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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?
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.
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/
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!
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.
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 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.
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.
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.