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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.
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.
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.