The WSJ describes the advent of do-it-yourself biohacking. “In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage. In Seattle, a grad-school dropout wants to breed algae in a personal biology lab. These hobbyists represent a growing strain of geekdom known as biohacking, in which do-it-yourselfers tinker with the building blocks of life in the comfort of their own homes. Some of them buy DNA online, then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases or finding new biofuels. But are biohackers a threat to national security?”
One biohacker was surprised to get a call from someone she didn’t know. “That’s when the phone rang. A man saying he was doing research for the U.S. government called with a few polite, pointed questions: How did she build that lab? Did she know other people creating new life forms at home?”
It would be an interesting problem for Mustapha Mond.
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People have not really quite understood that the bio geneticists are looking at language when they peer into their microscopes. its just like they peered through the lens and there was c++.
Oil mostly comes from ancient ancient algae. there a big business being built around juicing up the output of wild strains of algae and developing different strains of algae for different kinds of refuse water. In the last eight weeks several processes have been announced that cut 90% of the processing costs out of extracting the algae. And several strains of algae have been developed that naturally excrete their oil so they can just continually multiply and produce oil.
Within ten years every sewage treatment plant in the world will become a source of oil.
(Useing algae to convert raw sewage to oil is just one of three process currently vying to turn sewage into oil. All do so; the winner will be the one that gets their price specs down first and scales.)
The whole business just makes me laugh just to think about it.
I would have more confidence in these people if they sounded like the sort who put hospital corners on their bedsheets every morning.
Alas, they sound much more like Midnight Ramblers.
. . . then fiddle with it in hopes of curing diseases
Perhaps some of these biohackers are hoping to cause diseases by breeding more virulent pathogens. On the other hand, some may just be looking into making better home brew (genetically improved yeasts and all that).
Exactly how many casualties does it take to make a brave new world, anyway? Such intentions — let’s take them at face value for argument’s sake — are all well and good. But what if these ‘hobbyists’ accidentally create something catastrophically malicious? Are you willing to believe that a ‘closet lab’ has the containment protection of a class whatever CDC facility? This is AT LEAST as risky as the kid who tried to build a breeder reactor in the family outhouse. Why are we not putting a stop to it?
People don’t seem to realize that every time a male “sperm” and female “egg” of any species fetch up against each other and join, it’s a fresh instance of recombinant DNA. The division of cells that creates the male and female gametes HALVES the chromosomal material in each male and female reproductive cell, so that when they join and mingle, the resulting zygote has essentially the same amount of genetic information as the standard critter of the parent species.
That’s Haploid gametes joining to make a diploid zygote.
Sometimes plants self-pollinate, but even then the meiosis>fertilization>recombination scheme can by itself create offspring remarkably different from the parent, because there are so many ways of combining the DNA sequences. And there are so many inherited coherent sequences that any species has carried that can’t all be manifested in every individual.
At the same time, there’s a constant steady rain of ionized particles crashing into the Earth’s upper atmosphere, creating showers of daughter particles from the atmospheric collisions. Those particles come down among us living critters hurtling through living tissue like gamma and X-rays. When they pass close enough to a strand of DNA or RNA, these charged particles can disrupt them. Sometimes the disruption kills the cell, sometimes the genetic code repairs, but with changes that result in altered proteins in the developing embryo, and – Voílá! e presto change-o! Variations, new possibilities, old characteristics dropped, new ones popping up…
On the other hand, the natural processes don’t normally leapfrog from toilet scum to a new voter over a weekend.
Charles:
Could you please give us a link on the algae story? In so far as the sewage gets cleaned up, this sounds great, but all the algae I have heard proposed for this process are photosynthetic, so they are working with a diffuse energy source (somewhat more than a kW/square meter). Unless there is some real change in the energy equation, the oil will be more of a by-product from the sewage treatment than a profit center in its own right?
Coal is, in effect, the stored sunlight of millions of years. Petroleum, if it is in fact derived from fossil algae, ditto. We only get our sunlight a day at a time, so modern algae have the deck stacked against them in terms of fuel production.
Yes, I know that the algae can be artificially illuminated and heated, but both take energy which reduces the overall efficiency of the process. Hope I’m wrong and I’d really appreciate a link to your source.
This seems timely.
Swine Flu May Be Human Error; WHO Probes Scientist’s Claim
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=afrdATVXPEAk&refer=worldwide
” By Jason Gale and Simeon Bennett
May 13 (Bloomberg) — The World Health Organization is investigating a claim by an Australian researcher that the swine flu virus circling the globe may have been created as a result of human error. “
The Internet is a case of hackers gone awry.
Let them play. They are looking for solutions to real problems.
The bad guys are already working on the final solution, grey goo.
Or is grey goo a black swan?
Consider that sewage is a process stream. Coal is processed in batches. A plant only has to scale to process the existing stream.
Sufficient illumination is provided by increasing the surface are exposed to sunlight. One solution may be to stack troughs vertically.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere may be another income stream.
Algae are solar cells that convert sunlight to oil.
So artificially lighting is negatively efficient.
Alas, they sound much more like Midnight Ramblers.
===========================
To me, they sound like Midnight Engineers.
Midnight Engineering being my all time favorite magazine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Engineering
“Someone should stop that fool Thomas Edison from playing with that darned electric light. Could you imagine stringing wires all over the cities? What an unsightly mess!”
Like all new sciences bio-engineering has in it the promise of great good and the very worst of nightmares at the same time.
An ultra efficient algae that can consume sewage and make oil sounds wonderful, but what if it gets into the downstream water supply and it turns out that it eats EVERYTHING?
Unintended consequences indeed.
Oops! Links put my comment into moderation!
Be careful what you flush down the toilet in California.
“As a hedge against water shortages and population growth, Orange County has begun operating the world’s largest, most modern reclamation plant — a facility that can turn 70 million gallons of treated sewage into drinking water every day.”
http://articles.latimes.com/2008/jan/02/local/me-reclaim2
Animal,vegetable, or mineral?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
“Grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves—a scenario known as ecophagy (“eating the environment”).
The term grey goo is usually used in a science fiction context. In the worst postulated scenarios (requiring large, space-capable machines), matter beyond Earth would also be turned into goo (with goo meaning a large mass of replicating nanomachines lacking large-scale structure, which may or may not actually appear goo-like). The disaster is posited to result from a deliberate doomsday device, or from an accidental mutation in a self-replicating nanomachine used only for other purposes, but designed to operate in a natural environment.”
The difference from the past is by necessity much technology required significant infrastructure to exploit and distribute it.
With the home bio-labs we are seeing a parallel development trend to that of micro computers. The difference is since living organisms by definition are self-generating they don’t require an artificial infrastructure to exist and proliferate. An infrastructure already exists…the natural world.
The chance of a Jimmy Neutron making a nuke in his garage is nil. The chance of Jimmy creating an organism that melts your face is currently low but increasing.
The power to destroy once reserved by the state is now nearly accessible by the group. With bio-tech it will soon be within the capabilities of the individual.
The dilemma will be how to balance human freedoms with the individual’s increasing ability to destroy.
4. Clioman
Who or what is this “we” that you wish to take action? Could not the prevention be scarier than the threat?
PA Cat,
Homebrewers have been dabbling yeast for a long time now, that is hardly earthshaking. In fact, so too those who make their own sourdough breads.
17 MA
I was making a semi-humorous point.
Some time back Wretchard proposed a scenario where a group in a faculty lounge at some university becomes increasingly disturbed of how their country is being treated and cobbles together some WMD. Then he pointed out that scenario was just as likely to occur in Tel Aviv as in Tehran or Peshawar.
So perhaps given the DNA hobbyists, the scenario is just as likely to occur in Topeka, Tampa, Pampa, or Honea Path as it is in Tel Aviv.
I like to think that the Free Men of the world have an enormous advantage over the fascists, because for every AJ Kahn handing out info on nukes there are a hundred private individuals figuring out how to make them obsolete – or make the people who want to use them on us obsolete – or just make them all dead. I’d like to think that, anyway.
Clioman:
This is AT LEAST as risky as the kid who tried to build a breeder reactor in the family outhouse.
Why are we not putting a stop to it?
==================================
You mean David Hahn?
Wikipedia being what it is, notes that his reactor did not reach critical mass? I assume they meant ‘criticality’.
They do link to the Harpers article that details his experiments:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/1998/11/0059750
The Navy did not select him for NNPS.And you know he tried.
He got arrested again in 2007 for stealing smoke detectors.
All in all, what he did was akin to playing with rat poison. Slow acting, carcinogenic rat poison.
How long till he receives his lifetime achievement Darwin Award?
So the answer is that we are not doing bad. The Navy and the NRC won’t let him near real radioactive sources.
“On the other hand, the natural processes don’t normally leapfrog from toilet scum to a new voter over a weekend.”
No, in a single weekend they don’t usually get much beyond Daily Kos status.
“We’re heading into an era where people will
be writing DNA programs like the early days
of computer programming…”
Drew Endy, MIT.
“I see a cell as a chassis and power supply for the artificial systems we are putting together…”
Tom Knight, MIT.
See:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2007/12/journal-dna-hac.html
In the early days of hacking, the hackers were mostly nerds infiltrating systems and pulling pranks to show they could.
Now, organized crime syndicates are using it for things like extortion, and countries are using it to wage online warfare with plausible deniability.
If Bio “hacking” follows a similar progression. Then we’re heading
into a “golden” age of biowarfare/bioterrorism.
Imagine biohackers creating organic viruses with the same gay abandon with which computer hackers create computer viruses today?
What health care system could keep up?
There still will be people who are blind to these events and cling to outdated paradigms. Some would even go to quite silly lengths such as this one:
http://rhrealitycheck.org/reader-diaries/2009/05/09/gun-control-is-a-reproductive-justice-issue-some-thoughts-mothers-day?page=1
The hacking here is in the spirit of the MIT Model Railroad Club.
http://tmrc.mit.edu/hackers-ref.html
There is a link to Eric Raymonds Hacker’s Dictionary.
These two pages are worth exploring in depth. Unix, C,the Internet, and open source software are all have common ground in the philosophy of the hackers of the MIT Model Railroad Club.
That little incident at the Harvard/Yale Game in 1982 was the responsibility of Delta Kappa Epsilon, not the Model Railroad Club,but still a respectable hack.
Socially, we have seen a major shift in how communities are formed. People are changing allegiance from nations to causes, a trend dramatically accelerated by Internet connectivity. In fact, many people are much more engaged in their online causes than in their real-world communities. Of particular concern are members of groups who are willing to go to extremes to advance their causes—from the woman who lived in a redwood for two years to suicide bombers. Such actors place their causes above any rational analysis of the impact of their actions—and they can be found through the Internet.
In sum, political, economic, and social trends point to the emergence of super-empowered individuals or small groups bound together by love for a cause rather than a nation. Employing emerging technology, they are able to generate destructive power that used to require the resources of a nation-state.
All of these new developments are of particular concern because emerging political, business, and social structures have consistently been more successful employing nascent technology than older, established organizations. Today, two emerging technologies, nanotechnology and biotechnology, have the power to alter our world, and warfare, even more fundamentally than information technology.
Most writers agree it will be 20 years or more before nanotech hits full stride, so I will not discuss it further. In contrast, today’s biotechnology can give small groups the kind of destructive power previously limited to superpowers.5
Fourth Generation Warfare Evolves, Fifth Emerges