After all the point of having a lot of different kinds of Major Histocompatibility Complex alleles in the population is that somebody in the population will have the right combination of MHC genes to be a responder to an arbitary infection and so survive to breed.

There's another way to fix this, and Eric Drexler proposed it for nanomachines in Engines of Creation: Wrap the fabrication facility in a blanket of incendary explosives many times more massive than the fabrication facility. If things go sideways, light it up and the tiny nasties are burned back into carbondioxide before they can escape.

Re:Defenses

[amliebsch]

You mean like the HIV?

Re:Defenses

[October_30th]

Which reminds me of this.

Given such a massive breeding ground for HIV virii, I wonder what are the chances of HIV mutating into an airborne version.

Re:Defenses

[nounderscores]

I remember reading in the news that one way african communities deal with ebola infection is that when one town discovers it has ebola, it sets up roadblocks of dry wood on all the approaches to the town and sets them alight. Then they go back to their homes to see if they live or die.

Now I'm not advocating to do this with humans, but if a robotic factory happened to produce something that you couldn't eventually immunise against (and the HIV vaccines are still showing promise, there is a mixture of the difficulty of the science problems and politics of various nations that promotes hiv spread) then you should have some kind of contingency plan to contain the whole facility. Permanently.

Re:Defenses

[nounderscores]

I'll assume that your massive breeding ground for HIV is "All of Humanity."

The one thing about HIV is that it's very succeptible to oxidation. Any kind of oxidising agent, like bleach or strong disinfectants or even some mouthwashes, will render a puddle of HIV infected blood safe to clean up within minutes. Faster if you mix it, but please dont.

To get airborne, the HIV would first need to borrow some viral trickery from other diseases to reproduce in the lungs and mucous membranes as well as its usual home of in the lymphatic system, and then once expelled on a person's breath it would need a new coat to protect it from the toxic levels of oxygen in the air.

All this, while keeping the size of the genome down to a managable length so you can stuff it into its protein coat.

If you can engineer both those capabilities into HIV, you would have Airborne AIDS. Quite a puzzle though.

Re:Defenses

[amliebsch]

I was responding to parents statement that "anything that we design that is made of protein could be countered by our immune response." Pointing out HIV (or some engineered strain thereof) could not be countered by our immune response.

Re:Defenses

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

After all the point of having a lot of different kinds of Major Histocompatibility Complex alleles in the population is that somebody in the population will have the right combination of MHC genes to be a responder to an arbitary infection and so survive to breed.

The flip side of this is that many people are prone to getting autoimmune disease as a consequence of getting certain infections. Crohn's disease is likely triggered by a bacteria.

Certain HLA antigens are bad to have. Such as HLA B27 which makes one a sitting duck for autoimmune disease. People with that can get Reiter's syndrome (a form of autoimmune arthritis) from something as simple as food poisoning. As bad as HLA B27 sounds, it is likely to provide protection against something, much like sickle cell trait protects against malaria.

Biological diversity means there is less likelyhood of a large scale wipeout of the population, but also that there will be many people who get diseases due to things like having a bad HLA antigen (such as B27).

Any protection from viruses that HLA antigens could provide likely could be circumvented, as HLA antigens are not secret at all. They are use in diagnosing autoimmune disease, matching organ transplants, etc.

It is roughly equivalent to a computer virus writer having access to all the patterns that an anti-virus program is designed to detect.

Re:Defenses

[nounderscores]

HIV beats the immune response by killing the cells that are supposed to kill cells infected by it. We still have an immune response to HIV we make antibodies against it. People are tested to see if they are "antibody positive" because there are so many more antibodies present relative to actual viral particles. Even though the immune response is at the moment futile, it does slow down the disease relative to a person who has no immune system at all.

To mount an effective immune response, you'd have to be able to come up with a vaccine that pre-empts HIV infection and prevents it from killing those T-Cells. The HIV vaccine is still being persued.

We can only hope that engineered diseases would at least give us the human immune system as toe hold in the fight against them.

If the engineered disease happened to be caused by microscopic particles made of diamond that no protease could cut, we would be truly in trouble.

for perspective, consider that asbestos dust can never be expelled from the lungs and can never be degraded, because it is chemically and physically able to defeat the body's normal ways of clearing pulmonary debris. If antibodies could deactivate it and then macrophages could just eat it, the way antibodies and macrophages sometimes deal with proten based threats, it wouldn't be a problem.

Re:Defenses

[Fulcrum of Evil]

The flip side of this is that many people are prone to getting autoimmune disease as a consequence of getting certain infections. Crohn's disease is likely triggered by a bacteria.

So, once we get a bit better at this, what's to stop us from engineering a better immune system? It'd be pretty nice to be able to recognize that a particular allergic response is unnecessary and suppress it with no more effort than it takes to breathe.

Re:Defenses

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Even though the immune response is at the moment futile, it does slow down the disease relative to a person who has no immune system at all.

If someone with no immune system got infected with HIV, what would HIV use to reproduce?

If the engineered disease happened to be caused by microscopic particles made of diamond that no protease could cut, we would be truly in trouble.

I doubt it. If a bacterial/viral infection used diamond fragmnets, how would it reproduce? Presumably the human body can't make that stuff.

Re:Defenses

[Anonymous Coward]

So, once we get a bit better at this, what's to stop us from engineering a better immune system? It'd be pretty nice to be able to recognize that a particular allergic response is unnecessary and suppress it with no more effort than it takes to breathe.

Personally, I'm betting that it'll end up being a zero-sum game... optimizing to fend off one disease will leave you vulnerable to another disease.

Re:Defenses

[hoggoth]

> what's to stop us from engineering a better immune system?

Good luck. We can't even stop SPAM.

Re:Defenses

[nounderscores]

If somebody who was born with no immune system was infected with HIV, the virus would probably feast on the miroglia, which are important support cells in the brain.

If a nanite was infecting you, the eric drexler idea is that carbon atoms are guided into covalent bonds by mechanical rather than chemical processes. Hence his whole "dimonds for dirt" concept. This allows you to spend more energy more efficiently synthesising compounds, because you rely on controlled trajectories, rather than brownian motion or loosely constrained molecules that biological life relies on so heavily.

Re:Outlaw Science!

[surreal-maitland]

too bad they died so much younger . . . or is it?

It will never be the same again..

[RancidLM]

Person:"WOW is that a New ARM!" Me:" YA.. this new version of PHP Rocks"

Re:It will never be the same again..

[Idarubicin]

Person:"WOW is that a New ARM!"

You: YA...

Person: Is it the ARM 1020E, or the 1022?

You: ...

Or think of the big brother aspects...

[Jack William Bell]

I have some links here on Trufen about using virii that reduce the effects of illegal drugs.

Re:Or think of the big brother aspects...

[drinkypoo]

Maybe we should come up with some that reduce the effects of legal drugs. For those too lazy to follow the link: 85,000 deaths directly related to consumption of alcohol, 16,653 deaths from alcohol-related automobile collisions, and 17,000 deaths from illicit drugs. That includes deaths from drug-related automobile incidents, and illnesses contracted during the use of illegal drugs.

Re:Or think of the big brother aspects...

[Fulcrum of Evil]

Meanwhile, somewhere in America, a pothead is crossbreeding Marijuana, Monsanto corn, and Kudzu. The end result will be poison resistant pot plants that grow several feet per week.

Re:Or think of the big brother aspects...

[Daniel Dvorkin]

I want a genetically engineered virus that permanently removes any memory of the word "virii" from the brains of all human beings. ;)

I've said it before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Start mercilessly executing 'script kiddies' and others who maliciously do this crap. Problem goes away. You may think I'm joking, but I'm not. The stakes are getting higher. There is no room for feeling sorry for the guilty parties involved in these types of actions.

Re:I've said it before...

[Ag3nt]

You do realize that most of the hacking done in the world is done by people under the age of 20 right? Hence the term "script kiddie." And the reason people mercilessly execute them is because the are annoying and only cause problems. Ever try talking to one on IRC?

Oh great now I have to worry about...

[greymond]

"BTD's" as well as STD's

Mod Parent up, Please:)

[crache]

If I had mod points I would.

Biohackers Parts List: +2, Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

can be found at Biohacking For Educational Purposes Only

Bioethically yours,
Kilgore Trout

Re:Outlaw Science!

[October_30th]

hunter gatherers have more free time

I thought just finding enough food for the tribe was a full-time job. Defending the tribe against the neighbours counts as overtime.

and are generally happier than us

Sure. When you're freezing in a mud hut, your kid is dying of a rotten tooth and your pregnant wife is starving because you didn't manage to kill any game today, you don't have the time to wallow in angst and self-loathing over the pointlessness of human life.

Isn't this expected?

[leperkuhn]

I would think that there is a simple formula... #1. Someone figures out how to do something #2. Someone does it better #3. People kill each other Anytime you create a technology that is powerful, it will get abused. duh

Re:Isn't this expected?

[Bearpaw]

I would think that there is a simple formula... #1. Someone figures out how to do something #2. Someone does it better #3. People kill each other

You forgot #4: Someone says, "Big deal, this isn't new."

Re:Isn't this expected?

[leperkuhn]

And also the scientist throwing up his hands, crying, screaming, "I didn't mean for this to happen!"

If it was so easy...

[kabocox]

If it was so much easier than building nuclear bombs, why haven't we gone alot father in that field than we have?

I agree once you have a virus or some time of self spreading destructive agent, it is easier to spread than tradional bombs. Building tailored geneic machines will be like every other process. It won't be very profitable until some big break through makes it cheaper for certain apps. Then we'd carelessly use the tech for 5-10 years without any problems then one day we'd have an accident and the news folks would be all over it. There would be all sorts of safe guards so that nothing like that could happen again. Every six months or so their would be a new special report about how that tech could have been better managed and what not.

Re:If it was so easy...

[egarland]

Because the techonology and techniques are all recently developed. Just because something is old, doesn't mean it's not monumentally complicated. Much of the US's most amazing engineering happened from the 40's through the 60's. Much of what we do now is simple by comparison.

Re:If it was so easy...

[cbelt3]

I agree, but you have to look at the basic technology. Nuclear weapon's main issue is getting your hands on enough of the fissionable material. Doing that requires breeder reactors (not a small thing), massive chemical processing facilities, etc. (Until we figure out how to use Geobacter (Sorry about the soul sucking registration) to do it for us) It used to be very very tough to generate a custom IC. Hell, it used to be very very tough to generate a computer program. And get it to communicate (anyone remember Kermit ?). Biotech is experiencing the kind of wider quantuum leaps that IC technologies did in the 70's. As it continues to accelerate, and the tools get cheaper and easier to use, we'll definitely start seeing more oopses. My grandkids will learn whole new ways of dealing with crap like this. And nope, there's no way to 'stop it'. Science and development are driven by human curiosity and ingenuity.

Prey

[techstar25]

Reminds me of a book I just finished, Prey, by Micheal Crichton. I that book he brings up the issue of "hackers" releasing a biological virus created using nanotechnology that would behave like a computer virus, attacking people and self-replicating. If you think Microsoft is slow to release patches, imagine how long it would take the CDC to immunize everybody from a brand new man-made virus. Interesting stuff...good book, by the way. Better than Jurassic Park.

Re:Prey

[Anonymous Coward]

no, actually, it wasn't better. after jurassic park and sphere got made into movies...in some scenes i could tell he was picturing the movie that would be made while writing. it was awful. and so predictable too.

Re:Prey

[Anonymous Coward]

The book had a good precept, but a stupid ending - very disappointing. Oh look... the nanobots have evolved to mimic humans... />.

Hackers releasing a hax0red virus is nothing new, the government does it all the time. Thinking that skript kiddies will be able to hax0r the genome is silly though, pharmaceuticals have been around for a long time but I am not hacking up my own drugs. But just wait until the corporations get their hands on the tech - then you can get geneticaly altered to double your muscle mass for only $99.99 and never be fat again!

Re:Prey

[Anonymous Coward]

A few months ago I saw a copy of 'Prey' sitting on my uncle's coffee table. As the science department chair and an AP biology teacher at a large and respected public school, I consider him a relatively intelligent guy.

I just didn't have the heart to tell him that the day before, my boss, the head of Cornell University's Nanobiotechnology Center, had given that book to a graduating student... as a joke.

The disconnect between the reality and the public conception of biological research is disgusting and even somewhat scary. It's just something we in the field have to live with and make light of.

Re:Prey

[IBX]

the physics in Prey was all wrong. If you want a swarm of microbes chasing people around (before eating them) the individual machines would have to be insect-sized (if they were smaller, microbe-like, the air drag would be so huge that they would need a nuclear power source to fly fast).

Re:Prey

[Idarubicin]

Reminds me of a book I just finished, Prey, by Micheal Crichton. I that book he brings up the issue of "hackers" releasing a biological virus created using nanotechnology that would behave like a computer virus, attacking people and self-replicating.

It's a clever concept, but man does Crichton's execution suck. His earlier work is vastly superior, both from a technical standpoint, and from the standpoint of quality of writing. Jurassic Park had a few plot holes, but he's been getting sloppier ever since. He's also abandoned any concern for scientific credibility.

Prey demonstrates ignorance in roughly equal parts of the details of biology, physics, chemistry, and computer science.

He's just banging out books as fast as he can in hope that another one gets bought by a movie studio.

Re:Prey

[Dogsbody_D]

Prey is one of the worst books I have ever read.

Dont forget the human-interest subplot:

Women who have jobs are evil harpies that will destroy their men.

Never been so disappointed.

I'm not that worried

[Anonymous Coward]

This kind of threat is why the Europeans are so freaked out by GMO foods. In any event, genetic engineering will change our lives in ways that we can't predict. Life today is quite different from what the futurists were predicting in the 1950's. Just go down to the library and drag out some old editions of Popular Science.

Creating mass havoc is usually harder than it looks. Consider the terrorists that used nerve gas in the Tokyo subway. If you had asked me, I would have guessed that letting off nerve gas in such a location would have killed thousands. It didn't quite work that way. I don't think we have to worry about bio-hackers for a long time.

Re:I'm not that worried

[Monkelectric]

Score one for Europe! Who the fuck wants to find out if monsanto (the most evil company in the world, literally) has been responsible with GMOs by dying? You know they've poisioned whole counties in the US, right?

Re:I'm not that worried

[ImprovOmega]

The Sarin nerve gas attack may only have killed 12 people, but it left some 6000 injured. That would seem to me to cause plenty of havoc. This is perhaps the real nature of the danger of bio-hacking. I mean it may not be fatal to have a different strain of the flu going around each week, but imagine the disruption it would cause!

Re:I'm not that worried

[Sgt York]

Poisoned? Reference please.

They released some grain that could potentially cause a severe allergic reaction in a small portion of the people sensitive to it, but that is not poisoning. IIRC, it never reached the general population anyway, due to filter controls.

Worse accidental releases of antigen like that have happened with spills at grain processing plants. Tainted meat is more dangerous than the stuff released in those scares, and people take those in stride now.

DISCLAIMER: I don't like monsato. If you don't believe me, take a look at my posting history. I think their business practices are shady, at BEST. And that's being very nice. I just don't like it when people throw stuff out there like that to inflame people.

Re:I'm not that worried

[Anonymous Coward]

No war gas has EVER been a WMD. Nasty, but they aren't WMD.

Re:I'm not that worried

[aled]

The sarin gas they used isn't an alive, self replicating, evoluting organism, isn't it? Imagine the possibilities. Like '28 days later'.

Re:I'm not that worried

[grandbonheur]

Consider the terrorists that used nerve gas in the Tokyo subway...

OTOH, you have the 16,000 or so very efficiently gassed to death that unlovely evening in Bhopal. An accident, but an inspiration to aspiring DIY-WMDers everywhere, I'm sure... The danger in this day and age isn't that the jerks of the planet will create a weapon - it's that they've noticed lately our civilization is made out of frickin' weapons.

That said, I have no idea specifically what biomedical-type hackers could find to 'sploit. IANABT.

Re:I'm not that worried

[Cryect]

Heh and your link seems to suggest 8,000 died not 16,000. Not that it wasn't a horrible tragedy just making note your source disagrees with what you quoted.

Re:I'm not that worried

[XO]

Depends on how much mass havoc you really want to create.

But, really, I think a large number of rather ordinary people would somehow manage to not panic when faced with something truly mindboggling, like that.

Or like 9/11. Or the Madrid attacks.

Re:I'm not that worried

[Monkelectric]

Read , and be informed.

Re:I'm not that worried

[Sgt York]

Ah, so you're talking about business practice and not direct GM effects. I assumed (my apologies) that you were talking about the mixing of GM grains. According to that link, you were talking about industrial waste.

This does not surprise me. I have always been of the opinion that Monsato is not run honestly (again, being nice). I just hate it that they are to be the first into the GM business. It's good technology, and good science. Monsato is applying bad business to it, though.

Re:I'm not that worried

[Monkelectric]

yea, what I was trying to say was something more like "false in one, false in all" (whats latin for that again?). They've already fucked up big time and done incredible evil, why should we trust them we now? And it seems we agree

Re:I'm not that worried

[Sgt York]

We probably do. My opinion is that the GM technology is quite good and safe (though improvement is always good), it's just too bad that it's being impletmented by people that are jerks.

As scary as this sounds,

[Hanna's Goblin Toys]

hasn't Bush already implemented legislation to address this? I know he stopped the cell stem threat...

Re:As scary as this sounds,

[Anonymous Coward]

Congrats, that was a very clever reducto ad absurdum

Re:As scary as this sounds,

[TEMM]

Sarcasm?

Re:Outlaw Science!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the #1 reason we should outlaw science and start living off the land again. Seriously, study anthrapology, hunter gatherers have more free time and are generally happier than us.

Except, of course, for the rampant starvation and the fact that there is no way to support anywhere near the current population base. Oh, and all of us people with major diseases that are controllable by medicine will die.

Gotta love that 50% infant mortality rate (or was it higher?)

Oh, and I hope you're very happy in your 30 year lifespan. if you're one of the lucky ones.

I gotta learn to not feed the troll.

Re:Outlaw Science!

[Ag3nt]

I am really going to resist the urge to flame you right now. If we outlawed science, life expectancies would plummet, so would the nationwide health average, people would NOT be happier when they have to suffer immensly from a common cold, or do you think they will enjoy the risk of dying from the flu? If we outlawed science, the other nations that still practice and use it, would conquer the country and there would be nothing we could do to stop it. Can you imagine a world, where it would be illegal to wear glasses or to explain why an apple falls to the ground?

Give smallpox to script kiddies

[SunPin]

Seriously. Tell them it's 1337 and they'll be famous. After a little while... no more script kiddies.

Re:Give smallpox to script kiddies

[Ag3nt]

Um, sure why not start an outbreak of smallpox again after it was sucessfully wiped out in the US. That makes perfect sense, kill everyone who comes in contact with the script kiddies too.

Re:Give smallpox to script kiddies

[SunPin]

Who will be in contact will them?

Re:Give smallpox to script kiddies

[Ag3nt]

I think that they have to leave their house sometime don't they? Plus any family they have, depending on the kiddie's age. Then, when he dies he will have to be cremated at an intensely high temperature in order to kill the smallpox. If he was buried, the people at the funeral home would come in contact with him, plus all the funeral attendees. And don't say there won't be any, there are ALWAYS friends or family.

Re:Give smallpox to script kiddies

[Bearpaw]

Seriously. Tell them it's 1337 and they'll be famous. After a little while... no more script kiddies.

And after a little while more, no more script kiddie families. And no more script kiddie neighbors. And so on ...

"Seriously.".

Re:Give smallpox to script kiddies

[Jeremy Erwin]

Eventually, some script kiddie will come along and extrapolate from this paper. Containing the resulting outbreak, while not completely impossible will be most difficult

Re:Outlaw Science!

[PktLoss]

I'm glad you resisted the urge so well, perhapps your energy would have been better spent recognizing a joke.

Re:Sudan

[Anonymous Coward]

You're most welcome. That's how us lefties over here like to bash America: whatever the US does, it's always wrong.

Good luck!

Your friend,
Alex Schmidt from Old Europe

Re:Outlaw Science!

[Ag3nt]

Wow! That sure was a funny joke! Are you sure, because I could swear right now its marked as a Troll.

Books? Try "Oryx and Crake"

[heironymouscoward]

By Margaret Atwood.

http://www.oryxandcrake.co.uk/

Good story about a group of biohackers building a new future. Lots of "eat your face off" viruses. And blue penises.

SFW.

Gene Wars

[Anonymous Coward]

Let the Gene Wars begin

Mod Up - Funny

[Anonymous Coward]

Best Post Evah!

Re:Sudan

[foidulus]

was wondering if my fellow lefties can help me out here. As you are aware, there is currently a huge humanitarian crisis in Sudan. Some would even call it genocide. I have no problem with that. But what I can't seem to figure out is how the United States is to blame, as we usually are at fault.
Nobody is saying the US is at fault, people are complaining because the US(well the reason of the day anyway) says that it invaded Iraq to help the Iraqi people out from a brutal dictator. Saddam was a kitten compared to what is going on in Sudan, and yet the US does nothing.
I really think that the reason the US is doing nothing is because the action in Iraq has stretched US military strength to the breaking point, and if something REALLY bad does happen(even worse than Sudan) then the US is kind of screwed
Yeah, I'm gonna burn karma on this one, but it had to be said.

Hack to benefit society

[Bandit0013]

Anytime the subject has the urge to type 'lol' they wet their pants and forget who they are for half an hour.

Aren't we going a bit too far with script kids?

[sweet 'n sour]

I know it's therapeutic to attribute "Pure Evil" to script kiddies, but come on now.. It's one thing to cause mass mayhem on the internet.. quite another to cause mass murder. I'd be really surprised if script kiddies had that kind of carnage in them... Especially when they wouldn't be able to protect themselves from their own creation.

I'd be much more worried about the non-hacker, well funded, professional genetic researcher.

This is more a problem for Monsanto

[DrJAKing]

Monsanto and co have this flawed business model where they sequence gene X into organism Y and patent the resulting GMO. They do something mean like make it infertile, so they can charge peasant farmers for new seeds every year. As thought they were the only people who could ever muck about with genes! Wonder how long their window of profitability will last before gene splicing machines are available to the peasants.

Re:This is more a problem for Monsanto

[nounderscores]

Damn good point. The expensive licencing scheme under the guise of "protecting you from bioterror" could be used to crush the fledgeling attempts of poor countries to enter the biotech game. "Nothing to see here, we're just decommissioning the illegal bioweapons lab... No it held dangerous organisms, not cheap easy to grow grain."

Democracy Necessarily Harmful?

[Anonymous Coward]

With these dangerous technologies coming online it might unfortuantly become necessary that the world be controlled, hopefully computerized, by some sort of dictator.

I think the problem people have with dictators is that they are arbritary and usually power hungery. Would you mind living in a 'dictatorship' run by an infinintly fair computer consciousness? I might consider trying it...

I wouldn't read too far into this...

[spacerodent]

While on the surface it may seem possible to do all this in the next 20-30 years hte author seems to be forgetting all the equipment needed to handle and work with these type of organisms. As these are not typical consumer goods I wouldn't expect to see the prices come down like computer components either. I have no doubt a few cases will occur but it certainly won't be like with computer virsues where all you need is a computer and a compiler of some kind.

Re:I wouldn't read too far into this...

[aqkiva]

go to ebay and search for DNA synthesizer. Anyone can buy one for less than the price of many computers.

Re:I wouldn't read too far into this...

[danudwary]

Plus, speaking as someone who does biological and genetic engineering in a research lab, why would anybody spend multiple thousands of dollars on the medical-grade equipment, plasticware, reagents, biological media, etc to do it in your basement, when just about any university will remit your tuition and pay you a perfectly nice stipend to go to grad school if you really want to, and let you use that equipment for free. In fact I had a friend in grad school who had the same deal and he didn't even have a bachelor's degree (and had been working on an English degree!). Hell you don't even need to be able to speak English at most schools I've been to.

Re:I wouldn't read too far into this...

[militiaMan]

I'm interested. Please sign me up. Seriously. I have a BSCS, U.S. citizen, speak English, and love learning. I am willing to relocate anywhere in the World. If you can hook me up I am there. Please define "nice stipend". To me nice stipend would be enough to pay for an apartment, food, auto, electricity, and insurance (the essentials). I know that UNT where I graduated does not have such opportunities, and it is big a fed grant school now. Please provide me with info. Oh. The answer your original question. Some people do not like to be beholden to others at all cost. So, one might spend all that money to protect individualism. Like those that think metal detectors used by the feds is illegal search and seizure without a warrant.

Re:I wouldn't read too far into this...

[danudwary]

Well, I went to Johns Hopkins, made ~$16,000 at the time. Not much, agreed, but Baltimore is a super-cheap place to live (at one point was paying $195 a month for rent splitting a house), and they pay health insurance on top of that. And interest-free student loans are easy to get at that stage. This was about three years ago. One great way to get into biology is to leverage your skills on a problem to learn new ones. Fields get fuzzier in grad school. I went in with a chemistry degree and spent most of my day doing molecular biology, ostensibly to learn the chemical abilities of a biological molecule. I ended up publishing a paper (Journal of Molecular Biology 2002 Oct 25;323(3):585-98), on a poorly designed, overly complicated Perl script- the first one I ever wrote (the biochemical principles behind it were sound.) The program was slow, and I should have, in hindsight, gone over to the CS department and found a good coder who could have really saved me some time.

So, if you're really interested, look into CS grad school, and seek out a biochemical problem that needs (or would be aided by) a computational solution. It's definitely possible.

No more h4xx0rz

[Anonymous Coward]

The new 1337 title:
p0xx0rz

Usage:
roffl3 yuo ahve ben p0xxor3d!!11
i r teh p0xx0rz

Meaning:
I have just infected you with a virulent strain of mega-clap using a script I found that combines anthrax, syphillis, cooties, and halitosis.

Re:No more h4xx0rz

[Anonymous Coward]

The new 1337 title:
p0xx0rz

Less is more. You should have stopped here.

Licensing is the answer?

[james_in_denver]

The article states "Biological synthesis becomes fairly easy once the basic building blocks -- the oligonucleotides -- have been built, so the regulation of the whole process could be centered on licensing and tracking them."

And this has worked soooo well in preventing virii in the computing world (can you say Microsoft?).

The article goes on to say Tom Knight, who directs MIT's BioBrick wet lab in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. "There is an opportunity here because the oligonucleotides contain a lot of information which can be used to track and monitor what is being done with them."

Well, that assumes of course, that the development of potentially new and nasty little buggers is under your control

And finally

"Even if we don't have bioterrorists and teen-age biohackers, we will still create things that do not have the properties that we thought they would," Church said.

and will these "things" go on to further adapt and mutate on their own?....Hmmm, can you say Darwin?

Looping Slashdot, at a theatre near you!

[Anonymous Coward]

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
int x;

for (x=1; x>0; x++)
{
cout << "Fr0st T0ast ";
}

return 0;
}

forget your tin foil hat....

[millahtime]

Now we will all need biosuits with built in tin foil hats.

Open letter to Burt Rutan:

[chiph]

Burt -

No offense, but could you hurry up some? I need to get away from our gene pool because someone is about to piss in it.

I figure living on the moon is my best protection, so the sooner we get cheap spaceflight, the better.

Thanks.
Chip H.

Is this news?

[aled]

I realized this by myself at least 10 years ago thinking about computer virus and genetic advances. I don't remember now but there must be much older examples in SCIFI. I remember a Star Trek NG episode where a cure for a cold accidentally mutated the entire crew.

great now they can rule the world

[TLouden]

but there will be nothing left to rule. I on the other hand am moving to mars

Site slashdotted? Or poorly managed?

[mark-t]

It seems that one can only view the first page of the article. Clicking on the link at the bottom that should take one to the second page of the article results in the message that the article requested cannot be accessed, and clicking on "Print Article" from the first page only results in a completely blank page.

Although it might just be a Mozilla thing... that would make me even more irate... people that produce web content that only works in IE should be hurt... badly, IMO.

Re:Site slashdotted? Or poorly managed?

[grandbonheur]

IE is a WMD.

What The World Needs

[Master of Transhuman]

is me with a controllable Ebola.

(I don't mean *I* have Ebola, morons.)

Bring it on!

And "script kiddies with smallpox" will just wipe themselves out. No great loss.

This is just more future tech scare-mongering a la Bill Joy.

most are not that stupid/crazy

[TheRain]

I think that people, even ignorant adolecent teens, would not be so willing to mess with biotech in this manner. By the time this technology is so commonly available, I'm sure the majority of the population will already have some appreciation for the dangers and unpredictability of what can happen. The way this article reads, biological hacking could easily cause the extinction of the human race... and how many people would be willing to let that happen.

Then again, it could only take one screwball to cause a lot of damage.

Something else to think about is targeted killing/infection. Bioengineered to target a specific race or set of people with certain traits. Sadly, as the human race has progressed very far technologically we have not progressed much in regards to prejudice.

Re:Sudan

[Ignignot]

Maybe the US is doing nothing because it isn't their job to fix everyone else's problems. You'd like to have American soldiers die to save some people in Sudan? Their job is to protect the United States citizens, not protect Sudanese. Before someone responds "WHAT ABOUT IRAQ??" I think the US shouldn't have done anything there either. Not in the job description. A better question is why hasn't the UN deployed more of their own forces there.

Maybe not news, but it's topical....

[LondonLawyer]

Maybe you didn't catch the Wired article a week or so back:

http://www.wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,64040,0 0. html?tw=wn_6culthead

I have to say, messing with biology is to my mind not the sort of thing I can see teenager doing in their bedrooms though.

Re:Maybe not news, but it's topical....

[aled]

Why not? Not as we do it know but I can see in a few years some chemical kit that you can connect to your computer and some kind off high level language or graphical tool to instruct it. The key problem is understanding how DNA works. I imagine it's at machine code level and that we will be able to define abstract constructs to simplify it's understanding. Then you only need to enhance the manipulation technology and you get a Home DNA Maker Kit for Kids 12+.

Re:Sudan

[foidulus]

Heh, well just remember if the US was only interested in it's own affairs, Mexico would control Texas and California, Native Americans would still rule most of the midwest, Cuba would be a Spanish colony, and Canada may very well have been a province of Cuba. If you look at American history, America has done nothing but get involved in affairs people though it had no business getting involved in.... something to think about.

Already happened with SARS/Coronavirus

[xanthines-R-yummy]

I got news for ya: It's already happened!

This guy at Vanderbilt Univ (I'll spare him the /. effect and keep his name anonymous) works on coronavirus, ie SARS, and has been working to creat a vaccine. The only problem, is that his vaccines frequently create worse diseases. Don't worry, these were all animal models with strains somewhat harmless to humans. I went to lecture by this guy on the problems of combatting SARS where he freely admitted that it didn't look a vaccine was going to be easy or quick to develop.

Of course, based on the information above I'm sure a lot of you can guess who his. Oh, come on! Just guess!

zergling dept ??

[markan18]

Does it mean one might be able to create the zerg!! And IIRC, the zerg were created in Starcraft, they did not exist in the first place.

I can't wait to see hordes of ultralisk, lurkers and mutalisk rushing the pentagon.

Quote

[punyhumanpromo]

"script-kiddies with smallpox"

Actually, this is something I've been in favour of for a long time, but why stop with script kiddies, what about spammers, Nigerian Scammers and Kelly Osbourne?

Re:Quote

[IBX]

these DNA-script kiddies, sitting all night behind their little small-poxes: I bet they are running pirated Windows on them too.

Promote Diversity

[blueZhift]

The danger posed by the relative ease of engineering new biological agents makes a strong argument for promoting genomic diversity in human beings. It is this diversity that makes it less likely that any particularly nasty bug is going to wipe out the human race. And indeed, this diversity often gives us clues to eventual cures for various diseases.

Unfortunately, people often want the same thing or whatever is popular in the media. With genetic engineering, we could see a reduction in genomic variability as parents decide they want designer babies. We're already seeing an imbalance in the male to female ratio as sex selection becomes more and more viable an option.

So dear /.ers, what can you do about this? Well, hmmm, MATE WITH SOMEONE DIFFERENT TODAY! Oops, forgot where I was, nevermind...

Re:Promote Diversity

[DigiShaman]

The people in China in India want boys over girls. This is VERY BAD because as they grow old enough to want a mate, men will literally fight for a female. Wars are started over the simple means to procreate. Always has been, always will be.

Forbidden fruit?

[lawpoop]

How about an apple with THC in it? Or say, maybe dandelions of lawn grass?

Whoops

[Ratfactor]

accidental or deliberate creation of pathogenic biological components.

Sorry folks, that's the last time I leave the milk out while on vacation. Promise.

Twelve Monkeys

[Baldrson]

A Harvard genetics professor says...

Looking at the picture of Prof. George Church -- the aforementioned Harvard geneticist, one is struck by the resemblance with the guy Terry Gilliam cast as the "environmentalist" genetic engineer synthesized a pathogen to kill all humans in The Twelve Monkeys.

George Church is probably one of the least likely geneticists to hop on a world-wide jet tour to deliver a misanthropic virus he's synthesized.

The problem with all this isn't so much the creation of new, deadly pandemics -- nature does a good enough job of that. The real problem is the way amplification of international transport has been behind almost every major pandemic from the Plague which followed on the heels of the Mongol Empire's wide stretch -- to the pandemic of the first World War.

Globalization has already given us the AIDS epidemic and the SARS scare. It may have given us autism's recent explosive growth and a lot more we don't even know about.

No one is being held liable for this increased risk imposed on an unaware population -- this despite the fact even identifiable corporations have externalized the costs of their risk-taking on the public and walked away with higher corporate profits as a result. Not even Ralph Nader has guts to touch this.

Re:Twelve Monkeys

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even Ralph Nader has guts to touch this.

What the heck could you do about it? Eliminate air travel? Close all the borders? Ain't gonna happen, unless a really bad pandemic is already in progress.

Re:Twelve Monkeys

[Anonymous Coward]

What could be required is that companies involved in movement of people accross borders purchase insurance policies so that when something goes wrong the public isn't the one left holding the bag.

Now, I suspect it _would_ rather rapidly become expensive to get such a policy for someone from say certain parts of the middle east-but that is what corporate responsibility is about isn't it?

Cheap immigrant labor is only cheap if you don't factor in all the costs. I agree with the author, the folks that profited from internation trade/tourism should compensate AIDS victims world wide for the mess corporate greed created.

Re:Twelve Monkeys

[Baldrson]

companies involved in movement of people accross borders purchase insurance policies

That's generally right-thinking.

Now, I suspect it _would_ rather rapidly become expensive to get such a policy

The problem is this:

Attributing fault is difficult when you have the equivalent of a riot going on. Right now all the corporations that are profiting from transport of organic materials, including humans, are in a situation where they can all point the finger at everyone but themselves if a pandemic breaks out.

Riots are notoriously difficult to deal with in a moderate fashion such as you suggest. Something more akin to crowd control for corporations is in order.

It wouldn't be Smallpox

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be 5ma11p0x!

'dictatorship' run by an infinintly fair computer

[DiniZuli]

But who controls the computer then? - who programmed it and who's doing the updates and patching?

Today some psyko could ad some biohazardeous stuff to the groundwater with great ease - nobody has done that yet - likewise I don't think psykos will create vira etc. in the future.
Also, when these chips become available to you and me, I think safety precautions will be huge - Maybe you can't use the chip without hooking up to some central computer who follows your experiments and tests for biohazards...

Mod above post up

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a question or point that lots of people will be looking at and JDevers is correct. A virus that kills quickly would quickly be removed from circulation. If HIV killed the host in a matter of days it never would have spread like it has. It poses such a problem because it kills so slowly and may not even be noticed for long periods of time. Common colds don't even keep people from going to work, school, or around town though and as such are constantly circulating.

Why is this even permitted?

[hwestiii]

I'm no right wing ideologue or luddite, but I can't imagine why anyone thinks genetic engineering is really a good idea.

Two main propositions inform my views on this:

1 - a biological agent is by definition alive and able to reproduce. If someone creates something bad, you can't just wait for its half-life for it to degrade. Its out there making new copies of itself.

2 - it took billions of years and all the fine tuning that follows with that to get where we are today. What makes anyone think, we'll be able to do a better job churning this stuff out of a lab? We've made a hash of the world just by sitting around and consuming. God help us when we start tinkering with it.

Genetic engineering is pinnacle of scientific hubris. I think it has the potential to be far more distructive than nukyalur weapons because it doesn't just take the blunt object approach to destruction, it goes right into the nuts and bolts. Perhaps there really are things we weren't meant to mess with.

Re:Why is this even permitted?

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one, welcome our genetically surperior overlords.

Re:Why is this even permitted?

[Kris Thalamus]

1 - a biological agent is by definition alive and able to reproduce. If someone creates something bad, you can't just wait for its half-life for it to degrade. Its out there making new copies of itself.

Humanity isn't the only danger that threatens us. Pathogens arise from random mutations as well. Banning genetic engineering will senselessly limit our ability to create vaccines that could protect us from pathogens and biological weapons.

2 - it took billions of years and all the fine tuning that follows with that to get where we are today. What makes anyone think, we'll be able to do a better job churning this stuff out of a lab? We've made a hash of the world just by sitting around and consuming. God help us when we start tinkering with it

We tinker with our DNA every time we reproduce. Sexual selection is just a primitive and haphazardous form of genetic engineering. Every day, babies with a novel genetic sequence are born. Gene splicing involves intentionally selecting the desired genes rather than randomly slapping them together the traditional way.

This will never happen, guys.

[Beardo the Bearded]

Our bodies can take care of themselves. We've had tens of thousands of years to develop an amazing immune system. Bio-weapons won't end up killing a significant portion of the population. (Unless you're dead, then I suppose it's significant to you.)

Weaponized smallpox was released from a Soviet lab in the 80s. Only 17 people died. SARS killed about 200 people worldwide IIRC. By comparison, almost 3000 people die in the US every year from toilet-related injuries; 20 000 children worldwide starve to death every year. Even the plague didn't kill us all, and we didn't have any medicines, any way to track the disease, or have basic concepts of hygenie. OUr bodies are really, really tough, and we've had a lot of time to get really tough on disease.

As for chemical weapons, the reason places like the US and UK stopped using them after WWI was not to be altrustic, but to save money. On average, it takes about 1 ton of materials to kill someone with a chemical weapon like mustard gas. It takes a lot less lead mass to kill someone if you put in in a gun.

Finally, I've done work in the biomatics field. (Not much, mind you; it was a co-op workterm.) You can't run the sims on your desktop P4 or the future P7 9.8 TGHz. (Or Athlon 9800000+)It takes a real grunty supercomputer a very, very, very long time to run the simulations. How long? 10 us of data takes about 2 minutes for an alanine molecule. Alanine is very small as far as molecules go; it's one of the 4 key blocks for DNA. Multiply that by the vast number of blocks of DNA you'd have to manipulate to get any sort of virus, and you'd be more likely to die of old age than from a genetically engineered viral weapon.

By the way, when or if any bio-weapons show up, I'll be the guy not wearing the mask.

Re:This will never happen, guys.

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with you

just remember though, the public's understand of disease is impossible to combat. If Johnny has a sniffle, they take him to a doctor to get cured. People obsess over making sure there aren't any germs on ANYTHING. People cook food until its practically burnt, all the while ignoring mounds of evidence that cooked food causes cancer and a host of other diseases. I have even personally run experiments where I feed one group uncooked food, and to the other I feed the same exact food, only cooked... The group fed uncooked food always lives longer. I know people who have seen this same experiment performed yet they still believe cooking food is necessary to kill bacteria.

Anyway, good luck fighting some of these ridiculous notions out there.

Re:This will never happen, guys.

[maximilln]

I agree with your principles, however the following technical information is incorrect:

Alanine is very small as far as molecules go; it's one of the 4 key blocks for DNA

Alanine (which _is_ a simple molecule) is one of the 21 most common amino acids used to make peptides, enzymes, and proteins.

You were thinking of Adenine (which is _not_ a simple molecule) which is one of the four DNA base pairs. Every sequence of three DNA bases translates into one amino acid at the ribosome.

For reference:

[subtillus]

Just so as you know, for the would be biohackers, the immune system is ridiculously complex and any slashdot posting, mine included could never do it justice.
This is *the* book for beginning Immunology, written by Janeway who recently passed away:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0815 33642X/ qid=1089304040/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-7999783-80057 25

We've known about humoral immunity and mutation for a very long time. Nowadays the hotness is considered by many to be in the field of molecular mimicry and toll-like receptors...

Imagine you're a virus, Cell X can blow up your house when his neighbour is in mode 1, however, Cell X's neighbour, Cell Y, has a communication system with cells X, A, B (and so on...) which can be highjacked to change cell Y's mood and make Cell Y change Cell X into mode 2.

Mimic the communication peptides of important pathways, spew those about into the environment, highjack the immune system to make itself weak in fighting you. Eventually, the immune system gets the hang of killing you, but by that time, you're already in 5 more people who will in turn infect 5 more people and so on...

TLRs are pattern recognition proteins that have "learned" over the eons "When you see molecular pattern X, don't listen to anything else anyone says because X is bad news. Go into Kill mode!". The huge thrust of this is that, sometimes Vaccines have low immunogenicity, or the wrong type of immunogenicity, if you can attach some PAMPs (pathogen assosiated molecular pattern) then these PAMP-r (the TLR) will make the cell respond appropriately.

This is all of course, grossly simplified, but none the less appreciably interesting.

Expect to see a lot of this stuff in the future.

Re:Outlaw Science!

[lawpoop]

The 30 year average is for males. Leading cause of death: homicide!

But on the other hand, 2-3 hours a day to fulfill your daily needs ain't bad. Quality of life vs. quantity?

Starvation was probably not a big issue. That's what happens when you have a population dependant on a single food source, like a staple crop, and a high population density that goes along with farming. Hunter gatherers have much more food options ( over 40 species of edible animals in one square mile of Ohio, not counting the thousands of plants ).

Also about the diseases, the very nasty communicable crowd diseases are associated with cities and domesticated animals. They tend to vanish quickly, absent those conditions.

The thing to really worry about as a hunter gather is the neighbors.

A government's version of skript kiddies?

[Tackhead]

> I'd be much more worried about the non-hacker, well funded, professional genetic researcher.

Speaking of which, does anyone remember the rumored biowarfare projects from South Africa during the apartheid years? The genome hadn't been mapped at the time, and they didn't have the technology to go that far, but if the apartheid system had survived until today, I wonder how far they'd have gotten.

(For anyone who doesn't remember the rumors: Yes, the project was the obvious one.)

IMNSHO We can't stuff knowledge back in the box.

[Wardish]

If you've seen some of my prior writings you may already know my opinions, as always I encourage replies and responses here or in private email, and if anyone believes this is a troll feel free to mark it and/or say so.

In short:
I think there are basically 2 competing concepts on how to handle this and similar problems.
1. Heavily limit access to information, research, and experimentation.
2. Free and open access to information, active support for open research and experimentation.

I believe:
The danger from nano/bio technologies is real.
The dangerous time extends from now until the technology is mature.
Restrictions to slow or halt this technology increases the danger period.
Terrorist types are actively pursuing this technology.
Terrorists gain more from increased time than from access to open research.
Restrictions reduce the pool of skills and ideas available to deal with the danger.

In more detail:
As the subject line suggests, I don't believe we can shove this back in the box. In addition I don't believe that trying to limit or control the technology and it's distribution is going to be successful. While that process was affective (debatably as to how effective though) in limiting nuclear technology IMO because nuclear technologies require a large and very specialized heavy industrial base which in turn also required budgets that limited serious work to national sized organizations.

This isn't true for bio/nano tech. Much of this work can and is being done on budgets that are easily in the realm of small companies, and even many individuals. Certainly within the grasp of those organizations we fear will be using it to harm us.

Simply put, I believe that the knowledge is out there already. I believe that the more organized terrorist type groups are likely already pursuing these technologies actively.

Now, if we pursue a path of limiting knowledge the results as I see them are 2 fold. 1. We will slow development of bio/nano malware (malevolent hard/soft/squishy ware) that the terrorist types are undoubtedly already working on. 2. We will stop development in all but a few officially sanctioned arena's. We will reduce by orders of magnitude the number of people who are skilled in working with these technologies. Additionally we will slow by a huge degree the overall advance of these technologies.

I'm in agreement with those who believe that these technologies are extremely dangerous. My personal belief is we, as a intelligent species, have approximately a 40% chance of surviving the next 50 years. Where I disagree with many is that I believe those odds get much worse if we try to put heavy limits on knowledge, research, and experimentation. I believe that the more open and openly supported this technology is the more the odds improve.

My reasoning is based on the following. I believe that if we start restricting knowledge dissemination, research, and experimentation then we will lose most of those who would have the skills, knowledge, and ideas that will be required to defend against bio/nano malware that will be released sooner or later. I don't think that any amount or level of restriction will stop organizations that are intent on using this to harm others. My belief is that all it will accomplish is to slow the development and ensure that the process's that are used by those working on malware are unique and only understood by the malware creators.

In addition I believe that the danger is limited to the short period of time before this technology matures. I believe that giving malware developers more time is much more dangerous than the advantage they would get from open knowledge sources. The basis for this is my belief that a mature bio/nano technology will provide both personal and environmental monitors and defenses that will reduce the danger to a minimal scope and severity.

William Gibson saw this coming...

[idontgno]

The brains of Hosaka's best research people. Plague, he was whispering, my businessman, plague and fever and death....

Someone had reprogrammed the DNA synthesizer, he said. The thing was there for the overnight construction of just the right macromolecule. With its in-built computer and its custom software. Expensive, Sandii. But not as expensive as you turned out to be for Hosaka.

I hope you got a good price from Maas.

The diskette in my hand. Rain on the river. I knew, but I couldn't face it. I put the code for that meningial virus back into your purse and lay down beside you.

So Moenner died, along with other Hosaka researchers. Including Hiroshi. Chedanne suffered permanent brain damage. Hiroshi hadn't worried about contamination. The proteins he punched for were harmless. So the synthesizer hummed to itself all night long building a virus to the specifications of Maas Biolabs GmbH. Maas. Small, fast, ruthless -- All Edge.

New Rose Hotel

Much much harder than that...

[hung_himself]

Genetics is neither quick nor easy even if you know what you are doing and have lots of time and resources. There is essentially no hope of anything with a complicated set of changes surviving let alone do what you want it to do. That's why modifications are basically one gene at time - mostly one mutation at a time.

The hacker analogy is having a billion lines of disassembled code which you barely understand. Random changes are just going to cause the program to crash. Geneticists basically only know the NOP command (ah those were the days using MACSBUG...). If you know where the branch point for a key subroutine was you might be able to shut it down or have it run another subroutine but that is still very difficult to do without crashing everything. Changing it to do something completely different is very very difficult since you really have no idea what the code does. Add to that the fact that you need a lab and weeks or months to introduce your changes and you can appreciate how far-fetched these fears of amateur bio-hackers are.

Nuclear Industry?

[Anonymous Coward]

The situation is similar to the nuclear industry, where difficult-to-produce fissionable material is closely tracked and stored in secure facilities. Something similar could be done for oligonucleotide production and distribution.

Odd example to use, the nuclear industry. Consider that they've lost a ton of material and the database they were using was silently reducing the numbers they did have on quantities of material.

I think the bottom line is that any sort of technological development increases the power people can wield while at the same time making it easier to use that power.

Kind of scary to think about potential licensing. Once it's in place for one technology it becomes much easier to apply to others, like computers. I'm surprised they haven't instated reading licenses yet to prevent people from reading military training manuals or chemistry textbooks.

Good idea!

[Anonymous Coward]

just great: script-kiddies with smallpox

Let's give all the script-kiddies smallpox, maybe they will kill themselves off and everyone can live a little easier.

Just a thought,
Ahigumboo

Lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Dull, predictable, "yeah anyone who's read any sci-fi work by any author is not exactly stunned at this news"... On the other hand, "from the Zergling dept" brings a smile of amusement to my face.

...and the battle cry went out:

[Anonymous Coward]

H4X0RZ TEH GENOME!!!1!111

Re:...and the battle cry went out:

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anybody read the short story 0wnz0red?

It's a bit different than this story but talks about hacking ones own body.
I found it to be an interesting read.

Correction...

[mulescent]

Alanine is very small as far as molecules go; it's one of the 4 key blocks for DNA

alanine is, in fact, an amino acid. the four building blocks of dna are cytidine, guanosine, thymidine, and adenosine. its also worth mentioning that doing in silico molecular dynamics simulations (which is what the original poster describes, i think) is not the same as doing genetic engineering. genetic engineering is the process of cutting, pasting, and changing dna sequences to produce novel functional characteristics. this does not require a computer at all. instead, a reasonably well-equipped laboratory is what is needed. Bio-scriptkiddies are _never_ going to become a threat. unlike computers, which are sufficiently useful for everyone to have (and thus for everyone's kids to use for hacking), the tools required to do basic genetic manipulations (centrifuge, storage systems, enzyme sets, bacterial incubators, electrophoresis setups) are both expensive and _not_ something the average person would ever buy.

bioterrorism is a real threat, but to carry it through it would (and likely will always) require a reasonably well-funded set of individuals with at least some background in experimental science.

Viral replication is generally accurate

[bradbury]

Actually the last statement is incorrect.

The common cold is caused by Rhinoviruses which are a member of the family of picornaviridae (RNA viruses). The problem with rhinoviruses is that there are over 100 serotypes (sub-types) of the virus that have evolved over time. You do gain immunity to an individual serotype but you have would have to catch 1 cold a year for 100+ years before you were immune to them all. I can verify this -- I visited Russia a lot over a period of 5+ years. Whenever I went there initially I always got sick. But after several years I was able to go to Russia and return without that occuring. I presume this was because I gradually built up an immunity to all of the rhinovirus serotypes found in Russia but not in the U.S.

Rhinoviruses do change over time but they do it by recombination (swapping genome fragments) to create new serotypes not by using sloppy replication. It should be kept in mind that viral replication (of non-DNA viruses) involves very simple replication strategy. The viruses do not have at their disposal all of the repair proteins (120+) that are found in mammalian DNA replication & repair. So their genomes will vary somewhat over time -- but not vary *that* significantly because a successful virus wants to make more successful (identical) viruses.

Influenza (flu) on the other hand is a multi-chromosome virus -- it evolves by swapping chromosomes with influenza coming from other species -- human flu usually varies due to recombination of chromosomes between human, chicken/duck and pig influenza variants (commonly kept in close proximity in China).

It is only retroviruses (e.g. HIV) that have a really sloppy replication protein and mutate at a very high rate.

[This is based on my training in microbiology as well as some quick checks in "Fields Virology".]

Robert

GMOs Are Our Salvation, Ignore The Luddite-Lobby

[Vagary]

Forget biological WMDs, we have been under attack by chemical WMDs for decades. GMO food is the only reasonable* way to reduce pesticide use, which is actually causing health problems right now, as opposed to the vague danger of GMOs. Ingestion of weird DNA does nothing but entertain your stomach acids, so the only potential health threat is that GMOs may produce weird chemicals -- but surely they won't be as bad as the franken-pollutents in our environment right now!

* I'd like to believe the claims that organic food can feed the world, but it's an extraordinary claim and I have yet to see even weak evidence.

Darwin Award

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh great, just great: script-kiddies with smallpox

It may just be what we need. They are script-kiddies so chances are, they have no clue how to deal with viruses and infect themselves, thus, sparing us from those evil script-kiddies.

Re:Darwin Award

[KjetilK]

Yup. I have often said that the difficulty of getting WMDs is not producing them, it is surviving the production, and not to speak of, not killing your own forces if you use them... WMDs are dangerous, you know.... :-)

OTOH, I wouldn't want to clean up the mess afterwards....

Quote approximation

[V_drive]

Sorry I can't remember the exact quote, but I think this is close:

[Al Bundy]: A man can have dreams...like that a spaceship will land in the back yard and a woman with three hooters will come out
[someone else]: Three?
[Al Bundy]: Yeah, one in the back for slow dancing

I want do-it-yourself life extention etc.

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one, would like to see the development of nano/biotechnology that would enable you to fix yourself up (life extention), as you get older because, face it, medical systems everywhere are running out of money treating people as they age, and also, look at all the people in the United States that can't afford any medical care (and are faced with massive debt if their kid breaks thier arm)...besides, look at the benefits, with really advanced AI and nanotech, youu could handle most medical issues yourself, the hospitals wouldn't be so busy using ancient medical technology like they do now...people simply won't get old (check out the latest discovery, they found a new gene that they think controls aging: http://www.lef.org/news/LefDailyNews.htm?NewsID=76 6&Section=AGING ) I think that it's short sighted to let all these ignorant terrorists determin what we can do and what we can't...sure, biotech/nano couuld be a problem, to solve it, we have no choice but to put really massve $ and resources into it's research (like I mean on the scale of the apollo mmon project or the manhattin project) because script kiddies and terrorists are going to use this technology soon for their own amusment and there is nothing you can do about it...also, just the other day, india said that it wants a crash program to develop nanowepons against it's enemies (read pakastan and china)...so we can't sit and fart around like we did with 911, we had better ramp up that nantech/biotech research budgets now..

The spam was right!

[V_drive]

Maybe now there really will be websites that can En1argE Y0 Ur PeN1$

Total Recall...

[edsonmedina]

... also had a 3 breasted whore

Death by snu-snu

[Anonymous Coward]

just be glad you can still walk properly

It's called: death by snu-snu.

Re:Death by snu-snu

[NarrMaster]

They died of broken Pelvic Bones.

There's a difference....

[Tony]

If I owned a chip fab plant, and I built the meanest, most dangerous computer in the world, all I'd have is a single, evil computer. Which is damned cool, don't get me wrong.

If I built a single replicating evil germ, though, I could potentially have an army of billions of mind-controlling bacteria that obey my every command. Those bacteria would replicate and spread throughout the population until, on a pre-programmed evening, while watching a re-run of the Jerry Sienfeld "Frogger" episode, everyone turns into my personal zombie-slave!

Just you wait.

Microsoft is a poor example and alarmist.

[twitter]

Quote the atricle:

The continuing problems the Internet is experiencing with computer viruses that are released secretly give some indication of the problems that synthesized self-replicating systems pose.

techstar25 echos:

If you think Microsoft is slow to release patches, imagine how long it would take the CDC to immunize everybody from a brand new man-made virus.

This is extremely misleading and alarmist. The Microsoft Monopol has been compared fairly to monoculture virus propagation. 90% of the world's personal computers use M$ and M$'s lazy closed source development model insures that each version mostly contains the same code. Flipping the analogy around is preposterous. Biology is diverse in ways that have no coding or even linguistic analogies.

I doubt men will be able to match Nature's power and script kiddies won't come close. Nature itself is constantly working to create pathogens. Men can harness natural selection through traditional breeding. Each new tool makes breeding more powerful, but it is unlikely that any breeding project can match the scale of ordinary natural selection. Governments may be dangerous, but script kiddies will mainly be a threat to themselves. I'm far more worried about drug resistant strains evolving under the missuse of anti-biotics.

Andromida Strains, Petro-plagues, comet dust and man made viruses are good science fiction but I'm not quaking in my boots about it.

Re:Microsoft is a poor example and alarmist.

[Anonymous Coward]

Moderators: Please note that "twitter" is a known fanatical psycophant whose obnoxious offtopic rants are legend here on Slashdot. It doesn't matter what the topic is, he'll find a way to scrape in some pointless Microsoft bashing. While nobody expects us to love Microsoft in any way, his particularly tepid style of calling anyone he replies to "troll" or "liar" or "fanboy" because he happens to disagree with whatever they're saying is well documented and should not be rewarded. If anything, twitter is the type of person that should not be part of the open source/free software community. He is an anathema to all that is good about free software.

I'm posting this so that you (the moderator) have some context to consider twitter and not mod him up whenever he posts his filler preformatted rants about installing Knoppix or whatever that unfortunately get him karma every single time and allow him to continue posting his trademark toxic crap (read on) day in and day out. You may consider this a troll - I consider it community service. And I ain't kidding.

If you're a /. subscriber, I invite you to look through some of his posting history. I guarantee that you'll be hard pressed to find someone that is more "out there" than twitter. You'll also probably notice he's got quite an AC following. Don't just read his posts, make sure you go through the replies.

To get an idea of what I'm talking about, check this post out. I mean, this is an article about email disclaimers, right? The parent of the post is complaining about the ads in the linked page and so on, and twitter actually goes off on a rant to blame it on Microsoft and recommend Lynx. WTF?

Here's another. In this post twitter not only calls the OP a troll but attempts to "tell it like it is" while making some vague argument about "GNU". Yes, if you're confused, you're not alone. The reply (modded +4) proceeds to simply destroy his bogus argument. You will notice he did not reply. This is what some people call "drive-by advocacy". A sort of I'll just leave you with my thoughts here and move on to the next flamebait kind of deal. In fact, he almost never replies because he knows that his fanatical arguments simply do not hold up to any sort of discussion. It's not that he's chosen the wrong cause - he's just going at it in a completely wrong way.

More? Just read though this post and the subsequent replies. I guess this stands on its own. Or these two. Or this one.

Still not convinced? This is what twitter considers "humour" while going about his daily "M$" routine.

More? Bad spelling in astounding conspiracy theories, more offtopic FUD and uninformed "I'm right, look at me" rants, promptly proven wrong. Worse even, twitter wants to be RMS, apparently (that first one is a winner). I mean,

Re:Microsoft is a poor example and alarmist.

[Anonymous Coward]

I cannot believe someone so retarded could make it successfully to adulthood (though I might be overestimating you).

Your posts are so stupid and pointless. You're a waste of oxygen if I ever came across one. I mean, this:

M$'s lazy closed source development model

Is just amazing. You take something that is completely offtopic and manage to turn it into a dumb flame. Why do you change the subject title like that? Are you just fucked up in the head? "Alarmist"? "Lazy"? Oh, and the "M$" thing is just fancyful. I mean, did you come up with that all by yourself? It's very funny.

Where the fuck do you people come from. Please go away.

Re:Microsoft is a poor example and alarmist.

[Anonymous Coward]

keep wasting your time fanboy!

Re:Microsoft is a poor example and alarmist.

[Idarubicin]

This is extremely misleading and alarmist. The Microsoft Monopol has been compared fairly to monoculture virus propagation. 90% of the world's personal computers use M$ and M$'s lazy closed source development model insures that each version mostly contains the same code. Flipping the analogy around is preposterous. Biology is diverse in ways that have no coding or even linguistic analogies.

Are you nuts? Life is very much a monoculture, in some ways. You think Microsoft is in trouble because versions of software reuse code? The DNA that codes for you overlaps better than 95% with closely related primate species. If you look at some of the proteins in e. coli, they're carried forward right up to human beings. The important domains (parts of the protein) can have 80% or better homology (similar structure) between the two species, with still better than 50% identity (identical amino acids.)

There is only one disease that we have managed to eradicate--smallpox--and one where we're close: polio. We have a hell of a time with trying to eliminate diseases because many are able to cross whole species barriers. (Yes, there's usually the odd individual with some mutation that confers immunity, but such individuals represent a vanishingly small portion of the population in most cases.) Ebola probably has some primate reservoir in the wild. Rabies affects just about all mammals. Influenza is carried in birds. Birds! It's like having a computer virus that ran under DOS, but spreads happily to Windows XP.

Is your DNA identical to that of the person next to you? Of course not. Is it damn similar? Yeah. Are the two of you vulnerable to the same diseases? Most likely, yes. We all have immune systems that work in roughly the same way. Though not identical, there are an awful lot of common vulnerabilities.

I doubt men will be able to match Nature's power and script kiddies won't come close. Nature itself is constantly working to create pathogens.

Nature isn't some malevolent force that is doing its level best to kill us all. It's a blind process driven by selection. Viruses that replicate successfully carry on, viruses that can't--don't. Particularly nasty viruses tend to disappear in short order--if they kill all their victims too quickly, then there's nobody left to carry and spread the virus. If someone has one of the Ebola variants, then you know it in a few days, and the victim is in no condition to go spreading the illness around. Often a mutant form of the virus will emerge that is less virulent--longer incubation times, more moderate symptoms. (This has been observed with syphilis and cholera, to name a few). There is some evidence that DNA from ancient viruses has actually been incorporated into our own genome.

You want a new disease? Take an animal virus that doesn't affect humans. Modify its protein coat so that it can bind to human cells. Cackle maniacally. It might take some testing, and you'd have to be a little bit inventive in your choices, but you'd have a homemade pathogen that could infect 90% of the population. Alternately something like a carefully retuned smallpox could do a lot of us in. It's a bit of a stretch right now to suggest that a script kiddie could do it, but it's within the reach of technically proficient graduate students.

biomachine TTL

[theCat]

Mr. Church is right, people will be able to "code" whatever they want. But if that's so, then it's because the fabs automate a lot of the base sequencing and assembly. And if that's the case, then simply have the machines *always* write in some RNA/DNA sequences as unintended introns that enforce a simple TTL concept. Not sure what that would be, could be any of:

-- some sequences are more abundant than the rest, and these code for self-destruct proteins (perhaps enzymes) that slowly accumulate;
-- some sequences code for something inert, similar to plastic, that gradually accumulate and eventually mechnically destroy the biomachine;
-- the genetic code has regions that are chemically reactive to something else that is being created (perhaps an inhibitor protein) and eventually the genetic code is tained and slowly denatured;
-- Have a small sequence where a protein is created which, when abundant enough, stimulates creation of itself. A positive feedback race condition is set up after a certain period of time and the pathogen ties up resources in making the one protein.

I see a technical problem, that's all. Someone will figure it out.

Wait a sec...

[VanWEric]

Whats wrong with giving smallpox to script kiddies?

I certainly wouldn't mind having less spam.

Listen to the music, not the melody!

[Anonymous Coward]

I think there is an impotant point being missed here. The technology for something like "bio-CAD" is some decades off right now. The software right now modeling cellular processes is still in an early stage. There are private ventures and open source projects like biospice doing this kind of work. Yet this is a long way from something a VHDL or CAD. So whats going on here? IMHO whats really going here is summed by this.

"..the new field is what form technology regulation should take. Church suggested that anyone designing systems with synthetic biological components be required to have a license.."

Thats right folks regulate now and assure your monopoly later. This is about FUD. This is about the forming public perceptions _now_ about what _will_ be a multi-billion dollar industry. Its about ensuring the tools are held in the hands of corupt goverments and monopolists.

Re:Books? Try "Oryx and Crake"

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Crichton and Atwood are both ideological technophobes; using their deliberately nightmarish visions of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know as a guideline to the future of biotech is an insanely bad idea.

Tell Us A Story!

[Vagary]

...and accidentally swallowed a billion or so of one of them (but that's a different story B^>)

And if this isn't the place to tell it, where is?!

Synthetic biology is *hard*

[Anonymous Coward]

What many of you guys don't get is that synthetic biology is *hard.* It's not just like throwing together a few bits on a computer; it requires many rounds of testing before anything productive is created. I'm currently working with the MIT BioBricks program, and let me give you an example in EE terms that you may understand:

Imagine that you were given a big bag of resistors, capacitors, inductors, etc. They're all labeled with names, but none of them have any specifications. If you look, people have written papers discussing how they used these parts, but almost no one has a single number reflecting their properties, and those which do are all in different, ad-hoc units. When you assemble these parts into systems, you don't just wire them together; you throw the entire system into a bucket filled with an electrically conductive fluid, and hope that the right parts interact with only each other and that the cross-talk isn't too loud. Oh, and it takes a week and a half to assemble one system assuming you already have the parts in your lab, and upwards of a month or more if you don't.

Right now, the biggest successes in synthetic biology are bacteria which blink on and off. We're not giving anyone new arms any time soon.

Nothing to see here. Move along.

[carldot67]

Another academic seeking funding.
Cue misleading/unconstructive populist press release, media coverage and so new grant in September for the good professor and his mates.

The article is of course deliberately provocative. It is possible right now to genetically engineer pathogens to be nastier and to cause more harm than before. We do it the old fashioned way every day when we release chemical mutagens, radiation, UV and selective pressures such as antibiotics into the environment. Which we have been doing for years.

In the living world virii, plasmids, transposons, patchy DNA repair apparatus, cosmic rays, free radicals and other natural bits and pieces all do their bit to keep stirring this genetic soup in the search for the next King of the Beasts.
It's how life works. It is designed that way.

The hurdles that stop us trying to make the next super-pathogen in our garden sheds are:
a) getting samples of nasties in the first place
b) avoiding contact with said nasties
Not many s'kiddies have access to goverment level 4 biocontainment facilities.

Yes, there are kits around for pulling DNA out of cells, splicing it and and generally having fun but it needs discipline, skill, training, facilities and not a small amount of luck to keep the new construct alive long enough to figure out what it is. It's not easy to do.

Dangerous new pathogens are much more likely to arise in areas of dense human habitation with poor hygeine, healthcare and education. Maybe the best move would be to regulate *that*.

Astroturf

[Doc Ruby]

This bioscripting is exactly why we need industrial space satellites. With remote solar disposal failsafes. Talk about debugging with the Sun!

Linda Nagata

[BelugaParty]

has some great books that approach this topic. Check out the Bohr Maker, Limit of Vision... etc Well written and interesting.

Weaponizing this is not hard

[lperdue]

I wrote a book -- Slatewiper -- about this back in 1994 based on some information shared with me by a Pentagon source who I had relied upon back in the mid-1970s when I was an investigative reporter in D.C.

The issue that makes this most terrifying is the work done on synthetic DNA bases, including 6-base DNA. Some of this has been conducted in order to increase the information-storage capacity of DNA with an eye to biocomputers.

But like many technological advances, this one has a double edge that cuts where we'd prefer it not.

The idea that experiments on synthetic life can be licensed is unrealistic because there are already so many places to buy the starting ingredients and because the availability of instruments and apparatus for producing DNA with synthetic bases is migrating toward the kitchen table.

The concept of bio-script kiddies is not as far off as other posters here would like to think.

For what it's worth, Slatewiper was first published as an eBook in 1994 because despite having had more than a dozen books and novels in print back then, editors thought the idea was too far-fetched. Current events caught up with it and Slatewiper was published in hardcover in the fall of 2003. http://www.slatewiper.com for more.

Just nano dust is bad.

[mrmeval]

It doesn't have to be a the virii level. A nano dust of most any normally benign substance can have bad consequences.

Here's a guide to a device for making big things smaller.

http://www.gateway2russia.com/st/art_143331.php

Now figure out how to clean it up.

and that's d'oh

[grandbonheur]

Blech, my bad. I actually pulled that figure from bhopal.net, which claims "somewhere between 16,000 and 30,000 dead", but then decided to replace the link with the more neutral Wikipedia... Figures aren't relevant to my argument, but the inaccuracy sure discredits it, huh? :(

Re:Sudan

[Wellmont]

I don't have quite as much karma to burn, and i know this is off topic, but so is the parent.

Sudan is the UN's area of expertise, let France and Germany (who've refussed Iraqi pleas for help and support as a post "occupation" governing power) show the world that they're not lazy by helping Sudan while we have our hands tied.

BTW the US is doing the same exact thing with Sudan as France suggested with Iraq. Supposition will get you far, but the facts speek for themselves, France (and Germany) were suggesting Aid only in the form of food for Iraq in order to curb the vicious regime's power. So when the United States Finally looks toward diplomacy as John Kerry, France (governing power), Germany (governing power), the UN (Koffi Annan), and "new" Spain have criticized it for avoiding in the past we are bashed again.

It would be suicide for America to take a stronger stance on another muslim/christian divided nation at this point...better to send food and let the "all knowing" UN figure this one out.

Re:GMOs Are Our Salvation, Ignore The Luddite-Lobb

[orasio]

There is enough food for everybody already, as it is, and there is no need for GMOs.

Poverty related issues are not caused by the lack of resources, but because of the inefficient way that they are distributed.

Biodiversity insures species against world wide plagues and diseases. GMOs, combined with good marketing and stupid patent & copyright laws lead to monoculture (and that is a biiig step back) and less resistance to disasters. If everybody plants the same extremely enhanced crops, they will share the same weaknesses. And that if you don't take into account the fact that you are putting the future of the food of the entire world in the hands of a handful of corporations.

And in prehistoric news...

[Greg_D]

... the discovery of fire may spawn cooks! Oh, the horror! Cooked food! Why can't it be like the old days when people dined on raw flesh and they liked it? That's it, we're moving the family to Japan. Oh, the neanderthalality of it all!

Re:GMOs Are Our Salvation, Ignore The Luddite-Lobb

[orasio]

Some report with some numbers on food.

Re:how to clean it up.

[zmollusc]

Simply re-spray a car. Any particles within half a mile will throw themselves at the paint. For better results increase the value of car used.

Re:Books? Try "Oryx and Crake"

[hawkfish]

Not to mentional being written by someone with actual skill in the craft...

No Virii?

[Jack William Bell]

I take it you prefer the, even more clumsy, term viruses for the plural?

Re:No Virii?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Yes, because it's correct. (And I don't see why it's clumsy.)

The Changeling Plague by Syne Mitchell is better

[Anonymous Coward]

The Changeling Plague by Syne Mitchell is cool, it's got a lot of biohacking by nerd hobbyists, shich Oryxandcrake lacks....although, I liked Oryxandcrale too and I did like Prey even though the science was all screwed up...I still can't wait for biohacking to get popular and cheap to do. Its about time we took the medical/biotech establishment down a peg or two by establishing really abvanced nano and biotech and combined with brain interfaces to make your average person a genius, it will cause a massive change in the society, just look at what has happened to computer science and the internet over the last 25 years, we have taked that field from a small field of elite gurus to a massive pevasive presence with millions of applications and millions of personal computers world-wide. We need to do the same for medicine and biotech too. You must demand your rights to the future nano and biotechnologies and we must eliminate the human nature to establish these elite groups that control key medial and biotech technologies.

try:"The Changeling Plague" it's cool

[Anonymous Coward]

You could try "The Changeling Plague" by Syne Mitchell this novel is fast moving and really well written

Use Left-handed sugar & protien molecules

[djmk]

This explains a little bit. You can build into the design an inabillity to interact with our biology by simply using the "mirror-image" of our base molecular structure. Feynman was one of the first to recognize the potential for a parallel biology, and that it was just by chance that earth biology evolved from a "right-handed" structure. If we limit these expariments to "left-handed" structures, we significantly reduce the threat of unintentional hazards.

I fail to see the problem...

[shaitand]

Even if this article didn't ridiculously overstate and oversimplify the issue. Basically we'd have a world like we do today in programming. Yes some bad comes out of it, but much much more good.

Besides that, it takes quite a bit bigger balls to engineer a virus which will kill people than it does to write a virus to get even with that damn bank who charged you an overdraft fee.

In one case people are inconvienced and annoyed, in the other people die.

Maybe that's why SETI hasn't made contact?

[timek]

The more technologically advanced the race/civilization, the more deadly the industrial accident, even if rarer.

The more complex the technological implementation, the more likely breakdowns, errors, malfunctions, and general mayhem from time to time.

Bio-hacking would seem to be the most dangerous technology. It's dangers would be inseparable from the good that might come from it.

not quite true

[Anonymous Coward]

posting as AC because I've already moderated--

With that out of the way, sorry to say you're incorrect. The cholera toxin is quite nasty, whether you get adequate water/electrolytes or not. Nothing compared to anthrax toxin or botulin, but still quite potent. My employers sells fluorescently labeled cholera toxin to bind to a sugar moiety. I guess that makes it a lectin. More info here.

Re:not quite true

[Zaak]

The cholera toxin is quite nasty, whether you get adequate water/electrolytes or not.

While I don't know what other effects the cholera toxin has, it is true that most cholera deaths are from dehydration. Rehydration is a more effective treatment for cholera than antibiotics.

TTFN

Re:not quite true

[bucuo]

forgive if you know this, i just wanna run through a few things. (starin' at my biochem textbook)

so the receptors on the outside of a cell membrane have a corresponding G-protein within the membrane. normally, when the receptor is stimulated, the G-protein will bind a GTP, which in turn activates adenylate cyclase.

the adenylate cyclase is important because it converts ATP into cAMP, which is then free to float around the cell and act as a messenger. (cAMP tends to appears when the cell is low on energy)

normally, this signal fades over time because the GTP is phosphorylated to GDP. cholera toxin prevents the phosphorylation of the G protein-GTP complex, so the receptor does not turn off, and excess cAMP builds up.

cAMP is a transcription factor for all kinds of hormones, cytokines, etc. when the toxin hits your intestines, one of the consequences is that the fluid levels are out of whack and you get diarrhea, which is the primary problem of cholera.

since the toxin can disrupt the cells metabolic processes, it is quite capable of killing cells. if the level of toxin is high, enough red blood cells can die and blockages in those tiny little capillaries in the kidneys, causing them to stop working pretty suddenly. (Hemolytic Uremic Syndrome )
http://kidney.niddk.nih.gov/kudiseases/pubs/childk idneydiseases/hemolytic_uremic_syndrome/ if so, hope you're rich/lucky enough to get dialysis.

bottom line: yes, cholera toxin isn't fun stuff, but for the majority of cases it matters most whether or not you're hydrating properly.

whee! too much information man to the rescue!

Re just going to cause the program to crash.

[zmollusc]

infinite loop = grey goo ?

Re:Outlaw Science!

[Eythian]

This is the #1 reason we should outlaw science

Heh, I can just see that happening:
Bob: So, the sun has come up again this morning.
Joe: Yep, so it has.
Bob: Wonder if the same's gunna happen tomorrow.
Joe: Based on the trend, I'd have to say yes.
Secret Service: We've heard reports that you have been practising science! What do you have to say in your defence?
Joe: ...
SS: *bang*

another fan

[twitter]

How much is Billy boy paying you to write that trash? I'll be glad when he runs out of money and you can put your greedy little head to something else. In the mean time, keep sucking.

You take something that is completely offtopic and manage to turn it into a dumb flame.

Actually, this is a good example of how M$'s poor quality can reach out and skew public perceptions. M$ has nothing to do with Biotech, I hope, but here's an article quoting people from MIT and Harvard forcasting Biological sabotage and terrorism who point to M$'s hacking record to make their point. It's trivially easy to auto-root M$. It will not be trivially easy to best nature and make diseases that kill 90% of the population, yet this is what people might be lead to believe given the analogy at hand.

Skiddies with smallpox

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno, script kiddies with smallpox sounds like a recipie for fewer portscans and more hospitals.

Economy of scale

[Mal-2]

It can take months to engineer a simple mutations and get a protein that's properly expressed.

But it's more like programming than building bombs. The first copy may take months or years to make, but the creation of additional copies will be several orders of magnitude easier. After all, DNA was DESIGNED to replicate itself, so unless you botch it so badly it can't, you shouldn't have to tell it how. It just will.

This means that while people may design one-off jobs for something they alone need (or at least believe they alone need), the vast majority of bio-hacks are going to be replicated heavily. That's the entire point of the exercise. It's a highly inefficient process if you just want one.

Mal-2

The point is obscured by generalizations

[James Turpin]

There are really 2 separate issues here:

(1) People doing legitimate research that lead to benneficial treatments with unexpected side-effects. This happens already in medicine all the time. It's nothing new. The real problem here is that some of this stuff ends up becoming food, not medicine. It should be held to higher standard, because risky food is just not acceptable the way risky medicine is acceptable. But in many countries, such as the USA, its not held to a higher standard than drugs.

(2) Evil mad scientists. Sure, somebody with expertise and resources could manufacture something pretty scary stuff in their spare time. Somebody could do gene splicing to make some bacteria or virus manufacture a toxin or narcotic that is typically only made by plants. Walla, you now have the means to convert sugar into THC. Or somebody could grow viruses in a culture of human cells (say, blood), then subject the viruses to oxygen. Repeat until you have viruses that survive in open air and thrive in the human body. Walla, air-born AIDS.

Microsoft lazy?

[CaptainSuperBoy]

Microsoft ain't lazy! Hey, at least they write their own stuff. Torvald$ had to steal his code from Minix, I heard. Plus you have the whole thing with IBM taking SCO's intellectual property and mi$appropriating it into the Linux kernel. How are real software companies to survive while lazy open source thieves are stealing the fruits of their labor?

Uh, Luddites?

[MacDork]

You are a computer guy, aren't you (judging by the cs.queensu.ca)? Do you know that growing Roundup Ready(TM) beans implies using MORE herbicide than regular soybeans? I mean, that's the whole point of Roundup Ready(TM) beans. Roundup(TM) doesn't kill 'em. You can dump buckets of Roundup(TM) to kill evolved Roundup(TM) resistant weeds without hurting your beans. Ask anyone with an Ag degree. GMOs are not about reducing chemical usage/dependance. GMOs are about improving yield. Think about it. Why would Monsanto, a company that has a lot of money invested in selling you their chemicals, want to do away with the need for their chemicals?

Monsanto is the Microsoft of agriculture, so please take their literature with a grain of salt :-) Oh, and speaking of salt, please don't buy any of that Scotts weed killer for the weeds between the cracks in your sidewalks, as their commercials suggest. A bag of salt will do the trick and keep anything from growing back in that spot for years. Cheaper, more effective, and the fewer chemicals the better, right? Ok, so even if you love toxic chemicals, the salt is still cheaper and more effective. Oh, and boiling water, applied correctly, will kill your fire ants... since we're on that whole reducing chemical usage thing... uh, yeah, so I'll drop the valley girl thing now (Two five minute episodes of Pink Five, forgive me) and say...

Thanks for reading :-)

Oryx and Crake

[Chip Wilson]

I know Margaret Atwood is not an author that /.ers would typically read, but she wrote an excellent novel on just this subject (bio-hacking). It's called Oryx and Crake. I enjoyed it immensely and highly recommend it.

GMOs Are More Than The Sum Of Their Issues

[Vagary]

I realise there is enough food now, but many anti-GMO advocates claim there would still be enough food if we stopped using chemical pesticides and fertilizers. I've never heard these claims backed up, though...

Genetic patents, agro marketing, and everything Monsanto does is bad, but it's irrational to deduce from those issues that GMOs are the problem. Much agriculture today is overly reliant on heavily marketed and patented chemicals, but I don't see anyone complaining about that. Maybe agro R&D should be open source, maybe countries should offer tax incentives against monoculture, regardless, we are asking the wrong question if banning GMOs is the answer.

The GMO Industry Does Not Represent All GMOs

[Vagary]

Monsanto is not the only company making GMOs. GMOs are not, by definition, all designed to improve yield.

I agree that GMO developers are gearing up to be just as damaging to society as pharmaceutical developers are now; so maybe we need open source GMOs developed by nationalised R&D labs, but we don't need to ban GMOs.

Please tell me what chemicals my food has been soaking in before you give me its family tree.

Re:The GMO Industry Does Not Represent All GMOs

[MacDork]

Monsanto is not the only company making GMOs. GMOs are not, by definition, all designed to improve yield.

Microsoft is not the only company making OSes. OSes are not, by definition, all designed to stifle competition and disable competing products. So does that mean Microsoft is not a problem because Linux is open source? You cannot simply ignore the 800 lb gorilla, because he is the trend setter for the majority and his actions have the most pronounced effect on the world around him. Unfortunately in America, his money also makes him above the law.

Please tell me what chemicals my food has been soaking in before you give me its family tree.

Giving you its family tree often directly informs you of what chemicals your food has been soaking in, as my previous post should illustrate. I'm sure GMO manufacturers would be against you having knowledge of either though.

QM

[k98sven]

Quantum chemistry is my field, and we are some of the few who actually study biochemical systems with it.

Unfortunately, I can't really say much about long-range effects myself; The number of atoms which can practically be modelled at the same time is about 100. (that's one-hundred! Not much!)

I'd say possibly the most important QM effect strucurally in enzymes is pi-stacking and pi-cation interactions. It's not something which can be modelled well by a point charge.
(And what is worse, not all QM methods can model it either; DFT is infamous for not predicting pi-stacking or VdW effects)

Another significant thing which only QM can really model is transition-metal complexes. The coordination is very difficult to predict offhand. (Field splitting, spin states, spin interactions, Jahn-Teller effect, etc, etc..)

Just the other month, Science had some interesting results, including a completeley unprecedented mode of binding for nitric oxide to copper in nitrite reductase.

Our area is the study of the catalytic functions of metalloenzyme active sites. Again, this is not something which is easily predictable.

(Like, look at Cytochrome c Oxidase.. The function was determined in 1977, X-ray crystal structures have been known for over a decade. The mechanism of proton-pumping is still unknown. (And there's lots of notable people studying it.)

Vagina Sensitivity

[Anonymous Coward]

-increase the number of nerves in the vagina so that size really doesn't matter, just having anything there will be enough for her. (ego is an important thing to us men)

Sheesh... only the first third of it is sensitive anyhow. Besides which, vagina sizes vary from girl to girl. *wry grin* Heck, most of my female friends were actually fairly shallow. More than 6-7 inches and it got painful for them, at least if the guy tried for full thrusts.

nice.

[twitter]

Microsoft ain't lazy! Hey, at least they write their own stuff. Torvald$ had to steal his code from Minix, I heard. Plus you have the whole thing with IBM taking SCO's intellectual property and mi$appropriating it into the Linux kernel. How are real software companies to survive while lazy open source thieves are stealing the fruits of their labor?

Is that you Daryl?

Friendly neighborhood real view

[Pichud]

As far as all this genetic stuff goes, (girls, girls, and um, byrls and goys oh my,) It seems as we are nearing whatever be the abomination that causes desolation (a.k.a somethin bad that happens that makes people leave God) be it in VR, Genes, or something. I don't like this one bit.

Even if it be possible to create life, it is still subcreation, not being creating at all. Just resequencing. This is against even the bible, being that mutilation of the body is not right. Just because you are capable of wrong does not make it okay, and I see a very topsy-turvy future, even more so than I thought.

God will get pissed that you are acting such bad, and will destroy. (i.e.insest, with animals, with of the same gender,)

Just a friendly warning, so he can say 'I told ya so'.

Perhaps.

[StarKruzr]

But expensive.

PICS

[StarKruzr]

NOW

Arguments From Analogy [Not Suitable] For Dummies

[Vagary]

Are we supposed to follow through with your OS = GMO analogy to conclude that operating systems should be banned?! I wouldn't complain if Monsanto's corporate charter were struck down, but I think that banning their class of product is not the right way to curtail their behaviour.

You're right, however, that we are more likely to know the pesticides used on GMOs because they are designed with companion chemicals. This is at least partially beneficial because then there's only one pesticide I need to worry about. Also, this suggests that mandatory chemical labelling would be a superset of GMO labelling, which would be significantly more beneficial to consumers.