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Amateurs Are Trying Genetic Engineering At Home
the_kanzure points out this AP story on amateur genetic engineering, excerpting: "The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself. Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories." Reader resistant has a few ideas about how to use this sort of lab: "Personally, I'd like to whip up a reasonably long-lasting and durable paint made with dye based on squid genes that glows brightly enough to allow 'guide lines' to be daubed along hallway baseboards, powered by a very low trickle of electricity. Plus, a harmless glowing yogurt would make for a cool prank."
Someone should do something useful and recreate this.
Just because a few computer companies started out as projects, that does not mean that everything someone starts in their garage is bound to be wildly successfull. I dont get why they must draw the parallels.
I mean, I love the idea behind it. But isn't there regulation on doing this type of research?
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
I have a plan and you all will soon bow down before me:
/.'er to lose virginity
1) Create perfect woman in petri dish
2) First
3) Patent troll
4) ?
5) Profit
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
If I could get my hands on some panda DNA, I'd genetically engineer a mini-panda about the size of a guinea pig or hamster for the pet market.
In one fell swoop, I will have saved a species from extinction AND become a billionaire!
You know you want it.
I'm reminded of the breeders who purportedly tried to create a more sweet natured camel by incorporating lama genes in the camel genotype. The story is that they ended up with a vile tempered lama. Of course nothing like that could possibly cause my neighbor's attempt to produce vegetarian pit-bull to create a man-eating rabbit. Of course not.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
The basis for his book The Stand will come out of someone's garage and not a military lab. Unfortunately, people like these probably won't have good documentation for the Hazmat team to use after the "incident". The good side is that the opportunities to get rid of surplus population has risen. There are an awful lot of people on this planet.
Hey, you think your house is cool?
"The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine", and the Doomsday virus. Now the remains of humanity crawls in caves waiting for scientist to develop a cure
I have been doing genetic engineering for years and am quite an expert at it. Anyone can do it! Just stand on the streetcorner in a revealing getup and ask for money.
Bart: "How would I go about creating a half-man, half-monkey-type creature?"
Mrs. Krabappel: "I'm sorry, that would be playing God."
Bart: "God-schmod, I want my monkey man."
The home genetic engineering project I would work on, if I were rich enough and smart enough, would be to take some MMORPG, such as WOW, and reify as many creatures from it as I could, and secretly release them into the wild, in enough numbers to establish breeding populations.
Google started in a garage?
According to Wikipedia, Google incorporated at a friend's garage, but that's really stretching a startup in a garage thing. It was Stanford Ph.D. work we're talking about here.
Let's not cheapen real garage startups with that allusion.
rd
Oh, come on now! We're geeks; we can do better than that! How about Spoo?
Good, inexpensive web hosting
The general public seems to have this mental image of molecular biology scientists as this mad genius with bad hair and surrounded by giant humming arcane machines with arcs of electricity jumping around. The truth is, anyone with a mediocum of scientific and mathemathical knowledge (also some money helps) could do what we do in the lab. You could order kits for extracting DNA, cloning etc. online. You will also need to buy a microcentrifuge, a PCR thermocycler, a gel electrophoresis kit, UV light, micropipettors and a few other consummables. Overall, around 10-25 thousand dollars in start up money. You don't need to sequence the DNA yourself as there are private companies who can do it for you for a fee. However, before you get all tingly with the thought of making your own girlfriend in a petri dish, the state of the art labs can barely manage to clone sheep and dogs. Hell, in my lab, even cloning genes into E.coli only results in 10-50 successful insertions out of millions of cells. SO, it's not out of reach if you have some money lying around but don't start dreaming of playing god just yet.
At the 24th Chaos Communication Congress there was a lecture about this topic: Programming DNA http://events.ccc.de/congress/2007/Fahrplan/events/2329.en.html (links to torrents on the page).
Yes, I am a molecular biologist by training. This won't work. The reason genetic engineering is carried out in labs is because it requires expert knowledge of protocols, and expensive equipment. In TFA, one of the people interviewed is trying to insert a targeted florescent marker, and struggling. This is fairly trivial to do in the lab, but only with good understanding of basic principles, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear and consumables, and tested/documented protocols. You can't build a space shuttle in your backyard, neither can you successfully build a recombinant bacterium that meets spec in your garage. Just because cells are squishy does not make this equivalent to software development!
It will soon be banned, much as anything else remotely scientific at home is in the process of becoming.
Next, just having the knowledge will get you on a watched list.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
some fool breeds a deadly unstoppable strain of a new virus/bacteria in his garage ?
genetics is no I.T. computers cant harm people, websites cant kill people. you can confiscate computers, you can take down websites. genetics is no joke.
Read radical news here
Normally I have to preface my posts with "I am not a XXXX, but". However, in this case, I actually am a molecular biologist deeply involved in the synthetic biology community. Here are a few thoughts:
First, the amount of ignorance regarding genetic engineering and it's facets (such as GMO food) is astounding. Anecdotally, I've heard that a significant fraction of British folks polled said they would prefer DNA-free food. (Think about it until you realize the ridiculousness). People typically imagine we are trying to create hybrid organisms or bizarre clone armies or something, when it reality, it's just mixing DNA that encodes for a series of proteins you would find useful in combination. To make glow in the dark yogurt that responds to melamine would be fairly simple if you had the right set of genes: a melamine sensor that, when bound to melamine, binds to a specific DNA sequence (a promoter) that drives expression of a fluorescent protein such as green fluorescent protein ("GFP", a widely used fluorescent marker derived from a jellyfish). It's not difficult, and it's not unsafe. The vast majority of DNA and proteins are degraded rapidly in your stomache, so they are safe to eat (toxins, parasites, and infectious agents excluded).
Second, people underestimate how difficult it is to accomplish something genetically. Yes, the circuit logic above is fairly simple. Unlike electrical circuits, though, where you can control electron flow with wires there is no such spatial regulation of biological parts. It's very stochastic. One has to tune the concentrations such that the melamine sensor will strongly bind to DNA at the concentrations of melamine likely to be in food, without prematurely activating and freaking people out, while also avoiding being sued because it didn't activate when it should have and someone died. Once you get the sensor right, you have to then tune the promoter so that you get expression of GFP the same way-- no leaky expression causing permanently green yogurt, but enough expression when activated such that you can see it. I can build a simple circuit to drive GFP in the presence of melamine, but getting it commercially relevant is extremely difficult.
Finally, and most importantly, the regulations of these types of technologies are, well, 2 steps from insane. There are no regulations on the transport of DNA encoding some severe toxin, to list one example. Take botulism toxin: the DNA encoding it is well known, and short enough that one could order it directly from a DNA synthesis company. From there you can use PCR to make as many copies of it as you need. Then, put it in your bacterium of choice, produce a whole bunch, and purify it out. That entire process could be done with someone with basic college level biology and about $5k. Anybody can find the botulism toxin DNA on, say, NBCI (run by the NIH) and get to work. And there are NO regulations on any of the steps required to produce it. A person with practical experience could do it much faster. I could produce enough to kill my entire university, starting from scratch, in about 2 weeks, give or take, maybe faster
A second example is the definition of 'natural' when it comes to food. Any chemical produced in a flask, chemically, is considered artificial, even if it's molecularly identical to the natural flavor molecule. On the other hand, any synthetic flavor produced by bacteria in a vat is considered natural, as long as the sugar used to feed the bacteria is also natural. The food industry is spending billions trying to engineer bacteria to produce flavors in large quantities, because the average person will think 'all natural' means healthier or better for me.
A third example involves regulation of the types of bacteria used to produce flavors: if I randomly mutagenize bacteria with UV light until I find one I like, that's considered safe, even though I probably have no idea what mutations I've actually made. On the other hand, if I go in and, with ultra-precision, make a single, target
-Ryan
AUWYHSTOT (Acronyms are Useless When You Have to Spell Them Out Too)
yeah... we all wanna be garage gods, dont we?
but you should really take a look at "The World According to Monsanto". Hopefully these garage startups won't create the next I Am Legend :-).
Pris: Must get lonely here J. F.
Sebastian: Mmm... Not really. I make friends. They're toys. My friends are toys. I make them. It's a hobby. I'm a genetic designer. Do you know what that is?
Pris: No.
Sebastian: Yoo-hoo, home again.
Toys: Home again, home again, jiggity jig. Good evening J. F.
I think that was a plot of B sci-fi movie?
There, fixed that for you. ;)
Drumsticks for everyone!
I'm not doing my research on my garage but at a university lab, however there's nothing prevent people doing similar research at their basements apart from cost of equipment of gene engineering. It is very similar to working with software, and I believe a good reverse engineer for software can be a good gene engineer as well.
Currently GMO seed and micro organism producers try to put 'copy protection' for their products which prevent breeding new products out of theirs. This is very similar to what software vendors trying to achieve. But as in what current cracking scene doing, in future we'll see 'garage engineers' which would 'crack' those reproduce (read: copy) protections and release reproducible cDNAs.
In past computers were very expensive so it was almost impossible for those hobbiests to work on software. After cost of this equipment diminished and people started to be able to afford them we started to see this kind of activity effectively. For biotech we need similar thing as well and it's very possible that we'll see it. Improving PCR equipments and be able to buy them with an affordable price and also cheapers chemicals and enzymes can easily make this kind of biohacks ubiquitous in future.
Simple: THC in tomatoes. Might mix things up a bit.
Here is my order for an Open Source Genetic engineering project:
Kudzu incorporating cannabis genes for buzz, strawberry genes and tomato genes for food value.
That, when released ,would fix many of the worlds problems.
Yeah, I like all three. Peach genes would be nice too.
Well SCREW THAT!!!
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Not exactly genetic engineering, but a couple years ago I started growing mold. Seriously. It started out accidentally as some mold in a carafe of coffee left for a few days. After reading up on it, I then was able to get some molds to grow on some lemon peels and on lemon juice. I didn't learn a whole bunch, but it was actually a lot of fun checking each day to see what had sprouted. Once it "sprouts" the mold catches pretty quickly.
What I find fascinating about garage science is that it allows complete laymen like me to try out what real scientists are doing. I feel the same way as when I got a unix prompt on my PC and was able to run a compiler to run some Newton-Rhapson solvers from my college texts. Back in college it required scheduling an hour in the lab to input and then run your programs. Now those tools are available whenever I want...
Given that biology is a branch of science that girls are more likely to do, perhaps all the lonely nerds should ditch the programming and become biohackers?
How about the 'safety control' of throwing a project in the garbage?
Think of it this way: If Giant InterCorp tries to make a vaccine and find a way to wipe out everyone with genetic heritage X, they won't throw it away--they'll just apply for "black budget" funding where their researchers will quietly send reports to a small office in Langley, Va.
There's at least a 50-50 chance that the "garage band" researcher will look at his creation and throw the whole thing in the incinerator.
Am I the only one here who already read this story in a cyberpunk novel? I think it was a (short) story by Bruce Sterling... Man i wish i had vision like that (+20 20 years)
I've created a few new strains of plants. I have a near-blue catnip that took four generations to produce reliably. I've got thai peppers smaller than your pinky fingernail that'll bite your ass off, took ten generations to get that down. Haven't tried pot, yet, but since I have my medical script and card for it I just might try making my own strain of cannabis. Will probably take twenty generations for that, though.
Amateurs have been doing GE for a long time,e specially the stoners.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I'd like to breed these critters, the size of SUVs, dress them up in Santa suits, get them liquored up, and teach them to yell, "Ho, ho, fucking ho."
Rampage in Christchurch, New Zealand follows.
How come ThinkGeek aren't offering an "Amateur Genetic Engineering At Home kit?"
Must be them "Homeland Security" bastards, again.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
What precautions and regulations would these so called garage hackers take when disposing of such experiments? Sure one could say that the garage computer hackers of the 70s, took all the solder and buried it in the backyard or through it in the trash. But what is the potential of the environmental impact of a couple of circuit boards going in a landfill versus someone pouring down some modified bacteria? Also, don't forget in the 70s we were pitching TVs into the garbage.
Before you go off the handle, go do some research on "invasive species" that are occupying and dominating areas like the Florida everglades. Foreign Fish and Eels are ending up in the everglades because people are dumping their home aquariums into the local streams http://sofia.usgs.gov/publications/fs/swampeel/
Btw, dumping aquariums aren't the only issue, this type of issue extends to how people dispose of Prescription Medicines http://www.medicationdisposal.utah.gov/
Just like Bill Joy wrote in Wired ever so long ago. I have thar article printed out here somewhere, and I force it on everyone who will read it. I really think biotech will kill us all, or at least enough of us where the distinction is academic. I'm not worried about nuclear winter, or overcrowding, but the dang microbes. All it takes is one pissed-off bacterium or virus, and we get Stephen King's The Stand. No, I'm not a microbiologist, so I can't tell you, using the correct terminology, why we're all doomed, but I can't help but think that tinkering with life is bad. It might be an accident, but there are also quite a few well-heeled doomsday cults on the planet. Couple that with normal evil and quasi-evil government biowar research, and this freelance crap isn't going to help the situation. We're just too convinced that nothing bad can happen to little old us. The bacteria will win, I tell you.
IANAMB but squid don't glow. Perhaps you were thinking of jellyfish or diatoms.
Only his tendency toward a dazed stupor prevented him from screaming aloud.
In a university they'll tell you that there is no such thing as a mad scientist because one rogue scientist can't use the wealth of knowledge that a group has. It sounds reasonable, but will that hold up over time? When more and more knowledge gets fed onto the net, and technology goes down in cost(lab materials), won't the barrier to entry of mad scientist get broken down? So maybe the mad scientist isn't far away... especially when there are benefits to going against what some laws prevent.
God spoke to me.
One of Wired's Tools 2K3 list entries was for a DNA Explorer Kit that was sold by the Discovery Channel. It included the equipment and materials for several DNA sequencing experiments. Equipment included a centrifuge and a gel electrophoresis chamber. You can still find these kits for sale on ebay.
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Most genetic engineering done for research purposes really is harmless and people used to be way too careful.
But people can really mess up. One of the most common bacteria in genetic engineering, E. coli, grows in the intestines of every human being. If you add the wrong genes to it, you have a potent pathogen. Viruses are even worse.
Maybe the solution to the Fermi paradox ("where are they?") is that all civilizations kill themselves by homegrown genetic engineering.
While it's not (yet) possible to run a chip fab out of a garage, we can get very close. We can get so close that the difference is neither relevant nor apparent to the end user.
FPGAs are fast and getting faster all the time. Using FPGAs, a great many microprocessors have been effectively designed in a bedrooms, basements, and garages.
While this isn't building the physical chip in a garage, so what? A FPGA is just a commodity piece of equipment, the developers add all of the functionality, thus all of the value. It's very little different from any company that buys raw materials and turns them into finished goods steel for cars, wood for furniture.
When an FPGA is built into a finished device, the end user may never know the difference.
While equipment cost can be a barrier in a nascent industry, molecular biology isn't that industry.
By your admission, it takes a few hundred thousand dollars worth of equipment to achieve the described goal. The real question should be; would it have been possible to accomplish that goal with the equipment of ten years ago?
If the answer is yes (and I'm pretty sure it is), then that ten year old (expensive at the time) equipment is certainly within reach of many garage labs.
Efficiencies in sequencing other areas have been accelerating at an astonishing pace. What's the true value of ten year old, 'million dollar" machine, when new, cheaper machines with efficiencies HUNDREDS of times greater hit the market?
Scrap value, that's what. Or in this case, garage lab prices. The garage labs just have to beat the scrap merchants to the haul. In a perfect world, higher prices could be had. In our world, labs are often more concerned about their limited floor space than the few bucks they'll get for a ten year old machine.
If it could be done with 1998 equipment, it can probably be done in a garage lab, today. Assuming of course that the researcher has the skills.
I always liked the idea of putting the genes for THC into common lawn grass. It'd give a whole new meaning to "smoking grass". Since we're being completely irresponsible here, put it into all sorts of common plants and weeds for that matter. Drug enforcers would go completely insane.
(in uber layman terms as I know next to nothing about the subject)
basically an organism that feeds on coca plants (coca as in the plant that ultimately gives the world CRACK) thereby unleashing a disease that would eradicate most of the plants . . . seriously, I wish to GOD someone would either create it, or that it would happen naturally (although I doubt that)
A microorganism that feeds on plants with a high alkaloid content.
That would do so much for the world - and for me too! the neo-fascist caudillo government down here is FUELED by dope money (and 700 million hard earned US taxpayer dollars per year that the bush admin has been giving them)
sigh
I would die a happy man.
Ah, a man can at least dream . . .
SARAVA!
I ask this of all garage enthusiasts:
If you find something you're good at, that is useful and potentially lucrative, why keep it a hobby? Why be an amateur biologist or physicist, when you can be a professional? It's not that hard, and someone else will buy all the equipment for you.
There's a high school teacher in my area who is into nanotechnology. Rather than try and get together the $1 million equipment necessary to do nanotech research himself, he contacted a university physicist and arraigned to work in his lab during summers. If he wanted to, he could eventually leave his teaching job and be a full time researcher. Why don't more hobbyists do that kind of thing, even if it's just to learn the techniques and go start a company? What do you think the Google guys were doing at Stanford before they started Google?
The result is called your average voter.
Maybe even a multiple voter, in Chicago.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Looking at the NCBI database of DNA sequences and publications, there's a fair amount of research into the synthetic pathway that has been done. There's even a study that analyzes the DNA polymorphisms in the strains that produce THC versus the ones that don't. There might not be quite the info to produce the magic oranges, but there's more material towards that end than I would have thought.
Not now per se.. but give it 5 years. Around then there will be enough biobricks to make this more like programming than electronics. I also expect that, by then, you'll be able to do your design work entirely in silico, and send the compiled DNA sequences (at most a few plasmids) off to a lab to be synthesized, implanted into a specified bacterium, cloned, mailed to you - and for a cost that is affordable to hackers. Note that this is almost already here. Mr Gene will send you whatever DNA sequence you want for pretty cheap prices ($0.49/bp) but that needs to go down a whole lot more and they need to send the entire organism, not just the DNA they extract for you. Most their current customers don't want the whole organism, so they don't currently offer it, but I expect that could change as easily as getting the necessary paperwork done.
What kind of stuff can you make? Depends how creative you are. This year's iGEM Jamboree produced some amazing stuff.. and most every one of these projects had to make a new biobrick.. and that's the time consuming part, and cuts into the limited amount of time they had to get their entry in. If you're doing this in 5 years time it'll be hard to come up with a new biobrick that does something that hasn't been done. Instead, people will be working on reusable systems of biobricks.
This will all explode faster than computing technology ever did, because we're talking about machines that can manipulate the physical world here. If there's a single industry, 10 years from now, that doesn't include some kind of engineered biology then it'll be for a very good reason.. hopefully not legislative :)
How we know is more important than what we know.
This reminded me of an anarchy cookbook/manual I was reading at one time. One of the methods was biological warfare, where you would start off with a brew of relatively harmless bacteria and then start introducing anti-disinfectants to weed out the bacteria that were the strongest and then grow those - one would repeat this process until they were confident enough that when another person (possibly an enemy) when exposed would become either severely ill or die as a result.
happens @home
If Dr Frankenstein (FRAUN-KEN-STEEN) can do it in his castle, anyone can do it!
My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my Father! Prepare to die!
again, a very misleading title. this time I was expecting porn.
amateurs doing something so kinky it changes their dna.
It's not about fate, it's about character.
there be no shelter here, the frontline is everywhere!
In order to save the planet, we need to breed a Superhuman race. That is what i told her to get laid.
Whaaa?? Apple & Google were invented in the Garage? Without government handouts? I thought science couldn't progress (i.e. Stem Cell research) without government giveaways (I mean "grants").
How can anything have or ever have happened without your good friends in the government?
explain your decision.
is there a christmas sale with mod points ?
Read radical news here
As concerned as I am about terrorist, that's nothing compared to organized crime. All you have to do is look at malware to figure out where this is going. Some enterprising thug will create a very damaging bug and then offer to sell you the antidote. It doesn't have to be for people either. They could threaten our food supply also. And of course what happens when nature takes it's course and the little bug evolves around the antidote.
What could possibly go wrong.
I think you would need special incubators etc...
And a female egg to put the DNA in.
so I can't afford a garage, you insensitive clod!
"We should try to make science more sexy and more fun and more like a game." In context, I think that's the scariest quote I've heard all year. Somebody notify the SciFi channel: all those movies where a killer zombie (or vampire) virus is created by the government or a university lab? Nope, it was made in somebody's garage in LA.
Every time EA lets me play SPORE
I can remember as a kid playing around randomly with my chemistry set. Is this how the world ends, not with a bang nor a whimper, but with some kid saying, "Gee, I wonder what happens if I cross flesh eating bacteria with dandelion pollen"?
... of the automotive analogy.
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
The problem is "The Law of Unintended Consequences" is accellerated with human mobility.
A virus for example:
If 1 in 100,000,000,000 viruses mutates
and 1 in 100,000,000,000 of those are dangerous
and 1 in 100,000,000,000 of those dangerous results is infectious\communicable
and 1 in 100,000,000,000 of those can thrive long enough to infect
Then every 14 seconds on Earth a new way to die emerges (This is an old quote from a text book I had back in highschool). The fact it can't get anywhere usually means it dies out nearly immediately. That's nature. Now we add in human tinkering and the issue emerges that quickly an accident can get into the highly mobile human population.
Epp...
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-