

In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein - scott_s
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124207326903607931.html

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biohacker42
_In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology in 2007, a group of scientists
and FBI officials called for better oversight of so-called synthetic DNA...

Some biologists argue that anyone wishing to custom-make new organisms, even
if it's just glow-in-the-dark bacteria (a popular trick among biohackers),
should have to get a license first...

A senior official in the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate says
the bureau is working with academia and industry to raise awareness about
biosecurity...

George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, says anyone
using synthetic DNA should have to have a license, including garage
biologists..._

In summary: Oooh Frankenstein - scary!

Frankenstein is THE allegory for the dangers of science and it's pretty old.

If you don't like what's going on with biohacking, put your money where you
mouth is and give up everything science gave you since Mary Shelley died.

~~~
khafra
Although I agree with your viewpoint, I have an inexplicable feeling that your
biases lie with the biohackers. To play devil's advocate: licensing makes
sense for the type of dna recombination they do at, say, USAMRIID; and in an
emerging field like this it's always hard to figure out where exactly to draw
lines.

~~~
biohacker42
Imagine if Woz had to get a license to do what he did?

The key thing to keep in mind is that a lot, and I mean A LOT of innovation is
the result of a brute force search, the more people are searching the faster
we find things. And while regulation may have some benefits the costs are
often devastating.

I also happen to know that big pharma has a huge backlog of promising
potential drugs. But the years and hundreds of millions of dollars necessary
for even early stage testing are a suffocating bottleneck. The end result is
that there is absolutely no point in trying to find new cures, there's already
a glut of them on the shelf.

Suffice it to say, I think the risks are worth it and regulation is a blunt
weapon which eliminates most of the bad AND the good.

~~~
evgen
> Imagine if Woz had to get a license to do what he did?

Let's try to imagine all of the worst-case scenarios for what might have
happened if Woz instead created a monumental fuck-up. I can't really come up
with much beyond him losing several grand and going back to work at HP. Let's
try that same exercise for some hypothetical person who imagines himself to be
the Woz of DNA...

> Suffice it to say, I think the risks are worth it and regulation is a blunt
> weapon which eliminates most of the bad AND the good.

Given some of the potential risks involved, the good would have to be pretty
big and explained pretty well to the lay public before you will ever get past
some deep-seated fears of what the potential downsides are to this endeavor.

~~~
biohacker42
Your risk equation is overestimating the worst case scenario.

Super bugs are NOT at all easy to design. And there's plenty of natural super
bugs like swine flu, etc. that come around every year.

The worst case scenario is something like the 1918 flu, but it's not 1918
anymore and we can deal with viruses like that a lot better.

~~~
evgen
> Your risk equation is overestimating the worst case scenario.

This is a claim that you have yet to back up with anything beyond general
hand-waving.

> Super bugs are NOT at all easy to design. And there's plenty of natural
> super bugs like swine flu, etc. that come around every year.

To cause significant damage a biohacker would not need to actually design the
super bug, she would just need to design some interesting sequence that has a
novel and unfortunate interaction with the human immune system. Poor lab
procedure (like deciding that the sequence did nothing and dumping the results
down the drain) could easily introduce this sequence into the wild where other
bacteria could pick it up.

The difference between hacking code and hacking biology is that broken code
goes nowhere. Nothing it out there picking up the bits you delete and
recombining it with existing code to see if the result gives its progeny any
advantage. This is not the case with tinkering with biological systems.

~~~
biohacker42
_This is a claim that you have yet to back up with anything beyond general
hand-waving._

Much like Fermat, the time I care to devote to correcting people who are wrong
on the internet is too small to contain the full argument which would go
beyond hand waving.

Here's a bit more hand waving: Immune systems are complex and dynamic system
designed to deal with unknown and novel agents. That's why simply coming up
with something new, is not nearly enough. 99.99% of new mutations are
deleterious. And the 0.001% that might be something? Like I said, just one
more bullet in a machine gun shootout.

Dumping things down the drain does not make bacteria pick them up. You can
dump MRSA down the drain all day long, it won't make the bacteria in there
antibiotic resistant. Because there is no free lunch, even beneficial
mutations are metabolically expensive, and that's why if you dump MRSA in the
sewer, over time even they would lose their own antibiotic resistance. Without
antibiotics they would be out competed by Staph. which doesn't waste resources
on antibiotic resistance.

The difference between hacking code and hacking biology is that with code one
single bit can cause the whole system to crash or behave in wildly
unpredictable ways. Biology on the other hand is extremely robust.

Suffice it to say we agree to disagree.

------
grinich
I think most people don't realize the amount of genetic recombination and
mutation that goes on in nature. It's the reason we have new strains of the
flu each year, and similarity the reason behind the evolution which has shaped
our global ecosystem.

It's a moot point that these amateur biohackers are able to synthesize
different strains of E. coli or yeast. It's done in high school AP Bio classes
across the country. I think this will only be a possible threat when genetic
sequencing and synthesis becomes so cheap and fast that it can be done on the
desktop by anyone. At that point, the same thing may happen to pharmaceuticals
and medicine that has happened to software.

Could the methods to make Advil, Viagra, or similar drugs be under the GNU
license? Free software -> Free chemistry?

~~~
jerf
As much as I love free software, free media, and freedom in general, the idea
of downloading a non-trivial drug from the internet, ./configure, make, make
install, and consuming it sends shivers down my spine. And if it doesn't send
shivers down yours, you've got about ten to fifteen more years to build up
some more life-saving paranoia.

Chemistry is not the blocker on drug development; testing is. Our system isn't
perfect but I can't see how open source can improve anything. Open source can
barely scrape together the resources for a usability test and that's orders of
magnitude easier than a drug safety trial.

~~~
grinich
The idea of putting something into my body, which I know nothing about or the
ways in which it was synthesized or processed, sends shivers down my spine.

How much do you really "trust" pharmaceutical companies, whose sole mission is
to profit at the illness of others?

I hope the same thing happens for drugs that happened to encyclopedias. People
nowadays trust Wikipedia just as much as Britannica, if not more in some
cases.

As for testing, that is indeed a trickier issue. But I guarantee you that if a
person is suffering from an illness and cannot afford the drugs for treatment,
they'll be willing to try any sort of chemistry that may help.

~~~
jerf
"How much do you really "trust" pharmaceutical companies, whose sole mission
is to profit at the illness of others?"

You're propagandizing. The correct question is, "How much do I trust the
pharmaceutical companies and all relevant regulatory agencies?"

And the answer is... not entirely. That would be stupid. On the other hand,
they _do_ in fact conduct drug trials, and so far I have not had a
prescription for the mega-profitable drugs, so I'm not overwhelmingly
concerned about whether or not they cheated with their antibiotic tests. I
haven't needed an antidepressant, cholesterol medication (which I'm
unconvinced actually help), or anything else that might actually be a problem.
(And at this point I wouldn't touch a weight-loss pill; evidence would suggest
at this point that whatever it takes to fool the body into losing weight when
it wouldn't otherwise is virtually certain to mess with your heart, which is
one of the prime reasons for losing weight in the first place.)

The question is some sort of binary "trust open source or trust the evil
commercial interests!". It's actually "do I trust a possibly flawed system
that still uses science, or am I so concerned about it that I'm willing to
switch over to a system that can't afford to do science at all?" Some science
is, all else being equal, better than no science at all.

"But I guarantee you that if a person is suffering from an illness and cannot
afford the drugs for treatment, they'll be willing to try any sort of
chemistry that may help."

Only if they are in a situation that can't possibly get worse. I support the
aggressive deployment of possible cancer remedies in the cases where we can
tell somebody has a week to live, for instance, which our government won't do.
Very little can go wrong that is worse than doing nothing. But drugs can have
arbitrarily bad side effects that only emerge for a small set of people, and
throwing more drugs into the mix will only increase that number. And, best of
all, while doctors know about the standard drug reactions, they'll know
nothing about your home-grown concoction.

Example: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_epidermal_necrolysis>

Installing something on my hard drive is radically, radically different than
installing something into _me_.

~~~
grinich
I agree with your comment. I /do/ trust drugs like Advil, on a daily basis.

What I'm most excited about is that this sort of technology will hopefully
free dependence on overpriced pharmaceuticals and bring the capability for
invention to the masses.

Thanks for the thought-out comment. I heard Kurzweil speak a few days ago and
the convergence of technology and medicine has been on my mind since.

------
rdixit
This is hilarious. "My roomates are a little weirded out",since I, you know,
grow viruses in the attic... With sewer water.

Having worked in a virus lab in the past, I CAN reassure folks that you can't
order dangerous pathogens without all sorts of certifications you won't easily
find, say, in your garage. But this is still not a very good idea. Mixing
bacterial or viral strains together in a human-like environment... somebody
slap that kid. How will he test it's efficacy, anyway? On his roomate with an
ear infection?

------
hs
i used to make liquid fertilizer for my aquascape (google PMDD -- poor man
dupla drop)

the raw materials are very cheap (like $1 per kg, agricultural grade) and the
end product sells like $10 per liter (by weight, ~100 gr raw material, the
rest water)

so the multiplier (price/cost) is like 100, pretty common for chemical
products

the whole hobby-industry is like this: promote nutritionless sand as substrate
to replace soil use the expensive fert (surprise! they sell it too!) to
enhance plant growth use expensive 'full-spectrum' light use heater to give
vertical water movement co2 tanks (you can make DIY using sucrose and yeast)

and of course without saying, spreading FUD to fuel collaborative manipulation

in the end, i end up just using soil, sun, no fert, no tech ... plants had
lived for centuries on those with great success!

hey ... maybe i should go sell some ferts :D ... i still have bags of KNO3,
H2PO4, MgSO4, FeSO4, ZnSO4, MnSO4, Na4EDTA lying around collecting dusts

