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The Economist Calls For "Open Source" Biology
Socguy writes "With the announcement earlier this week that a team of researchers has created the first artificial life, The Economist has been pondering the implications of what this brave new frontier means when the power to build living organisms filters through to anyone with a laptop. Traditional methods of restricting and regulating dangerous technology have more or less worked so far, but The Economist thinks that this time may be different. They are calling for an open system where the 'good guys' can see and counter any dangerous organisms that are released, accidentally or otherwise."
great idea, how about open source economics too.
And makes too much out of 'synthetic biology'. For every nasty, dangerous issue that purely synthetic biology is faced with, the same issues occur with our current technology. Want to weaponize an E. coli - you could do that with current recombinant techniques. Creating the sequence de novo won't necessarily make the problem more dangerous - or even easier.
TFA worries about some time in the future when some psychotic teenager with a laptop and a DNA synthesizer can dream up some evil little critter and theorizes that 'open sourcing' of all DNA sequences would make dealing with this scenario easier. I don't see that. Even if Kim Jun Il's minions manage to do create a Micheal Crichton class bug having the 'code' would not make stabilizing the problem a whole lot easier. Especially if you could grow the bug and then sequence the thing. (Sequencing is and likely will be much easier than synthesis).
Besides ol' Kim isn't likely to upload his code to the repository, is he?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Open source, in of itself, is somewhat agnostic to these quintessentially biblical terms. Open source is neither good nor evil, it just exists in a neutral state and it is up to the mind of the user whether it will be used for beneficial purposes or harmful purposes. Early FUD spreaders tried to capitalize on the fact that something open source would be less secure because source code could be examined for flaws and exploited by those wishing to do harm. The counter argument goes that security weaknesses are inherrent because software is a human innovation and thus error-prone and source code availability can lead to faster patching of flawed code because more people are examining it. The same can be said for biology - there are always people that will try to engineer a harmful life form based on what is out there but the more knowledge there is in the public space, the faster the harm can be subverted.
People have already installed Linux on badgers.
For many years students with education in biology really could have let some horrors lose upon the world. Thankfully those who know how tend to be stable enough not to want to pursue such negative goals. After all, it takes a certain sum of stability and direction to reach upwards in the universities. These folks tend not to want to do harm.
With synthetic life possible little has changed yet. Obviously this area can yield wonderful products to support and cure the ills of mankind.
As to regulation of the technology that will never be available in any substantial way. The cost of watching all of the peoples' efforts to create new and different things has nothing to support it unless national economies are very, very robust. Worse yet, science that is not done here will be done elsewhere. A bright student in Ethiopia is as likely to let the genie out of the bottle than a goofy student in California. So just where would the money come from to watch the people all over the world and study their work deeply enough to predict real hazards?
But so do most slashdorks too.
I've long thought that THIS is how intelligent life destroys itself. Basically, technology increases until the power to destroy all life can be used by a single insane individual.
Consider this. Let's say we have biology down to the level where a very intelligent person can design a lifeform using algorithmic programs. This person decides to destroy all human life, because they hate mankind (picture some enviro-nut). So he designs a pathogen that spreads through the air, and hides in the body. He wants it to spread everywhere, so he puts a 20 year fuse on it. After 20 years, the pathogen instantly kills the host. There's no way we would know about it, and there's nothing we could do about it.
Think no one would do that? Look at the Unibomber. If there's anyone who could've done it had he had access to the technology, it would have been that guy. I had a high-genius IQ. He was crazy. And he hated people.
Once we have this technology, all it takes is one nut to wipe out everyone. And honestly, I don't see how we can stop it. I hate to be pessimistic, but the inevitable march of technology means it will get cheaper and eventually fall in the hands of a nut.
The only things I can think of that can save us are full-body scanners that could catch anything trying to hide (fairly unlikely), or possibly real A.I. computers that are vastly more intelligent than human, and could instantly analyze diseases and find cures. Or perhaps a full-blown cure-all for mental illness. I don't know. But I'm fairly resigned to the fact that this is how the human race will end.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Maybe we will ask ourselves, one day, why we didn't make a backup of nature.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
You must not be from Texas. They've already done that to history and have made great swipes at doing it to biology as well.
"Weaponize" E. coli? Were you planning to crap on all the produce in the supermarket? Bioweapons are typically airborne. Weaponizing anthrax isn't even a genetic engineering process.
it's an interesting development to be sure. the economist is stretching however when it claims world shattering paradigm shifts in the hysterical voice of a chicken with it's head cut off.
bugs such as ebola already exist. the black death was the nuclear apocalypse of it's time, and had nothing to do with synthetic life. monsanto currently manipulates biology for profit in heinous ways, yet the screams of the world don't seem very loud on this one, nor do they call for 'open source crops' despite a variety of evidence that the product is harmful.
we still don't have a clue what most combinations of a,t,g, and c mean yet we'll go ahead and call this collection of lego blocks synthetic life? all the 'junk' dna we all carry that eclipses the stuff we 'think' works in the human body for regular processes? we haven't a clue, maybe it just adds bulk to the system so we aren't 2 inch tall humans.
when we can't explain the difference between worms and humans as identified functions we are not playing god, we are playing ridiculous.
Making something open sourced or putting most things in the public domain does not remove the ability to hide things. Anyone who wants to use this technology in private will be able to do so regardless of the communities openness. TFA seems to miss this fact.
But what's to say the Bad Guy will? I mean when Kim Jong-Il IV creates his monster bug to wipe out all humanity (excepting his descendants and a few breeding women), why would he Open Source it?
Saying "when the power to build living organisms filters through to anyone with a laptop" is like saying, "when the power to install Linux filters through with anyone with a laptop". It will never happen because both systems require you to have some training and education that "anyone" will never be willing to obtain before installing.
Traditional methods of restricting and regulating dangerous technology have more or less worked so far, but the Economist thinks that this time may be different. They are calling for an open system where the 'good guys' can see and counter any dangerous organisms that are released, accidentally or otherwise.
Microorganisms aren't quite like software where vulnerabilities can be easily discovered from source code. Sure, having complete genomic and proteomic data makes finding potential vulnerabilities easier, but drug discovery and development is still extremely difficult and expensive even when such data already exists. A better solution would be to engineer susceptibility to a number of antimicrobials (both artificial and naturally occurring), say 6-9, which could be used in combinations of 2 or 3 which are rotated to prevent the development of resistance. This would be trivial to do from a technical standpoint. Even better would be to include dozens artificial and highly prominent surface markers into any artificial genome that could be used to quickly develop highly effective and selective vaccines should the need arise.
The article is way too optimistic and as expected weak on science. They start out with the old mindset of each bacterial line being completely seperate, totally missing the extensive lateral gene transfers that have spread such wonders as antibiotic resistance and the toxins that created O157...
And follow it up with assumption that knowing the code makes it so much easier to figure out how to stop or fix any problem organisms arise. We still barely understand protein folding, and then only with the help of supercomputers.
Oh, and then you add a funny thing called evolution to add random mutations...
Life is a massively parallel ongoing experiment, with the current ecological terrain/surface the result of countless battles in multiple dimensions. And we are continually making the terrain more and more fragile through the chemicals we spew and spray all about the globe with hardly a clue of their impact let alone their combinatorial influence...
Unfortunately most humans are not saints, but lazy, greedy and sometimes outright paranoid and murderous. Expecting morals and miracles to stop mistakes is foolish.
It's aliiive !!!!
It doesn't matter if he does or doesn't. We can just capture a specimen and sequence it, and because we open-sourced everything else, we'll understand everything else well enough to work against it. TFA is pretty clear about that. Remember, in biology, RTFS == RTFB, and extracting the DNA and sequencing it currently costs about $10000 US for a human, which is a much larger genome than anyone working with a pathogenic strain would go after.
... a similar story on Slashdot talking about open sourcing the battle against disease, with the concept that "with enough eyes, all bugs become shallow", and ultimately how there was the concern that it would create a new type of malware that could do a lot more damage than the rest of the world could offset. I mean, even when we're trying to do good, we can make things that are utter poison... imagine if some borderline nutbar in a university lab got dumped by his girlfriend and decided to take revenge on women in general by making an airborne pathogen that would leave men intact. Sure, you could make an antidote with enough people and effort, but how many people wold die in the meantime? We see the battle between dedicated coders already with DRM and DRM-cracking... if that were to happen in the bio-tech space, it would be an utter disaster.
The Economist is right, to a point, but they seem to have more faith in humanity than humanity deserves.
(disclosure: that Slashdot story years ago led me to research and write a novel about this type of scenario, so this is near and dear to my heart)
The world's only surviving livewriter.
Thst was my thought too. You don't see much malware code on Sourceforge, do you?? Why on earth would someone opensource their biological weapon??
While the concept is good from a research POV, it's hardly going to save us from a nutcase armed with a hacked copy of Recombinant DNA For Dummies.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
If women open-sourced their biology, any geek could have any woman they wanted, as many times as they wanted!
And if you're worried about STDs, just compare Windows to Linux. Which has the most infections?
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
Homeless programmers with pickets that read "Will code food for food".
Ezekiel 23:20
Just an Interesting Sci-Fi book by Frank Herbert(the one who wrote Dune) about what can happen if Bioengineering becomes more affordable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Plague
Look at all the database projects that have huge lists of experimental data. In fact, for some projects, if you are government funded you must publish your results into databases.
I don't see how it can get more open than that.
I'm waiting for someone to synthesize one of these buggers to turn sugar into THC-class compounds, or maybe opiates.
Hilarity will then ensue.
If there is any open-source calling for synthetic biology, it should be in the vein of ensuring a free exchange of novel biological information. We are at a threshold of biotechnology, where the future can either be a restrictive science owned and controlled by Venture et al. or open source and freely available for others to develop upon and move forward in a contributive rather than competitive fashion. And open source is already inherent in science based on natural discovery. For novel invention and technology, think creative commons or GPL but applied to biotechnology.
'And makes too much out of 'synthetic biology'. For every nasty, dangerous issue that purely synthetic biology is faced with, the same issues occur with our current technology. Want to weaponize an E. coli - you could do that with current recombinant techniques. Creating the sequence de novo won't necessarily make the problem more dangerous - or even easier.'
Which is pretty much the most insightful comment in this thread. We've been manipulating bacteria and viruses for decades. Arbitrary genes encoding any nasty protein that takes your fancy can be inserted into a wide range of microorganisms using existing technology. The Venter group's work is a fantastic technical achievment, but does not increase the risk of a terrorist group or rogue state developing a biological weapon. Far easier for them to tweak an existing pathogen that billions of years of evolution have exquisitely adapted to infecting humans. Easier still (and much more plausible) to take an 'off the shelf' bug like Anthrax and weaponise it without the need for any genetic manipulation at all.
I'm also curious about how the writer of TFA thinks molecular biology research actually works. The sequences of any number of pathogens, down to the individual genes that make them virulent, are freely available on the net from sites like NCBI, making them rather easier to get hold of than The Economist's own paywalled 'premium content'. Pretty much everything else that has been sequenced is out there too, including the Venter group's synthetic mycoplasma genome, which can be found right here:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/296455217
In what way is this not already 'open source'?
I would seem that this quote from TFA could sum it all, but stating that "most bacteria opt for an easy life breaking down organic material that is already dead" clearly shows that the author has not grasped that Life cannot be studied separately from Evolution and Survival.
Billions of years ago, Evolution has started from such bacteria and led to us humans, for whom the "easy life" option is to "break down organic material" that is alive and well, preferably members of our own species.
From Evolution's point of view, Cannibalism and Capitalism are the two sides of the survival coin. Once as a kid (or even as a baby and some say even in the womb) you realize this, this knowledge indeed cannot be unlearned.
The real reason to worry about synthetic life is that you cannot just code into its DNA Asimov's laws of robotics, and even if you do, Evolution will actively and inevitably erase them. Several millenia of failure to achieve the same for humans provide ample evidence that this "arrow of knowledge", together with the arrow of time and the arrow of war is deeply programmed in our DNA.
To complete the above amateur attempt at a dialectic approach, another worrying fact is that Life itself ultimately seems to be based on both learning and unlearning. Do take the time to read about selective perception and just before you go to sleep, take the time to think why sleep is so necessary for Life. It's not just garbage collection. It's garbage in, garbage out. And no, garbage cannot be uncollected.
I just read "Oryx and Crake", you insensitive pigoon!
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Why the Future Doesn't Need Us
it's relevant...
You thought jellyfish were a problem; any science fiction writer could sketch out twelve different scenarios were out-of-control bacteria either eat up all plastic, mutate , then eat everything organic. Or Viagra bacteria escape into our drinking water.. Those are the funny scenarios.