The Grassroots Future of Biohacking

An anonymous reader writes Forget about some kid engineering a virulent microbe in their bedroom. As the assistant director of the Maurice Kanbar Center for Biomedical Engineering, Oliver Medvedik, puts it, "It's extremely difficult to 'improve' on the lethality of nature. The pathogens that already exist are more legitimate cause for worry.” If anything, you're better off putting energy into wrenching away your desire for McDonalds, and making sure the government doesn't impose draconian laws about DIY-bio. Here's a look at the grassroots future of biohacking and the problems with government overreach.

Comments

Freeman Dyson

[NoImNotNineVolt]

I attended a talk given by Freeman Dyson roughly a decade ago. His opinion on the future of technology was clear: grassroots biohacking (I doubt that he called it that verbatim, but the concept was the same) would be the next Wild West of technology. Increasingly accessible tools would open up the world of genetic engineering to an entire generation just like the desktop computer opened up software development to curious kids. His opinion, if I remember correctly, was that the "government overreach" thing was a non-issue because of the inevitable ubiquity of such tools (much like "government overreach" limiting the availability of software development tools today seems impossible).

Re:Freeman Dyson

[i kan reed]

Except, of course, that genetic engineering isn't that big a deal to those already born.

Unless you also have the tools to spread your clever genetic change to all of the several billion cells in your body at once, that is. We can use the insights of genetics to help poke and prod our body's behavior, but you can't just "hack" your genome and be done with it.

You might have pie-in-the-sky claims about gene therapy using retroviruses to supply the change, but unless you want those viruses to make you sick and destroy your cells to spread, you're going to need a lot of them.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Shortguy881]

This movement is trying to break ground on both parts: understanding and altering genes, and distributing those changes throughout a system. Its really not that infeasible.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

Methinks Dyson mistook "ubiquity of tools" for "widespread interest and ability". Regular people have had the tools to make meth and perform surgery for decades, but neither would be particularly desirable without the limits currently imposed by the government.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[mlts]

Problem is that it can be stomped out in the US and Europe with some quick fearmongering. "Home bio-terror labs" is a phrase some politician would throw around, that would get laws passed banning biohacking almost immediately.

Of course, this this type of thing can be very useful. For example, the article about bacteria being able to make propane. If someone was able to make bacteria that could, given sunlight, split water, it would spark a hydrogen economy revolution. Similar with critters that could filter heavy metals out of water, where said critters could be easily picked up and disposed of.

Of course, the fearmongering isn't all conjecture. Someone in theory could make a bug that could eat a vital building material or resins crucial to electronics could make a civilization failure similar to what was described in the Ringworld series with their room temperature superconductors.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[i kan reed]

Sure, all it needs is one major revolution and the objections I'm raising cease to be relevant. But there are more. Like most genes' positive observable effects occur during development and childhood. And hacking humans isn't like hacking code. There's huge ethical risks. And careful applications of science have been our best tool for identifying the health benefits and risks of changes.

And quacks making extraordinary claims will crop up, as they always do, if popular opinion reflects positively on genetic engineering. A regulated market is almost inevitable. Backyard/grassroots hacking is the opposite of what will happen.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Scottingham]

Yes yes, but what about our bacteriome? Surely that is waay easier to genetically modify and have those modifications spread quickly throughout your body...

And if anything goes wrong, some antibiotics should help to clear up your mistake...hopefully.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[i kan reed]

Of course, there will be applications. Let no one call me a Luddite who doesn't see the value in genetic engineering. I'm just instantly incredulous of claims that "regular people will do this in their backyard" as a degree of revolution.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[i kan reed]

Ok.

Wait.

Shit.

Sorry.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Opportunist]

Who said I have to use my body to multiply them?

On a completely unrelated note, I have here a new breath mint you just HAVE to try...

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

If they don't have a corn-hole that's used for fucking, do they still have to close it? Or what if they have multiple corn-holes, at least one or more of which is used for fucking, and at least one or more of which isn't? For that matter, what if they have multiple fucking corn-holes? In that case, which one should they close?

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Opportunist]

Actually drugs would be a lot more desirable without limitations that force people to resort to less and less sensible routes to cook them.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[NoImNotNineVolt]

It must've been around 2007, since googling for 'freeman dyson genetics' brings me to these articles.

Anyway, his argument might best be summed up with his own words:
"I see a bright future for the biotechnology industry when it follows the path of the computer industry, the path that von Neumann failed to foresee, becoming small and domesticated rather than big and centralized."

Re:Freeman Dyson

[HeckRuler]

Unless you also have the tools to spread your clever genetic change to all of the several billion cells in your body at once, that is.

Why "at once"? Your body normally REMAKES most of the cells in your body every 16 years. Some parts faster than others. Some parts stick with you till you die.
Patience.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[bigattichouse]

Look up Microbial Fuel cell... which normally generates power.
Now put in 0.2v. the little buggers make hydrogen.
Now use algae in one fuel cell to generate the 0.2v for another fuel cell.

You're welcome.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

Problem is that it can be stomped out in the US and Europe with some quick fearmongering. "Home bio-terror labs" is a phrase some politician would throw around, that would get laws passed banning biohacking almost immediately.

Of course, this this type of thing can be very useful. For example, the article about bacteria being able to make propane. If someone was able to make bacteria that could, given sunlight, split water, it would spark a hydrogen economy revolution. Similar with critters that could filter heavy metals out of water, where said critters could be easily picked up and disposed of.

Of course, the fearmongering isn't all conjecture. Someone in theory could make a bug that could eat a vital building material or resins crucial to electronics could make a civilization failure similar to what was described in the Ringworld series with their room temperature superconductors.

Hopefully things like this propane-producing microbe aren't able to survive in the wild, otherwise say hello to your newly flammable atmosphere.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

You're doing it wrong.

You don't engineer yourself you engineer short lived organisms to do useful (or entertaining) things.

Making your own bioluminescent goldfish, or engineering a bacteria to emit a foul smell and setting it loose in your sibling's room. would be more the sort of thing I'd expect "curious kids" to do.

More useful applications might be things like implementing conway's game of life in ecoli, or making a virus that kills the stink-bacteria mentioned earlier.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[drinkypoo]

If someone was able to make bacteria that could, given sunlight, split water, it would spark a hydrogen economy revolution.

We already have bacteria which can, given any organic matter, split it into butanol (a 1:1 replacement for gasoline) as well as acetone (an industrial solvent, which burns clean and can be used to alter the octane ratio of the gasoline replacement) and ethanol ('nuff said.) Practical commercial exploitation was worked out at a public university and therefore partially with public funds, but the patents are owned by Butamax, a shell company owned by GE and DuPont. They have sued Gevo to actually prevent them from producing and selling fuel to the public, something in which Butamax apparently has no interest. They've been sitting on the technology for years.

The truth is that if someone did come up with such a bacteria, a patent would be assigned to a corporation by hook or by crook, and it would either be exploited or be buried to preserve profits for other industries until such a time as those profits become harder to come by. But the already-inconceivably-wealthy seem determined to ride this pale horse until they run it down... Right down our throats, until we choke.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

This is like the everlasting lightbulb, right? Or Tesla's magical free electricity? Marvellous miraculous products that are being suppressed to preserve vested interests.

Except, being able to create sellable fuel from nothing is a killer business. Nobody would say "let's NOT take over the world's fuel production and make trillions of dollars from our patent; let's instead sit on it, and buy all our fuel from elsewhere". So logic tells us that there must be something wrong with the product that means it fundamentally doesn't make a profit versus digging oil up. Maybe that will change as oil becomes more expensive, but it's in competition with fracking and other methods that only become viable when oil reaches a certain price. Stop with the conspiracy bullshit, there are a million reasons a product might not come to market, and there are a million reasons why something whose short layman's description seems miraculous might not actually work out in detail.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[sillybilly]

Or engineering a photosynthetic noneukaryote single celled bacterium that eats all eukaryote lifeforms in existence, and "wins" in the struggle for survival, and exists happily in absence of other species, and the one and only, thie monopolium species left on Earth. It's not impossible to find an Achilles heel in any life form, including broad classes like eukaryotes, if you only look hard enough.

Which is why self sufficient, completely isolated and sustainable, rotating artificial gravity space stations that take a Noah's Ark style zoo of life from Earth with them, each, is absolutely mandatory, while it's economically and technologically doable.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

A single, let alone multiple "self sufficient, completely isolated and sustainable, rotating artificial gravity space stations that take a Noah's Ark style zoo of life from Earth with them," is not yet economically or technologically doable. Maybe you meant *when* it's doable, instead of *while*.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[drinkypoo]

Except, being able to create sellable fuel from nothing is a killer business. Nobody would say "let's NOT take over the world's fuel production and make trillions of dollars from our patent; let's instead sit on it, and buy all our fuel from elsewhere". So logic tells us that there must be something wrong with the product that means it fundamentally doesn't make a profit versus digging oil up.

Okay, smart guy, tell us what the problem is. Gevo doesn't see a problem.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[sillybilly]

I made posts here on Slashdot starting around April this year, of how it is technologically and economically viable. It all starts with lunar oxygen extraction, via calcium thermite reduction, calcium oxide or hydroxide electrolysis - there are three ways, low temperature Castern-Kellner cell with a aprotic (lithium ion like or molten salt) solvent amalgam strip, a medium temperature involving calcium chloride electrolysis, that has a lot of steps, or a superhigh temperature molten calcium fluoride dissolved direct calcium oxide(silicon and other element free) electrolysis with iridium/rhenium anodes, and whatever cathodes, and the calcium recovered as a vapor. It's not energy efficient, but it's time and space efficient. The energy supplied to it would be from a "geothermal" ("lunathermal") cooling based mobile nuclear platform that keeps going to fresh cold sites once it saturates the rocks with heat below its present location. The leftover silicon/aluminum/iron/titanium/magnesium/sodium/potassium metalloid slag would be separated first by vacuum distillation to get the potassium, sodium and magnesium out as metal, then reacted with chlorine gas to get liquid chlorides of silicon and titanium, easy to sublime chloride of aluminum, and iron chloride more difficult, but not impossible to sublime, kind of like a distillation tower they have at oil refineries, you can get separate most of the major elements out as chlorides. On the Moons surface you don't have an atmosphere to contend with, and you can directly shoot material into orbit with a cannon, unlike down here on the deep gravity well of Earth where you need a continuously firing rocket with slow speed through the atmosphere else it burns up like a meteorite, and because of the need for a rocket, and rocket fuel that lifts the rest of the rocket fuel, shipping charges to high orbit are on the order of $10,000-$20,000/lb or kg, though they talk about some $700/lb theoretically attainable. Astronaut weight matters when you talk $10,000/lb, and a 100 lb astronaut only costs 1 million dollars to ship into space, while a 200 lb one costs $2 million, so that's a big difference and 5'1 100 lb people can push buttons ant follow instructions from Huston we have a problem just as well as 200 lb ones. Shipping costs of materials from the Moon's surface into orbit via a cannon should probably be $100/lb or less longterm, a big difference from $10,000/lb.

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course liquid hydrogen should only be used where it actually represents space savings, such as mega-massive space lifts, where the rocket is humongous, and the insulating cryogenic boiloff temperature containment cost is not too high. As liquid hydrogen can be kept at regular atmospheric pressure, vented to the atmosphere directly from a thermos-like insulator, the liquid temperature naturally adjusting from the boil-off, there is almost no reason to use metal containers compared to better specific strength by weight composite materials, such as the carbon fiber body of the Chevy Corvette, of course still forming a silver mirrored Dewar vaccum thermos shape from it (btw, the insulating vacuum between the thermos walls is very light and easy to lift into space). But as you go higher on mass, the lower the ratio of surface area to bulk volume, and the lower the rate of liquid hydrogen loss through vaporization, because volume goes up as the cube of the dimension, but surface area as the square, so a 10 fold increase in size gives a 100 fold increase in surface area, but a 1000 fold increase in volume, overall dropping the surface area/volume ration to 1/10, or by 9/10th, or by 90%, leading to less heat exchange, the bulk itself, insulating the rest of the bulk, kind of like polar bears are the biggest bears and seals and penguins are big, to fight the cold.
So for megamega space lifts only do you use liquid hydrogen. For small things, such as small satellites, the cryogenic containment becomes expensively heavy, and simply storning the hydrogen compactly as a hydrocarbon (which holds it at a volumetric density even higher than liquid hydrogen, though not weight wise, but the rocket can be skinnier or smaller volume) is proper, so you get kerosene+ammonal mixtures as the preferred way of propulsion into space.

Blah, I'm past my 2 posts per day on Slashdot, so got to post as Anonymous Coward, and sign it, instead, so

Yours truly, &c,
Slashdot user: sillybilly

Re:Freeman Dyson

[Anonymous Coward]

For the plasma thing of course you can't just build up charge in the rocket continuously, you need a return path, but having two plasma beams side by side, they'd whip around and short circuit, so say, if the negative charge comes from earth, the positive charge has to come from outer space, and up there there could be a way to shoot electrons into outer space, and accept electrons of negative ions from down below, to maintain charge balance, especially if massive solar panel energy is available. However you're again talking about roundabout speed like a space elevator, and nothing fixed stays up there for too long unless at 35000 km. But that brings about another idea. If you could have a space station like the ISS split itself into two in orbit, or whatever proportion, with one part shooting ahead at very high speed carrying all the kinetic energy, mv2 of the whole station, thereby braking the space station to a dead stop, that would start a free fall. If you start high up enough, you might have enough time to free fall for many minutes, say even up to 20 minutes, and stand still up in the sky, at a fixed location above ground, buying enough time to aid the ride up a rocket launched from the ground via the plasma mechanism. I don't know if it's possible to jumpstart a plasma beam along the path of a very intense laser beam to the space station, even the semi-vacuum up there has quite a few kV/meter breakdown voltage, and when you're talking 500 km, that's a lot of gigavolts or petavolts between you and the space station to get anything going, and then comes the issue of how to get a rocket in the middle of the beam, blocking it, and taking the negative charge from below and sending it up, while harvesting much of the potential waterfall for internal electric uses, to accelerate its internal propulsion material to velocities higher than allowed by the 24 MJ limit per kg unit mass maximum allowed by chemical energy density fuel mixes.

Bleh, over the 2 posts per 24 hr limit, so

Yours truly, &c,
Slashdot user sillybilly

Oh, that sounds like a challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't you ever heard you shouldn't challenge a hacker to do something that's difficult or impossible?

Re:Oh, that sounds like a challenge

[Shortguy881]

Thats ok though, the white knight bio hackers are here to save the day!

Re:Oh, that sounds like a challenge

[Anonymous Coward]

TFA only says that it's beyond the abilities of "homegrown biocoders". They're fully aware that a virus could be built better than nature if they tried and had the resources available.

Another dumb summary

[Anonymous Coward]

Jesus, could the submitter have mis-paraphrased the opening paragraph any more stupidly? Seriously, why not include the actual paragraph if you weren't intentionally trying to mis-characterize the article:

"First, let’s put aside the dystopian scenarios of nasty modified viruses escaping from the fermentor Junior has jury-rigged in his bedroom lab. Designing virulent microbes is well beyond the expertise and budgets of homegrown biocoders."

Improving on the lethality of nature

[MobyDisk]

The statement "it’s extremely difficult to ‘improve’ on the lethality of nature" dodges the fact that one does not need to 'improve' it, one needs only 'combine' existing forms of lethality:

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

A scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison published an article in June revealing that he had taken genes from the deadly human 1918 Spanish Flu and inserted them into the H5N1 avian flu to make a new virus—one which was both far deadlier and far more capable of spreading

Overall, this article really is quite inspiring. I'm glad to know that creating deadly viruses is not yet available on the average home lab. It makes it sounds like home-hackers can make some really cool bacteria. It's like we are working toward a bio-arduino.

Re:Improving on the lethality of nature

[erice]

The statement "it’s extremely difficult to ‘improve’ on the lethality of nature" dodges the fact that one does not need to 'improve' it, one needs only 'combine' existing forms of lethality:

You don't even have to combine different forms of lethality, just combine lethality with ease of propagation. Airborne ebola, anyone?

Re:Improving on the lethality of nature

[Intrepid imaginaut]

I'd imagine it's not all that hard to improve on the lethality of nature. Just infect a large number of people with the relevant virus and extract the strain from the person it affects/kills the most etc, no different to breeding dogs for certain traits. Even the lowest tech terrorist could manage it with a large enough test population, although not being an expert I could be mistaken here.

Re:Improving on the lethality of nature

[LWATCDR]

How about putting the gene to make botox into e. coli or staph?
Over all bio-hacking seems to be right up with nuclear power, something best left to well trained individuals.

It's not hard to improve

[smooth wombat]

"It's extremely difficult to 'improve' on the lethality of nature.

So the cross between ebola and the common cold, which was a terrible, terrible thing, wasn't an improvement on lethality?

Re:It's not hard to improve

[3.5 stripes]

It's just as lethal as regular ebola, what you've created is something more "infectious".

Already cool, but has a bleak future...

[chihowa]

I'm a chemist, but I've had the opportunity to work with some of this to make customized proteins and cells to work with. It really is getting surprisingly easy and inexpensive to play around with this stuff and the range of what you can make is huge.

That said, I really see this going the same way as amateur chemistry and rocketry (and soon drones and 3D printing). The mere fact that it's possible to do something dangerous or disallowed means that the entire field is off-limits to amateurs. Any interest in it will be suspicious and used against you in your imminent trial, even if it's not technically illegal.

Re:Already cool, but has a bleak future...

[HeckRuler]

On the flip-side, the early adopters will make bank in a similar way to those who really embraced personal computing back in the 80's, or the internet in the 90's. Even if the law comes down or the market cornered by big business, you'll have a valuable in-demand skillset. Or you'll be the inventor the next big thing. Let's see: bio-OS, YouGene, NANthrax, fat'be'gone, OracleOcculars, hmmmm....

And that's the sort of statement made with an intent to kickstart another gold-rush into new exciting territory where most of the poor schlubs won't make a dime and will complain bitterly for decades about what could have been. But hey, society will be better for it.

So, go ahead, create a bio-weapon at home

[bobbied]

WMD's, everybody needs them. Bio-weapons from hacking? Why not....

I have no doubt that BIO hacking is a great pastime, but seriously, there really needs to be some oversight on this, draconian or not. I'm not going to sit here and say it's easy to weaponize this kind of thing, but if some yahoo are growing anthrax on the back porch it might be a good idea to have somebody keeping track of it. Virus production is even worse. Anything that could cause trouble for humans, the food supply, or the environment needs to be watched, carefully, or somebody who doesn't know better is going to cause a big problem.

Now if you want to experiment with genetics by selectively breading peas or some such, knock yourself out, but if you start "hacking" around with possibly lethal pathogens or something that could become one, we need draconian oversight.

Re:So, go ahead, create a bio-weapon at home

[david_bonn]

I am getting very skeptical about the home-made bioweapon that ends the world.

It isn't unreasonable to think that some lone idiot could make a new version of smallpox or bubonic plague or bird flu that goes the distance. My question is how in heck would they test it? DNA is like the worst imaginable spaghetti code, so it isn't like you just flip this one sequence here and your ordinary flu bug is 99 percent fatal. And if you combine in other stuff you have no real idea what unintended side effects might make your world-killer fizzle out. And given the very large number of angry people with guns who would be looking for me, I would want to be DAMN sure that my world-killer would really kill the world.

If I wasn't suicidal, I'd also want a vaccine. How are you going to make that vaccine without testing? I mean like really infect people, vaccinate some uninfected people, put them together, and see who dies. And for your potential world-killer to go the distance, it would have to be easily transmittable -- so that implies that you would need wicked good biocontainment and someplace very private to do your evil deeds.

Now, there are still some awful things you could do without needing to worry about testing so much. Making a hypothetical virus that would be asymptomatic (or just very mild) for nearly everyone except some small group with specific DNA markers, or just one person, would be possible. It would sure suck to be president or even a university professor who gave the wrong little snowflake a shitty grade.

Re:So, go ahead, create a bio-weapon at home

[bobbied]

I am getting very skeptical about the home-made bioweapon that ends the world.

It isn't unreasonable to think that some lone idiot could make a new version of smallpox or bubonic plague or bird flu that goes the distance. My question is how in heck would they test it?

Does it matter? The problem here is that some yahoo *could* get a sample of small pox, or plague, and start such a problem. Small Pox might be officially eradicated, but I can think of possible ways to collect samples outside of official channels and you could kill millions in the third world if you let that loose.

But, I'm more concerned about stuff that might not be lethal to humans, but say kills chickens or cattle. There is a virus that is killing pigs "in the wild" right now that is causing hog farmers no end of trouble. They don't know where it came from, how it is transmitted, but it's killing a significant number of pigs. Say somebody comes up with something that destroys corn plants and gets transmitted by wind and birds. Lets say it wipes out 25% of the corn crop before we can deal with it. There will be a LOT of starving people out there. This is the kind of thing that we must prevent.

Most of this kind of thing can be prevented if you follow simple protocols when working with risky things. Such protocols need not be expensive, but they need to be followed and that means we need oversight in place to make sure they get followed, even for the guy with a microscope running an incubator on his back porch.

Re:So, go ahead, create a bio-weapon at home

[Anonymous Coward]

It might give tangible tools to a category of nutjobs that have so far been harmless because they're powerless: antinatalists. Blowing shit up is like terrorists does nothing to their "cause" so they don't do it (AFAIK) but some pandemic which makes people infertile If biohacking takes off, it won't even be that hard (relatively speaking) - just look up diseases which are curable but often cause permanent infertility and then choose the "best" one and make it more infectious.

Re:So, go ahead, create a bio-weapon at home

[david_thornley]

You seem to be afraid of people who will deliberately create bioweapons in their garage, which is going to be really difficult. I'm afraid of people who will play around with stuff, accidentally create something really nasty, and accidentally let it out. It really doesn't matter to me, while I'm coughing my lungs out and bleeding out of most orifices, whether it was deliberately designed as a weapon or hacked together because it looked neat, or whether the originator inoculated himself before cleverly escaping or died by being the first one infected.

Bio-Hack 3D Print Combo

[turkeydance]

do you want Lasers with that?

modifications I would like

[staalmannen]

Point 1 and 2 on my list would be UV and IR vision

Re:modifications I would like

[lister king of smeg]

Point 1 and 2 on my list would be UV and IR vision

closely fallowed by Magnetoception

Nature has other objectives

[Opportunist]

There are of course natural entities that are lethal, but they are lethal as a by-product. No parasite, no virus, has the death of its host as its primary goal. Usually, the host dies from the unpleasant side effects of the parasite's primary goal: self preservation and propagation.

If you turn those objectives upside down (i.e. primary goal: Maximum damage, secondary goal: sustain existence) you sure as hell can increase the potential for lethal effects!

Re:Nature has other objectives

[Anonymous Coward]

Any organism that doesn't have "propagate my genes" as it's primary goal won't get very far

Re:Nature has other objectives

[Opportunist]

Not unless human has the goal of getting it very far by artificially keeping it alive and multiplying.

Do you think the bacteria producing insulin have any snowball-in-hell chance to survive on their own?

Re:Nature has other objectives

[Anonymous Coward]

You should play Plague Inc, then you'd have an idea of how badly such an organism would do. Fundamentally, everyone has to infect > 1 people before they die, otherwise the plague dies out. That's why there are no organisms today which have such skewed priorities. They all died out. One could evolve naturally tomorrow, and it'd be extinct by next month.

What you actually need is a pathogen so benign that nobody bothers curing it, but which is one random mutation away from extreme lethality.

Re:Nature has other objectives

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no "primary goal" or any goal as such at all. Anthropomorphizing much?

a redundant approach

[nimbius]

I could imagine a situation where a company obtains genetic samples from a given geographic area to determine regional likes and dislikes, says Medvedik. That would be a very powerful marketing tool.

not necessary. 1.28 billion people voluntaily and questionlessly provide deeply personal detauls about their opinions and beliefs every single minute. its called Facebook, and its helping to destroy privacy on a very fundamental level.
what genetic data is being used by corporations to do is hock tests for a wide range of precursors and indicators of ailments and maladies, many of which are controvesial or flat out inconclusive. this instills fear in the customer and in turn more drive to purchase additional products and services they offer.

Such a lack of imagination is rarely seen.

[pubwvj]

Such a lack of imagination is rarely seen. Remember: "Nobody will ever need more than 640KB of memory" by Bill Gates?

Synbiota ScienceHack 2014

[clawsoon]

I'm doing a biohacking-ish workshop next week, as it happens. The Synbiota people are taking care of all the bureaucracy so that I can play with DNA. It's part of a bigger experiment, so it's not like I'm going full-mad-scientist, but it's a fun way for an IT guy with an interest in biology like me to do some experiments.

Well

[s.petry]

Fear mongering is almost never all conjecture, but that does not make it something other than fear mongering. The reality is that fear mongering has been a known control tactic for centuries.

It's one thing to have a rational discussion about potential issues, it's quite another to use intentional rhetoric to make problems exist that don't, or make very minor (extremely rare) problems that do exist seem much worse than they are.

The problem with your statement about stamping out a current "threat" is that it provides additional channels for overreach. I quoted "threat" intentionally, because the chances of a home grown anthrax causing any damage at all is akin to a home grown nuclear bomb causing damage. The cost of having and maintaining a home laboratory that can create something truly a threat is not obtainable by the majority of people, in fact the people that could afford such a lab and equipment are rare.

And lets just say that Jimmy somehow creates a new strain of flu. He has to contain it, weaponize it, and disperse it. These are not small or cheap feats to accomplish.

We already have Government agencies (DHS, ATF, FBI, etc..) that are already able to search out people spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on lab equipment and materials. We already have laws that protect society from people making such weapons, and using such weapons..

On the lighter side, maybe some additional regulations would get some companies to clean out those bioweapons growing in their fridges on occasion.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

And lets just say that Jimmy somehow creates a new strain of flu. He has to contain it, weaponize it, and disperse it. These are not small or cheap feats to accomplish.

No he doesn't, he just has to allow one virus particle to escape the lab inside a host. That's how viruses work, and that's why all types of bioengineering need to be very very very very very very very very heavily regulated. For a start, nobody is going to be working on live viruses at home. At all. Ever. If you can't kill it, you can't play with it, sorry.

Wait...I thought scientists had "given up"

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

Wait...I thought scientists had "given up"
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

extremely limited.

[Anonymous Coward]

You only need one computer to hack. Almost any garage sale you go to will have the required equipment to produce something of incredible value or novelty if the user has the ability. That user can design, test and redesign over and over with one piece of hardware. If you want to know the gritty details of a program just look at the source.

Chemistry and biology do not work that way. If you want the gritty details of a solution of a few salts, DNA and enzymes you are looking at several thousands in hardware, software licenses and then the training to use it, and interpret the results. The tools for analytical work are staggeringly expensive. The glassware for proper organic chem is too. A thermocycler is a couple thousand, even a proper pH meter is hundreds of dollars and require a surprising amount of maintenance.

Yes, if you want to do extremely rudimentary PCR starting with 10^5 copies of dna and a gel image to prove it worked, you could do that in your garage. But you'd have no idea of the real purity, no way to quantify, and probably it would be loaded with contaminants from the air you could not detect. And at the end of the day (half the day if you've done it before) you would be spending thousands to replicate a biochem 101 experiment, nothing exciting at all.

Nothing is obvious when you are doing science in the lab. Confirming your suspicions requires yet another experiment with more hardware and more room for error. You can't just make an edit to the code, recompile and try again 30 times an hour.

Re:extremely limited.

[jonwil]

Hacker spaces have gotten all manner of expensive-when-new gear from all sorts of places (usually because the company that owns it has bought a new gadget and is tossing out the old one or someone has gone out of business and the liquidators are having a fire sale to sell everything off as fast as possible).
Electron microscopes. Mass spectrometers. Pick & Place machines. Robot arms. High-end electronic test gear. And more.

Its not unrealistic to think that a hacker space or individual could get their hands on used bio-science gear in much the same way.

Re:extremely limited.

[Anonymous Coward]

Companies rarely get rid of their instruments for the reasons I stated above. It's crazy expensive and new stuff needs a month's worth of work to qualify and compare to the old instrument. Any donation a free communtiy space rececives is broken or several decades out of date. Useless? no I guess not but you can't innovate with hardware like that. These spaces are great for motivating young people in science, but it's simply ridiculous to think that a garage tinkerer will be able to do something truly innovative in biological science. A basement coder can still do that. That's the difference I am trying to point out.

Re:Conservatives killed six million...

[DahGhostfacedFiddlah]

Wow.

Can someone help me out? What's the name for when someone acts like a crazy supporter of their opponents to make their opponents look crazy? (you can tell that's what's up because the only person named in the post is the right-wing boogeyman-of-the-day, Elizabeth Warren)

Re:Conservatives killed six million...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you hate her? According to many people she has more of a chance at the White House than HRC! Considering HRC is a DINO, that is the best news this country has had in decades. Again, what do you have against Warren?

Re:Conservatives killed six million...

[Anonymous Coward]

right-wing boogeyman-of-the-day, Elizabeth Warren

You have that exactly wrong. That is the opposite of the truth. Right-wingers love her because this week she said "Destroy ISIS immediately, increase surveillance and tracking of Americans abroad." This is from:

http://thehill.com/policy/international/216559-warren-destroying-isis-should-be-our-no-1-priority

Maybe she's just reacting to a CNN poll that shows 71% of Americans think ISIS has agents in the US (http://www.cnn.com/2014/09/08/politics/cnn-poll-isis/index.html), but she is pretty much full-on neocon at the moment.

I find it strange that the moderators voted you up to a +2 and the guy that is correct to a -1. This site really has gone downhill.

Strange

[j127]

There are more dangers from random people "biohacking" in their basements than creating things that are directly lethal. For example: terminator seeds that interbreed with other species we depend on. Or disrupting the extremely fine balance of ecosystems -- like something that affects bees or other pollinators. I think it should be well regulated.