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Open Source, Genetically Engineered Machines From a Kit?
An anonymous reader writes "Students in an MIT competition are helping to build a dev-kit for cells. Together with synthetic biologists, they're building a Registry of Standard Biological Parts called BioBricks. They aim to do for cells what open source software has done for computers. 'The competition is a showcase for the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. Knight and his colleagues Randy Rettberg and Drew Endy, who created the contest in 2004, want to make biological systems easy to build by applying the tools of computer science and engineering: using standard parts and modular design to simplify complex systems. The goal is to create "genetic Legos" that could produce any chemical, from ethanol to pharmaceuticals.'"
I saw a talk by Tom Knight recently about BioBricks. It's a cool concept.
Some interesting points I remember from the talk:
- His lab and others like it are trying to take the craft out of manipulating cells and make it an engineering discipline.
- They've got ready-made kits of cell building blocks that you can piece together like Legos, and are adding thousands of new ones each year.
- Cells are enormously more efficient at storing information that we can in silicon - 5 or 6 orders of magnitude more dense - but most cells aren't good at writing new data, just reading it.
- Cells are really good at making precise structures at the atomic level, but our mechanical processes rely on statistics and probabilities to get things right. The smaller the structures get, the more a small statistical variation can really mess things up. Carbon nanotubes are much-hyped, and guess what's really good at making carbon structures?
- Another useful critter that was created for the last competition detected arsenic in water. The best manufactured/chemical solution costs is tens of dollars per test; using these kits, undergraduates from Edinburgh created something over a summer that is so cheap the bottles to put it in are the dominate cost.
My computer, my kitchen utensils, and my car can't kill tens of millions of people.
This is simply a probability function. The more people that have the ability to create a biowarfare agent, the higher the chances that you'll have one released into the wild.
Consider this. The DNA sequence for the 1918 avian flu virus is public domain. You can buy base pair sequences online. It's not that difficult to add 1 and 1 to get 2. This isn't really technology you want to democratize to the masses. The number of angst ridden hate the world biochemists is much smaller than the number of angst ridden pimple faced teenagers. Given the ability, sooner or later one of them is going to think it's a cool idea to wipe out half the human species and will try.