Even more important, stricter copyright laws help the media corps sell more product, and GWB is in favor of anything that helps US corps sell more stuff.
True, but weaker copyright laws help sell more mp3 players, CD burners, and so on. It's not clear (to me, anyway) which contributes more to the US economy and how changing copyright law will affect the relative balance of sales.
There was an article in the New York Times that made this point. Especially since many companies sell both music and players, once they make more from selling players than music it will be to their advantage to increase demand for mp3 players by making more music available for free.
They forgot to mention my favorite thing about japanese cell phones - each has its own idol advertising the phone. I-mode has Ryoko Hirosue, and J-phone has some equally cute idol. I left one of the i-mode brochures on my desk, with its giant picture of RH on it, and one of my labmates thought it was a porn magazine!
There is one mechanism that comes to mind to target a specific individual DNA sequence. It doesn't rely on functional differences between individuals, just genetic differences. Make a retrovirus that can integrate itself into the human genome (not an uncommon thing for viruses to do), but make the integration site tagged to the individual you want to target. Then make the virulent part of the virus (the warhead) coupled to genomic integration, so that integration triggers virulence.
Another way to accomplish the same thing might be to have a toxin that is activated upon DNA binding, but only to specific sequences. You can then choose the binding sequence to the particular target you're aiming for.
All of this is hard, but probably not impossible. However, you have to wonder if it wouldn't be just easier to use a strike with one
of those fancy GPS guided munitions the US has. It's not clear to me why to go to all this trouble to kill a single person when there are probably easier ways to do it.
On the other hand, developing designer pathogens against a specific crop seems both easy and likely. People have already proposed it for use in the war against drugs, as a previous poster pointed out.
As someone who is reasonably well conversant with this field (I've read many of the biological modelling papers, and heard Adam Arkin speak twice), I thought I would try and explain what's going on here. The DARPA call for proposals seems to contain two items - one on DNA computing and one on BioSPICE. As far as I can tell, they are two separate things. BioSPICE is an attempt to make a piece of software to model biological systems. It has everything you would expect: synthesis of RNA from DNA, translation of RNA into protein, chemical reactions, interactions, and so on. The goal is to use this software to model biological systems. The benefit of this is two-fold: one, you can test an existing biological system to see if the model agrees with the data; two you can use it to design new systems. However, the technology is very primitive. The only system that's beem modelled with any confidence is a piece of the phage lambda decision making circuitry (phage lambda is a virus that infects E. coli). There has also been some modelling of the cell cycle (the timing of DNA replication and cell division, but that was done more phenomenologically). As far as building novel biological circuits, this is still in its infancy: the only two things that have been built (both in the last two years) have been a flip-flop and an oscillator. So biology has a long way to go before it even gets to where electronic circuits were in the 40's.
In response to the previous poster, I don't know of any evidence for IR causing mutations. In general, light must be high enough energy (i.e. short enough wavelength) to cause chemical changes in DNA to cause mutations. UV light causes mutations by photo-induced dimerization of thymine. X-rays cause mutations by producing breaks in DNA strands. I can't think of a mechanism by which IR could cause a mutagenic effect.
In fact, I'm sceptical that the reported effect is real, as it's hard to see what effect IR light would have on cells, unless there's a particular receptor for it, or it works by some non-specific mechanism, such as heating the cells. And I actually am a biophysicist:)
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Even more important, stricter copyright laws help the media corps sell more product, and GWB is in favor of anything that helps US corps sell more stuff.
True, but weaker copyright laws help sell more mp3 players, CD burners, and so on. It's not clear (to me, anyway) which contributes more to the US economy and how changing copyright law will affect the relative balance of sales.
There was an article in the New York Times that made this point. Especially since many companies sell both music and players, once they make more from selling players than music it will be to their advantage to increase demand for mp3 players by making more music available for free.
They forgot to mention my favorite thing about japanese cell phones - each has its own idol advertising the phone. I-mode has Ryoko Hirosue, and J-phone has some equally cute idol. I left one of the i-mode brochures on my desk, with its giant picture of RH on it, and one of my labmates thought it was a porn magazine!
There is one mechanism that comes to mind to target a specific individual DNA sequence. It doesn't rely on functional differences between individuals, just genetic differences. Make a retrovirus that can integrate itself into the human genome (not an uncommon thing for viruses to do), but make the integration site tagged to the individual you want to target. Then make the virulent part of the virus (the warhead) coupled to genomic integration, so that integration triggers virulence.
Another way to accomplish the same thing might be to have a toxin that is activated upon DNA binding, but only to specific sequences. You can then choose the binding sequence to the particular target you're aiming for.
All of this is hard, but probably not impossible. However, you have to wonder if it wouldn't be just easier to use a strike with one of those fancy GPS guided munitions the US has. It's not clear to me why to go to all this trouble to kill a single person when there are probably easier ways to do it.
On the other hand, developing designer pathogens against a specific crop seems both easy and likely. People have already proposed it for use in the war against drugs, as a previous poster pointed out.
Is someone trying to say something by linking to the Ontario Swine Institute (osi.org)?
As someone who is reasonably well conversant with this field (I've read many of the biological modelling papers, and heard Adam Arkin speak twice), I thought I would try and explain what's going on here. The DARPA call for proposals seems to contain two items - one on DNA computing and one on BioSPICE. As far as I can tell, they are two separate things. BioSPICE is an attempt to make a piece of software to model biological systems. It has everything you would expect: synthesis of RNA from DNA, translation of RNA into protein, chemical reactions, interactions, and so on. The goal is to use this software to model biological systems. The benefit of this is two-fold: one, you can test an existing biological system to see if the model agrees with the data; two you can use it to design new systems. However, the technology is very primitive. The only system that's beem modelled with any confidence is a piece of the phage lambda decision making circuitry (phage lambda is a virus that infects E. coli). There has also been some modelling of the cell cycle (the timing of DNA replication and cell division, but that was done more phenomenologically). As far as building novel biological circuits, this is still in its infancy: the only two things that have been built (both in the last two years) have been a flip-flop and an oscillator. So biology has a long way to go before it even gets to where electronic circuits were in the 40's.
In response to the previous poster, I don't know of any evidence for IR causing mutations. In general, light must be high enough energy (i.e. short enough wavelength) to cause chemical changes in DNA to cause mutations. UV light causes mutations by photo-induced dimerization of thymine. X-rays cause mutations by producing breaks in DNA strands. I can't think of a mechanism by which IR could cause a mutagenic effect.
In fact, I'm sceptical that the reported effect is real, as it's hard to see what effect IR light would have on cells, unless there's a particular receptor for it, or it works by some non-specific mechanism, such as heating the cells. And I actually am a biophysicist :)