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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 . . ."
A 3 breasted blue haired girl with a nymphomaniac obsession for men with glasses and a fetish for Moutain Dew....
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
Evolution or ID?
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.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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
Physicists get Hadrons!
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
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
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...
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
You got pwn3d! Now you have two cocks!
Great, the world gets better every day.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
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
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Person:"WOW is that a New ARM!" Me:" YA.. this new version of PHP Rocks"
Shame on you; it's from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, specifically Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon VI.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
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
http://www.rustyrazorblade.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'd be much more worried about the non-hacker, well funded, professional genetic researcher.
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.
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?
and perhaps a vaccination... ;)
I am very sucseptible to "let's have another drink"
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.
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
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10.
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2. ?????
1. Use your mouth, dipshit.
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.
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.
/.ers, what can you do about this? Well, hmmm, MATE WITH SOMEONE DIFFERENT TODAY! Oops, forgot where I was, nevermind...
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
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
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.
Seastead this.
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.5 33642X/ qid=1089304040/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/102-7999783-80057 25
This is *the* book for beginning Immunology, written by Janeway who recently passed away:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/081
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.
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.
Ward
. Silence! Be thankful thy species is unpalatable! .
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.
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.
+++ATHZ 99:5:80
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
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.
Whats wrong with giving smallpox to script kiddies?
I certainly wouldn't mind having less spam.
www.olin.edu
> what's to stop us from engineering a better immune system?
Good luck. We can't even stop SPAM.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
(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.
Mathematics is not a crime.