Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

The Spread of Do-It-Yourself Biotech

Posted by Soulskill on from the not-just-for-terrorists-and-governments-anymore dept.

zrbyte writes "Are you an electronics hobbyist or a garden shed tinkerer? If so, then move aside, because there's a new kid on the block: the DIY biotechnologist. The decreasing price of biotech instrumentation has made it possible for everyday folks (read: biotech geeks) with a few thousand dollars to spare to equip their garages and parents' basements with the necessary 'tools of the trade.' Some, like PCR machines, are available on eBay; other utensils are hacked together from everyday appliances and some creativity. For example: microscopes out of webcams and armpit E. coli incubators. Nature News has an article on the phenomenon, describing the weird and wonderful fruits of biotech geek ingenuity, like glow-in-the-dark yogurt. One could draw parallels with the early days of computer building/programming. It may be that we're looking at a biotech revolution, not just from the likes of Craig Venter, but from Joe-next-door hacking away at his E. coli strain. What are the Steve Wozniaks of biotech working on right now?"

25 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. Just great... by KarrdeSW · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Now I have to worry about the my idiot roommate engineering a virus that'll cause the zombie apocalypse?

    1. Re:Just great... by interkin3tic · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You should be more worried about your idiot roommate not washing his hands and getting you sick the old fashioned way. It's unlikely that even if he tried, he could make a disease more lethal than what nature has produced before.

      By the way, those people who think HIV was created in a government lab seriously underestimate how cleverly made HIV is. It's way beyond our best evil geniuses.

    2. Re:Just great... by bhartman34 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      It's unlikely that even if he tried, he could make a disease more lethal than what nature has produced before.

      It's not the idea of someone trying to make a disease that worries me. What worries me is the idea of someone moroning it up and accidentally producing something dangerous because they don't know what they're doing. The well-meaning idiot scenario is almost certainly more likely than the evil genius scenario.

    3. Re:Just great... by andrea.sartori · · Score: 2, Funny

      The parallel with computer programming looks even more appropriate now that I read this.

      --
      Mostly harmless.
    4. Re:Just great... by wizardforce · · Score: 3, Interesting

      As a biologist let me say that that is ridiculous. It's like creating a highly efficient piece of malware on accident. However, back to the GP's post: it doesn't need to be deadlier than nature; nature after all, has evolved organisms that are overkill- it just needs to be mildly effective to be a problem.

      --
      Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
    5. Re:Just great... by IICV · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Not very likely. Evolution is like a trillion monkeys hammering away at potential genomes; if creating one that was viciously deadly to humans were easy, it probably would have happened already. One more monkey hammering away at it won't change much.

    6. Re:Just great... by bhartman34 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's not a question of efficiency, necessarily. It's a question of possible unintended consequences. It's fairly difficult to write a highly-efficient piece of malware. It's fairly easy to accidentally do something destructive. It's why people are not encouraged to run programs as root on their machines. Do I think someone's going to accidentally create a superbug through their own tinkering? No. But can you tell me it's impossible someone gets a hold of a pathogen and it doesn't accidentally escape, or worse, mutate into a different strain, and then escape? That's where I see the potential for danger.

    7. Re:Just great... by HungryHobo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      How many people do you know who accidentally tripped while coding an application and unintentionally programmed a virulent computer virus?
      Bio viruses are orders of magnitude more complex, it's exceedingly unlikely to happen by random chance.

    8. Re:Just great... by HungryHobo · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The *mutate and escape* scenario is far more likely to happen at your local farmyard as regular old viruses cross speciese back and forth mutating as they go.
      Yet I don't ever see people terrified that a farmer will accidentally kill us all.

    9. Re:Just great... by jbengt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You a optimistically assuming that the "author" of the virus (software or bioware) starts from scratch. More likely they play with an existing virus and unthoughtfully modify it in a way that make it worse for people, even if also worse for the virus' purposes.

  2. Glow-in-the-dark yogurt? by migloo · · Score: 5, Funny

    Glow-in-the-dark slippers would be more useful.

  3. Re:BAD idea by durrr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    What happens when your neighbor releases his new organism by accident?

    You'll end up with green flourescent beer and bread.
    Seriously though, microbes are not rabid dogs, most of them are not virulent, most of them don't live in humans, and even if they do they have quite a few problems before they can colonize you. And if you're to suffer from them they need to produce some kind of toxins. And if you're to wreak havoc with them you need to weaponize them, and if you're at this stage you've probably done enough to see a FBI-sponsored surge in the profits of the local take-away coffee chain.

  4. Fluorescent, not bioluminescent by Scrameustache · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'd like to point out that the ambiguous "glow in the dark" quality mentioned here refers to the green fluorescent protein (GFP), a protein which exhibits bright green fluorescence when exposed to blue light. This isn't the good kind of glow in the dark where it produces its own light, it's the inferior "black light makes it glow" variety.

    --

    You can't take the sky from me...

  5. biotch? by donnyspi · · Score: 2, Funny

    Am I the only one who read this headline as "The Spread of Do-It-Yourself, Biotch!"

  6. soon to follow... by AffidavitDonda · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I could accept Biohackers, but the next step would be Bioscriptkiddies...

  7. Re:BAD idea by bhartman34 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    History is replete with examples of people doing things because they could, without considering the question of whether or not they should. It's almost certain that someone will rush headlong into a project like this without adequately preparing for contingencies. It's no different than someone buying a gun and being lax about gun safety.

  8. I do a little of this by elewton · · Score: 2, Insightful
    I get loads of old lab equipment from the 80s that's being thrown out now, but still work pretty well or require minor repair. Many are more of a hassle than modern equipment, but some of it what I was using when I was in college.
    I don't GM organisms, but selectively breed fungi.

    I believe that it is only a matter of little time until someone releases a harmless virus into the population that contains the first 13 primes or an ASCII message. When this is discovered, the population will correctly be concerned about home-made bioweapons.
    Even if the Biocracker isn't smart enough to engineer a new, virulent plague (and they will eventually, hopefully after targeted anti-virals are practically synthesized quickly) they could impair an old deadly virus to only be effective on specific immunodeficiencies in a cell line of an enermy.
    The Biotech world of the future will be a world of wonders and horrors.

  9. Re:BAD idea by bhartman34 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Just as a quick clarification: I don't mean to sound anti-gun. Everyone has a legal right to own a gun if they want to (subject to certain restrictions). I was just pointing out that there are people who don't take it quite as seriously as they should. Regardless of whether you think guns kill people or people kill people, it's undeniable that a person with a gun can kill people, so guns should be treated with due care.

  10. Ultravision by gurps_npc · · Score: 3, Interesting
    The human eye contains rods and cones to see color. Rods detect light at 498nm frequeny, short cones peak at 420 (purple), medium cones peak at 534 nm (green) and long cones peak at 564 nm (red).

    But birds have cones that can see far greater. Some birds can see as low as 375 nm. This lets them see ultraviolet.

    How hard would it be to find the gene that lets birds make this kind of cone cell and add it to a human? Breed for UV colorblind birds, compare their DNA with birds that can see UV, sample the DNA and try it out on a monkey first.

    P.S. the human lens tends to block light at frequencies of around 380, so we might only be able to see down to 385 nm, but that is still a boost of 35 nm, greater than the difference between green and red.

    --
    excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
    1. Re:Ultravision by durrr · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Adding more color pigments within the range of normal color vision is also beneficial in that it allows for more subtle nuances of existing colors to be discerned.

  11. Re:don't see the link by Hatta · · Score: 4, Insightful

    You underestimate the amount of low hanging fruit left. And with the progress of technology, there's even more low hanging fruit now than there was 30 years ago. Yes, you need large grants if you're doing cutting edge research. But if you're doing something that's been ignored by researchers because it's not directly connected to a disease process, for instance, then you might find it relatively cheap to produce novel results.

    --
    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
  12. Re:Scary by durrr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What makes you think we can do better?

    Ignorance. Having no actual detail knowledge of the process of genetic engineering will make you assume that there's a single well known gene encoding for Spore-forming-antibiotic-resistant-universal-substrate-utilizing-bacterioviral-immune-system-bypassing-Death-plague.

    And they are right, every idiot will now be able to mix two ingredients together to create a pathogen so vile and soul-wrenchingly evil that the sun will go nova the very second that they open the lid of their petri dish. Really!

  13. DIY Insulin - A Challenge! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I like to do things myself: make bread and cheese, build my own computers and do landscaping, build sheds, chop firewood, knit, sew, try to repair everything I own at least a couple of times before I admit defeat.

    It's what I like to do.

    Earlier this year I was diagnosed with adult onset type 1 diabetes, and ever since I've been slowly realising that I'm completely dependent on modern society's medical system. This in itself is OK, but I have been tinkering with the idea of attempting to "produce" (I realise this could mean extract, or synthesise, or ...) my own insulin. It wouldn't have to be much and I don't even know if I'd attempt to inject it myself, although I would attempt to get its structure and purity verified so that at least I knew I'd done it right.

    This is just an open-ended question: if there are any molecular biologists out there could they suggest the easiest method for me to attempt insulin production at home?

    Assume I have the chemistry and technical skills to perform distillations, run a PCR machine, know when to use a fume hood, handle solvents and acids without killing myself, that kind of thing.

    Suggestions welcome!

    1. Re:DIY Insulin - A Challenge! by MrBippers · · Score: 2, Informative

      Long story short, don't. It's not worth the risk. To "synthesize" your own you would need to obtain an isolated DNA sequence for insulin and transfect it into a cell line. Then culture the cell line and purify the insulin from cell products, most likely with some sort of chromatography. That said, this is not something you're going to easily accomplish at home. Producing proteins is not like making small molecule compounds. With small molecules you either have it or you don't. It isn't so cut and dry with proteins. Even a product of the same amino acid sequence can vary greatly in the post-translational modifications it undergoes. Prokaryotes don't glycosylate proteins and yeast hyperglycosylate is just one example. That's not to mention contamination from denatured protein and aggregates. Even if you did manage to create insulin, you would have to be crazy to think about injecting it into yourself. The purity is going to be dubious at best and you run the risk of developing an immune response to it. Worst case scenario, those antibodies are cross reactive to your body's endogenous insulin and you're now not only under-producing insulin, your body is attacking the little that you do make (or inject).

  14. Re:Glow in the dark by Jesus_666 · · Score: 2, Funny

    Somehow I don't think a man with the awesome power of yoghurt would be particularly fearsome. What can he do? Get eaten by other people and aid their immune system?

    --
    USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)