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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.
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.