
Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria - spektom
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/12/harvard-nature-crispr-cas1-cas2-horse-gif/
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detaro
previously:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14755429](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14755429)

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epmaybe
Yeah, not to be prude, but this was literally posted yesterday. The actual
article, too.

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cromwellian
I gloriously await from teenage hackers 10 years from now release CRISPR
viruses/worms that insert GIF meme pranks into the human population germ line,
eventually triggering the apocalypse.

It seems our ability to mess stuff up is growing faster than our ability to
defend against bugs. I shudder to think what happens when sloppy engineering
practices or "WannaCry" meet biology. Hey, we've encrypted your germ line, and
sterilized you, send Bitcoin to XXXXX to restore your fertility.

~~~
searine
>I gloriously await from teenage hackers 10 years from now release CRISPR
viruses/worms

You're going to be waiting awhile.

The hard part about biology is that it often doesn't work. To get things
working even semi-reliably you need tens of thousands of dollars of sensitive
equipment and reagents. Equipment and reagents that would catch the attention
of interested authorities if you bought it as an independent.

Computer viruses are the result of a tractable ecosystem and a low cost to
participation. Biology is largely untractable, with a tremendous cost of
entry.

Yes, CRISPR helps us insert DNA, but it doesn't change all the sensitive steps
up to the point of transformation. Even then, CRISPR is limited to the cells
being treated.

A custom biological virus is what you are imagining, with the ability to both
insert DNA/RNA and with a capsule that protect it during transmission.
Unfortunately we are likely centuries away from being able to code a
completely custom life form, and even then, the cost and training needed to
create such life forms will be cost prohibitive, leaving only corporations and
governments the ability to do so.

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cromwellian
I don't think you need a completely custom from scratch lifeform. It seems to
me you just have to find a flexible existing pathogen that can tolerate a
CRISPR edit sequence tagging a long. Perhaps a virus is too small, maybe some
common gut bacteria or fungus can be weaponized.

Admittedly, we're a "long way" from that, but for me, I define "long way" as
20 years. Centuries? Seems way past the singularity horizon for me. I think
it's really hard to say at this point something is too hard to be solved in
100 years unless it's something that defies the laws of physics, or takes
ungodly amounts of mass or energy.

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searine
> It seems to me you just have to find a flexible existing pathogen

We can do that now. It's fairly easy for anyone to edit viruses or bacteria
using non-crispr methods to make something more virulent.

The problem is there is an evolutionary trade-off. To be more virulent means
dedicating resources to it, to the detriment of other kinds of fitness. The
result is your virulent pathogen cannot spread, defeating the point of a
weapon.

We are many decades away from achieving systemic understanding necessary to
improve an organisms fitness using molecular tools, and also account for
compensatory changes to fitness.

You can however use selective breeding to do this, but that's millenia old
technology.

> I define "long way" as 20 years.

We don't even understand most of the existing proteins in databases yet, and
it is going to take decades to meticulously characterize these sequences.

Worse, nobody has come close to a useful denovo protein sequence yet, let
alone a genomes worth of proteins and their interactions. I feel safe in
saying we are at least 50 years off from these goals, probably more.

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LeifCarrotson
Here's the image that was encoded:

[https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muybridge_horse_gall...](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muybridge_horse_gallop_animated_2.gif)

~~~
iansowinski
It's iconic photography!

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rubatuga
Can we stop with the slippery slope arguments? No, CRISPR will not be used be
teenage hackers in the future to infect humans and keep them hostage. CRISPR
can’t be “spread” or “transmitted” and is a local technique to introduce DNA
snippets into the main genome of the organism. And to anyone who thinks that
CRISPR could be potentially used to infect humans, this technology is nothing
new: viruses have already had DNA editing machinery for millennia, search up
retroviruses.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrovirus](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retrovirus)

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Analemma_
Note that when the popular press worries about the destructive potential of
"CRISPR", they don't mean CRISPR specifically. They're using the word as a
stand-in for the general trend of the exponentially decreasing cost of genome
sequencing and editing techniques which probably, eventually, will reach the
level where they can be done by teenage hackers. And that _is_ something that
requires concern and attention, even if I don't think it merits panic.

I think you are much too sanguine about this, which I've noticed is a tendency
among programmers in general. We're used to a world where bugs always have
fixes, and can be patched and the fix spread worldwide instantly, for free.
None of these things are true in epidemiology, and it causes us to make really
bad metaphors that don't apply in this world. For starters, "responsible
disclosure is good" and "security-by-obscurity is bad" are obvious truisms in
software but not even remotely true in epidemiology.

> viruses have already had DNA editing machinery for millennia, search up
> retroviruses.

But viruses are subject to evolutionary pressure that puts a ceiling on how
bad they can be. Most of the worst human viruses have a "pick two" of 1)
airborne 2) highly infectious 3) fatal, because a virus with all 3 burns
itself out and can't survive. Engineered organisms do not have this ceiling.

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rubatuga
To be fair, we do have examples of some superbugs, such as the Spanish Flu in
the 1910s, where an influenza virus managed to wipe out a significant portion
of the world. It would be considered by most to be airborne, infectious, and
fatal. Maybe my optimism results from the fact that a supervirus has never
been engineered (which I agree is fallacious), but I don’t think CRISPR, a
research technique, even begins to encroach on the topic of genetically
engineered superbugs.

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cabalamat
They should encode some music on it and then watch the RIAA go apeshit trying
to track down and kill all the copyright-infringing bacteria.

~~~
positivecomment
If someone finds some protected data as controversial as AACS encryption
key[2] and creates a "fork" of HIV which contains that information, I'm
optimistic that we will get a cure for it in a few years.

On a more serious note, I'm not sure, with this kind of power, if we are
quickly approaching a Great Filter[4] or not.

[4]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter)

[2]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy)

~~~
cabalamat
> I'm not sure, with this kind of power, if we are quickly approaching a Great
> Filter or not

We're approaching several.

We -- or rather, some members of our species -- are clever enough to build
amazingly powerful technologies (nuclear weapons, biotechnology, maybe strong
AI), but as a species we seem to often use them unwisely, either because
political leaders are power-obsessed (in the case of nuclear weapons), or
because some technologies might become able to be harnessed by
individuals/groups without much resources (DIY biotechnology).

It's like toddlers playing with matches on a petrol-soaked carpet.

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sabujp
so storing data on multiple (billions of bacteria). I assume that you would
have populations of duplicates and would piece together your entire original
dataset (e.g. a tar) using start and end encoding tags? How do you re-sequence
multiple populations of bacteria that you just grab from a sample sitting in a
-80c freezer? You'd also have to prevent them from modifying their own genome
and messing up your data.

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kingbirdy
You could store it redundantly, in a genetic RAID

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magic_beans
I read the article, but I'm still quite confused. How exactly did they
"insert" a computer image into living bacteria?? Do they mean they have stored
binary code in the bacteria?? Or did they just physically create a fine image
somewhere in the bacteria???

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sabujp
they store the data in the dna, they encode pixels using ATGC, and re-
sequence. But they only have one population of bacteria that contain all of
the same data.

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yazan94
I don't know much about how DNA works, but by inserting ATGC sequences, does
that not mess up the bacteria's replication process or something? How would
the cell 'read' this encoded gif in the DNA? Would it try to build a protein
because of it, or would it ignore the sequence? Do cells usually have a
checksum-type of functionality to detect if their DNA is valid/unmutated? The
article itself didn't make any mention, but could there possibly be negative
impacts to the cell hosting this data by having its DNA altered?

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dmoy
Right I'm no biologist, but my understanding is that there's vast amount of
dna that doesn't really do anything (doesn't encode any proteins). I don't
remember why... maybe it used to do stuff a long time ago.

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progval
You are thinking of introns. Their function is still not very well-known.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intron#Biological_functions_an...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intron#Biological_functions_and_evolution)

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ineedasername
So, eventually we can look forward to getting rickrolled by a bout of food
poisoning. And maybe get sued for piracy afterwards, for unauthorized
duplication and distribution. Unless consideration of fair use is updated to
include involuntarily crapping out copies.

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alex_duf
How likely is it than storing arbitrary data in a bacteria's DNA would allow
it to create something dangerous for humans?

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thriftwy
Approximately like the chance that DNA sequence of a virus, when executed as
shell code, will infect your machine.

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piyh
Buy your subscription to Norton Anti-virus 2030 today!

~~~
unit91
If not for yourself, do it for the children.

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wyldfire
Inspecting for exfil just got a lot harder.

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ballenf
Seriously, now border & customs agents will have to require unlocking your DNA
as well as your phone.

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JumpCrisscross
What are the odds this is being used for exfiltrating sensitive data? (Reminds
me of a Culture novel, I think _Excession_ , where one character tries to
sneak information out of a ship by encoding it into the DNA of bacteria on,
essentially, packages.)

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ballenf
Zero right now, but the future where borders agents require you to unlock your
DNA as well as your phone makes for a great sci-fi dystopia.

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netheril96
DNA of which organs should the border agents examine in that future?

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vortico
What does this have to do with the GIF image format? Wouldn't using something
other than LZW compression give them a much faster converging restoration
rate?

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tomswartz07
Anyone have any info on the amount of data that was encoded?

It looks like it was a low resolution image with 5 frames, so I expect it to
be about 1 Kb, max?

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searine
Nature paper say 2.5 kilobytes of data, and I guessimate a few Kilobases of
sequence.

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danso
If I hadn't seen this tweeted around earlier, I would've guessed this
title/story generated by the HNSimulator markov bot.

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gremlinsinc
When did techcrunch get bought out by Buzzfeed? 'did your head just explode'
is such a link-bait-douchy title

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jrs95
The next big _leap_ : putting Pepe memes in a frog

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nvr219
Okay great, but how did the scientists pronounce it?

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Lagged2Death
Look at my horse. My horse is amazing.

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nthcolumn
Pay-walled science don't you just love it? Why do they bother - it isn't
science until you publish IMHO. This is just showing their rich friends.

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obstacle1
I suspect that falsely denouncing paywalled research as "not science" isn't
going to work in bringing about the outcome that you want. Probably a strategy
without so many scotsmen would work better.

