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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."
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!