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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?
Maybe we will ask ourselves, one day, why we didn't make a backup of nature.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
I say spread out into space. If we only have a few thousand people per rock (think rings of Jupiter and Saturn), a terrorist can only wipe out a few thousand people. Spreading anything throughout the entire solar system is impractical - most of it will fall into the sun/a gas giant and the rest will break up on collision at over a kilometer per second. Delivery mechanisms like missiles can be detected and shot down with lasers (that takes care of thermonuclear war destroying everything as well).
Let's say your nefarious person invents a machine that turns 1/2 of the earth into antimatter. What would we do then?
Yes, I'm saying your magic bug is magic, it doesn't just get to hide in the body for 20 years, it has to hide in the body for 20 years while avoiding the host immune system and competing for resources with other stuff living on the body, and then it has to be 100% effective.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
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?
Except there are numerous examples of bugs that lie dormant in humans before triggering. That's why they are able to spread. It's an evolutionary success mechanism.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
That's not going to work, unless the space colony gets no visitors in that 20 year fuse time. And even if they didn't, it's highly likely they will still be dependent on the Earth for some sort of critical supplies. A dead Earth probably means a dead colony.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
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.
*snip*
There's no way we would know about it, and there's nothing we could do about it.
indeed, this has been predicted as early as the 1950s, and some of our brighter thinkers have even come up with potential solutions 50 years ago.
Unfortunately I think we as a species, or even a collection of nations, will not do what is required to prevent damages and our extinction before it is too late.
The article below by Eric Drexler is specifically in regards to nanotechnology at a level of full remote control or programming ability. We are of course still far off from that, but two things we should agree on are 1) Engineered biology has similar risks to all of humanity, and 2) short of an extinction event, humanity WILL progress with technology.
http://e-drexler.com/d/06/00/EOC/EOC_Chapter_12.html#section07of10
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.
Name the one that is closest to staying non-virulent for 20 years and then being lethal.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
The obvious example is AIDS. But you're missing the point. The point isn't that that there exists a natural pathogen with these attributes, the point is whether it's possible to *engineer* a pathogen, and I don't see any reason that once we have genetic engineering down to a computer-like language that we can't do it.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
... 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
By the time we have the technology for that, we'll also have smart people thinking about how to detect that, and as much as you'd like your pathogen to be both airborne and to hide in the body and kill the host instantly, that is not an easy thing to accomplish. And smarter people, coordinated in teams, will have had years to build up defenses against such a pathogen.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Artificial, or just naturally advancing superbug-biology is a serious threat to mankind and all other higher life forms, and could be one of the reasons that we don't see much intelligent life trying to talk to us from outer space. The unity of multicellular lifeforms - together we stand alone we fall - can provide to specialization necessary where braincells get developed, and in exchange for food, they provide the other cells with strategic decisions, such as where to run. And boy, is maintaining a large brain expensive, or what? 1/5th of power consumption in the body is by braincells, when mass is 1/20th only. In any case, you and I are multicellular organisms, and our constituent cells, together, through cooperation, specialization, and code of ethics, seem to be more successful than single celled ones, at survival. But the battle is not final yet, it may just be that lower, disorganized single celled organisms evolve that wipe out all the multicellular ones. Imagine the natural evolution of a virus that figures out a way to attack and destroy all eukaryote cells. Even if it's just a human specific disease. Especially with air travel these days, epidemics can spread very quickly and quarantining is difficult.
The answer to such issues is simple - "Biosphere 2", and similar, fully hermetically isolated biospheres, that have contact with the outside world only through an energy exchange, but no matter exchange. No disease can get in or out. A prime example is space stations. Going to space and successfully living as pockets of fully isolated life is an almost mandatory security issue for mankind and the rest of life, whether it's about a nuclear holocaust, or artificial or natural superbug/epidemic-disease evolution. When you achieve that, then you can say, there, single celled life forms can't build a space station, and put a jungle/biosphere in each of them. Then you can say that the survival guarantee of all life, including single and multicellular, could not have been possible without multicellular, that multicellular is worth it. The issue is divergent evolutions, where each pocket gives you different lifeforms given a few million years, but the danger of extra variety is preferable to almost certain doom.
Also creating pockets of life like this, and sending them off to distant worlds, such as Voyager 1 and 2, may buy enough time so that when AI smarter than us gets developed, and hunts us, they are limited by the speed of light, and can't catch us, or at least we get a century til they catch up with us, and can deliberate in the meantime on whether to program even smarter AI to defend, in those 100 years, at the risk of it hunting us too, but hopefully not. I don't know about you, but having to choose between a scenario where there are no humans left in the universe being destroyed by the AI created by humans, vs. one spacestation making it very far, and escaping by sheer luck, with people living for trillions of years from now, I would prefer the 2nd scenario. It may seem like aggression, aggressive conquering the Universe, by exploration, like Columbus going to the new world, why we can't just stay put where we are and live happily, but it can be done without aggression, especially if the universe is mostly empty of other life, unlike in the case of Columbus.
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
This person decides to destroy all human life, because they hate mankind (picture some enviro-nut).
Or, someone might decide to wipe out all human life AND sea life (picture some oil executive).
And smarter people, coordinated in teams, will have had years to build up defenses against such a pathogen.
That's like saying that once we have nuclear weapons, "smarter people, coordinated in teams, will have had years to build up defenses against such a" weapon. I don't see a defense against a nuclear bomb on the horizon. Our only defense (so far) is the fact that it takes government-level resources to make one (and not a single insane individual), and severe international restrictions. And I don't know about you, but I'm uncomfortable with having an insane individual in charge of North Korea right now. (But at least he doesn't have humanity-destroying power, only millions-of-people destroying power)
But I digress. It's always easier to destroy than to defend against destruction. And remember, the pathogen doomsday aggressor only has to be successful once. The pathogen doomsday defender has to be successful EVERY TIME, or else it's game over, and there's no second chance.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The reason is that our bodies are incredibly hostile environments for pathogens.
You cite HIV as the 'obvious' example, yet one of the reasons it is so hard to deal with medically is that it mutates at a very high rate, so it would be very difficult to tie it together with a clockwork timebomb. Influenza has also proved difficult to treat, and it mutates so fast that ~80% of each generation is unable to infect the host that it was made in.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
probably. but the point of the article in the economist is not open source vs public domain. It's whether a government should legislate the morality of synth-bio. And their point is that even if it should attempt to, any limitations on research should be minimal. The open source analogy is a little weak, but the idea is certainly commendable.
-- All this knowledge is giving me a raging brainer.
People have invested tons in nuclear defense. The US has made many billions of dollars worth of investments into nuclear defense, and to ensuring that a lone actor CANNOT in fact initiate a nuclear assault that could destroy all of humanity. Even an organized terrorist group with a large number of members has been unable to acquire even a single nuclear weapon.
We have a lot of very smart people working on how to prevent precisely the crazy bio engineer scenario, and I think there is reason to hope. We can track who buys the equipment, raw materials, etc. We can build detectors that detect new organisms. We can build stockpiles of antivirals, antimicrobials, etc (the difficulty of building something that will evade all of our arsenal of anti-life weapons is daunting). There are lots of ways to fight this, and there is a lot of money being poured into doing so.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
The open source model is already being applied to disease control
Scientists are able to see the benefits of working together without The Economist telling them that it's a good idea.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
'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'?
There's a very high probability that virus would cease to exist in short order. Evolution favors viruses that preserve their hosts at least until they've had ample opportunity to spread. Even artificially developed viruses, not subject to the pressures of natural selection at the time of their creation, must still replicate and spread to cause epidemics and will be influenced by selective pressure in the environment.
However, consider the range of natural viruses and the incredible diversity of symptoms that they can cause. What worries me is not that some nutjob will create a virus which merely kills people - that sort of thing is swift, obvious, susceptible to existing protocols for controlling infectious diseases, and probably self-limiting - but that some nutjob will create a virus that alters people in subtle ways, body or mind (Vernor Vinge explores the theme of a mind-control virus in one of his sci-fi novels, Rainbows End (sic)). When a virus infects your cells it can write whatever code its creator wants into them. However difficult doing any high-level coding with this may initially be, "libraries" will be developed and such things will eventually be as easy as programming a computer is today. In fact, this would be awesome if not for the threat it represents (and if not for the fact that people are going to do some really immature if not outright harmful things with that ability - think a real life version of the Spore creature library). It would increase biodiversity tremendously from the outset, though common "library" sequences would likely be more or less homogeneous.
In any case, I do not think a designer virus would spell the end of all humanity, although it could cause widespread devastation. For any single pathogen there is a segment of the population which is, for some reason or another, by cause of some mutation or another, simply not susceptible to it. It would be extremely challenging for a virus writer to take the level of diversity among all humanity into account. We evolve too. What's more, designer viruses would also enable us to begin building our own defenses against such things if the researchers can keep up with the bio kiddiez.
As for advanced AI presenting a threat, I'm not as concerned about that one: I don't think an advanced AI would want to kill us any more than we want to kill off the chimps. If anything it would want to study our behavior - if it's that advanced we're no threat to it, and if it's not we still have a chance of stopping it.
None of this is in disagreement with your argument that establishing distant colonies would be beneficial for the robustness of humanity and of life, BTW. That's still the best long term solution.
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.
... Influenza has also proved difficult to treat, and it mutates so fast that ~80% of each generation is unable to infect the host that it was made in.
Thankyou maxume
I had never figured out why the 1918 flu went away, why didn't it keep coming back year after year wiping out millions; so simple once you know!
It mutated itself out of existence, and then it was gone!
One more piece in my model of "Life the Universe & everything" slotted nicely into place.
No. You can't look at my Sig; it's mine, and I'm not showing you.
I'm just reading "The Great Influenza" by John M. Barry. About 1/3 of the way through, a great read so far.
I went back and checked, to make sure I wasn't misleading you terribly, it turns out that the figure given in the book is that 99% of the viruses are not viable, not 80% (but 100,000 to 1 million individual viruses are released for each cell that is infected).
Another significant factor is that survivors usually have significant immunity, even to later, mutated strains.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
When dealing with infectious diseases in general, and viri especially, you need to make a distinction between infecting and pathogenic (http://www.answers.com/topic/infection - notice the word may in the first definition)).
When someone has Influenza, most, if not all, of the people around him will be infected, but few will develop an overt disease. For the virus this is a good thing, because people who are infected and are asymptomatic (or mildly symptomatic) pass on the virus better than someone who dies from the virus.
The Influenza virus mutates a lot, but it still very infectious - just not very pathogenic (disease causing). On top of that, very few of those infected died, with about a 3% mortality rate in the 1918 pandemic and less than 1% in the H1N1 pandemic ( http://general-medicine.jwatch.org/cgi/content/full/2009/521/1?q=etoc_jwgenmed ).
Whenever in an argument, remember this.
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...
I say spread out into space. If we only have a few thousand people per rock (think rings of Jupiter and Saturn), a terrorist can only wipe out a few thousand people. Spreading anything throughout the entire solar system is impractical - most of it will fall into the sun/a gas giant and the rest will break up on collision at over a kilometer per second. Delivery mechanisms like missiles can be detected and shot down with lasers (that takes care of thermonuclear war destroying everything as well).
But what about the much cheaper approach of biological weapons? Or even just trade embargoes?
Unless it's led by fanatic isolationists, human presence in space is always going to be part of a strongly linked web of travel and trade, and any social, biological or economic disaster is likely to spread to all of them just like wars and plagues have always spread throughout Earth empires.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
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.