Slashdot Mirror
DARPA Aims for Synthetic Life With a Kill Switch
jkinney3 writes to mention that DARPA's mad scientists have undertaken a new program designed to create synthetic organisms, complete with a "kill switch." The project, dubbed BioDesign, is dumping $6 million into "removing the randomness of evolutionary advancement" by creating genetically engineered masterpieces. "Of course, Darpa's got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they'll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create 'tamper proof' cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, 'similar to a serial number on a handgun.' And if that doesn't work, don't worry. In case Darpa's plan somehow goes horribly awry, they're also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch."
History has no evidence of any organism managing to evolve away from a lethal or maladaptive feature. The killswitch should persist in the population indefinitely.
Let's hope the kill switch is not a lysine dependency.
jkinney3 writes to mention that DARPA's mad scientists have undertaken a new program designed to create synthetic organisms
Ok, this stupid meme that everyone who works with applied biology is some sort a crazed wild eyed 'mad scientist' arrogantly playing God really needs to die. If you can't say something without that sort of emotional language, don't say anything at all.
Putting aside the sarcasm, any self-replicating technology, or technology that could be self-replicating, needs to have multiple safeguards in place to prevent over-replication. Unless you are willing to declare any such research absolutely off limits and enforce it somehow, then I think they should be credited with doing the right thing here.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
That what popped into my mind. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die."
It seems as though the "kill switch" option is an attempt to hard-wire an equivalent to Asimov's laws of robotics (obey all orders / don't harm humans / protect self).
However, Asimov's "I, Robot" stories were written to highlight how even something hard wired could have its pitfalls - and that was someone who wrote the stories and also the 'rules' behind the stories.
Be interesting to see how this one pans out.
"She's furniture with a pulse"
They should talk to Craig Venter. He'll beat DARPA by 5+ years.
How could it possibly go right?
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
When I start seeing developments like this, I wonder if we as a species are developing faster technologically than we are maturing as a civilisation.
Are we wise enough to use such a technology, if it were developed to it's full potential ?
I have a unusual vision problem which the NHS has failed to diagnose. Can you help? More at failedbythenhs.blogspot.com
I believe the movie you're looking for starred Harrison Ford and Rutger Hauer.
Just because it's been done before doesn't mean it can't be remade with more special effects, a higher budget and worse actors.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Sure sounds like it to me.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
The killswitch needs to be incorporated into critical sections of the organisms DNA to give it even a chance of working. The deadly gene needs to have a beneficial purpose, or (even without selective pressure) the section that codes for the killswitch will randomly mutate with no adverse effect on the organism.
To put it another way, a car alarm built into your rear bumper is not nearly as useful as one built into the ignition.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
You realize that without DARPA you'd not be whining about defense spending on the Internet, right?
[citation needed]
There's a reason Medicare and Medicaid exist, and it's precisely because the poor *could NOT* afford health care.
The idiots who look at the past through rose-colored glasses really piss me off -- there were no "good old days". The government programs we have today were largely the result of a problem needing to be addressed. What, you think that the magical budget fairy appeared and said, "Hey everybody! Let's give money for health care to people who can already afford it!"
And there is something fundamentally retarded about someone who believes that an unregulated system would result in a better outcome. Newsflash, retard -- when entities are allowed to act completely in their own self-interest, they do so, to the detriment of others. The insurance industry is a private tax on health care (a portion of everything lines someone's pockets). Why shouldn't the beneficiary be the general public (via a federal system) instead of a small group of extremely wealthy people?
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Before the government got involved, health care in the US was affordable to even the poor.
Leeching out bad humors was less expensive than an MRI is.
Of course your statement is untrue. It was a lack of available healthcare that caused medicare and medicade to be enacted to fill the gap.
There is something supremely retarded about you kids. You see government fail miserably at almost everything it does, yet you somehow believe the solution is more government control.
Perhaps because we see that non-government-controlled healthcare in the US is unaffordable, and we notice that it is private healthcare charging the government those high prices. We likely also notice that things like that law that makes it illegal for medicare to bargain for cheaper drugs was written by private healthcare companies.
More likely though, we just notice that everyone else has cheaper (often by half), more effective, universal healthcare than we do.
Please feel encouraged to mod me off-topic, right after you do the same to the parent. This isn't an article on healthcare or right-wing ranting about a time that never existed.
Listen. Your anecdotal claims backed up by zero statistics are surely fascinating. And I'm so excited that here in the "science" section of slashdot, hearsay is apparently super awesome.
If you want to go back to 50s medicine, you're welcome to it. People who have heart problems can die twenty years earlier. Severe forms of diabetes can go back to being lethal. Patients with mental illnesses can be lobotomized and put in a walled garden somewhere. Let's just throw out the massive advances in medical technology just so you can make some cheap, baseless, and most importantly, false political points.
Medical care is now highly specialized, with many, many fields, staffed by many different doctors, and I can guarantee you that that leading oncologists, heart surgeons, and neurosurgeons will not visit your house for an extra fifty cents. Sorry, but your childhood fantasy is just a childhood fantasy.
Out in the rest of civilization, the best way to cope with the increase of medical technology is to socialize it to reduce overhead. This is because it is very difficult to incentivize keeping someone healthy in a pure market. Without regulations, companies have no reason not to charge you outrageously for everything, since the cost you're willing to pay to live his virtually no limit.
SARS is claimed as being a case where things in the lab screwed up and someone become infected.
Swine Flu was also apparently mishandled, the virus being recreated from a previous similar outbreak decades ago.
You got any evidence for either of those?
*sigh* back to work...
Means they're below me on the food chain.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
I don’t think monopolies are nearly as much of a problem in a free market as opposed to one that’s been heavily regulated.
Look around the world to see the results. Strong regulatory states dominate GDP per capita. This is because a powerful regulatory body steadies the market as it inevitably moves through it's cycles.
these arguments come down to a moral one: is it okay to forcibly take from one person in order to provide a basic level of care for another? I don’t think that’s morally sound, in fact, I think it’s horribly unjust
Ah. So, building roads is okay. Rail, airports, municipal buildings, all fine. Fighter jets, tanks, helicopter gunships, and we're still on the moral high ground. And the second an orphaned child receives state funded care, you think it's "horribly unjust." You're really just full of shit, aren't you?
You will always be forced to make unconscionable choices: who deserves to bear the burden of supporting the others? Why shouldn’t we take equal amounts from everyone, why should some bear a higher burden than others from a moral perspective? What do you define as the bare minimum that everyone deserves?
So, the more unconscionable choice is to decide to let your countrymen suffer because you won't come off an extra 10% on your taxes? Do you have any idea what happens to a society when wealth inequality leads to starvation, or what an economy looks like when a vast majority of the country is illiterate, uneducated, and wallowing in poverty?
If a poor person needs an $1,000,000 surgery in order to survive, should he get it or not? If that person needs $10,000,000, should he get it? Or should we just let him die? At what point is it okay to let a person die? I would never want to be the one making these decisions because I don’t believe there are right answers here. They are all wrong.
If poor people aren't worth keeping alive, why not sponsor hunts like the good old days in the Wild West? We could offer $1,000 for the head of any minority (since they're most likely to be poor), or offer them $1,000 in exchange for getting sterilized so they won't breed. I'm sure none of the major businesses would suffer if the lowest wage they could pay an employee was $15 an hour, since all of the people who earned a minimum wage are now dead. I'm sure prices wouldn't go up a bit. And I'm sure you would never get caught up in that cycle, where the bottom 20% of the population is wiped out, jobs are cut, more people sink to the "poor" level, and another round of head bounties begins.
I'll get serious just for another moment. Here is a list of the most expensive uninsured hospital expenditures. The top one translates to about $52,000 per procedure, which is an AMI/heart attack, for a total of 2.08 billion. The next is a pregnancy and delivery, at $9,300 per person, for a total of 2.04 billion. And the costs go down from there. As far as I can tell, the total cost of uninsured care which doesn't get paid is $40 billion per year. So, less than three months of war spending, or half of what we spend a year on cigarettes.
That's a fine moral argument you're making. If you're a complete lunatic.