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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.'"
Sweet. I can think of a few.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
I just hope that these basic "programming" blocks do not turn out to be Windows.
Now that they've released it under open source, God is going to sue them for copyright infringement.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
What is this crap about a license taking months to produce and release? They should just release it with a license saying everything made with the kit is in the public domain, with the single exception to that disclaimer of all rights that any derivative must also come with that license. Why would it take more than 5 minutes to agree to release that license, and release it?
When some university comes after me for metabolizing glucose as part of my job (moving a muscle during business hours, just like you sometimes do), I don't want to have to argue about some license they've got on some DNA they synthesized.
All these patents on discovered genes are the purest BS violation of prior art. Any complexity in this BioBrick Public License will create more problems than it could ever solve.
--
make install -not war
upside: any elicit drug, or pharmaceutical intellect property drugs, can be made
downside: hello nerve gas
results: all of the pluses and minuses of free computer code manipulations we are familiar with (intellectual property meltdown, hackers, etc.), replicated in the world of biochemistry. except this time, the script kiddies are playing with petri dishes
what took an entire universy research department, with all the pcr machines, southern blots, grad students, etc. 10 years ago, will 10 years from now be on the workbench of high school students
i'm all one for the relentless march of technology, and there is no putting pandora back in the box, but this leaves me feeling queasy
maybe it's just the GM wasabi in my sushi
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
Announcer: Hey kids! How would you like a chemistry set for Christmas?
Kids: BOR-ING!
Announcer: A ray gun?
Kids: BOR-ING!
Announcer: How about the new amazing Bio-Bricks!
Kids: COOL!!!!!
Announcer voice-over with kids in background hunched over a petri dish full of Bio-Bricks: With Bio-Bricks your kids will have hours upon hours of enjoyment creating new life forms. Bio-Bricks are available at fine genetic research supply stores everywhere.
Announcer reading legal disclaimer:
Neither the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition, MIT, Bejing University, or the government of China is responsible for improper use of Bio-Bricks. Serious injury, mutations, illness, death, or the end of life on Earth may result from improper use of Bio-Bricks. Using Bio-Bricks to create dangerous life forms is not recommended. Adult supervision required.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
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.
I wouldn't worry too much about that. While most of humanity would be wiped out, Bruce Willis would survive, enabling the scientists to send him back in time to find the origin of the virus. They'll then be able to create a vaccine and we'll be able to live on the surface again.
We should probably check with him that he didn't see anyone get shot dead at an airport when he was a kid though, as it might mean something tragic.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
If I'm being alarmist about this, why not let anyone buy weapons grade plutonium or uranium and publish functional weapons designs along with the CAD/CAM instructions? After all, using your logic it's alarmist to think anyone would actually go to the trouble of actually constructing and using a bomb.
After all, the technical and monetary investment needed to build a nuclear bomb is several orders of magnitude greater than what is required to build a biological agent. If we don't have anything to worry about with biological agents, then obviously our nuke fears are overblown as well.
I don't often post, but most of the comments here are completely wrong. I'm a bioengineer and have been following this project since its inception. Some points:
- This technology is NOT any more effective or dangerous than "traditional" genetic engineering. You will not be able to make a unicorn, dragon, or some unholy dog/cat combination.
- Building an Über Death Virus from this takes just as much skill, equipment, and knowledge as it would using standard tools. First, the BioBricks are made for use inside of a living bacterial organism. They will not work without a cell to operate in. A virus, by contrast, is just a specialized collection of proteins that is not in any way alive - something very very different from BioBricks.
"But what about a killer bacteria?" I hear you ask. Well, while technically possible, it's not easy to make something that can live comfortably in our bodies. To a foreign bacteria, our bodies are a fortress crawling with guards and death traps. It has taken nature millions of years to develop microbes capable of harming us (as our immune systems have also grown to combat each new threat.) The key point here is that, to create a NEW bacterial threat, one would have to be very well versed in biology and genetic engineering. What's more, for someone of this skill level, it would be much easier to create such a bacteria using standard biological techniques, not BioBricks.
These BioBricks are incredibly cool and powerful, within their problem domain. Making bacteria do things is very different from giving them the ability to successfully harm our bodies and spread to other hosts.