
Putting 500k People's DNA Online - gwern
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/11/what-happens-when-you-put-500000-peoples-dna-online/543747/?single_page=true
======
devteambravo
That's a terrifying read. See DefCon talk: DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic
Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY))

~~~
John_KZ
That was absolutely horrific. The worst part was this person calling for a
"Apollo-level funded" arms race on developing the most horrific bioweapons
possible.

If you really care about his problem you should call for a ban on related
research and keep yourself silent. The further we delay the development of
such technology, the better. Some people argue it's inevitable; Well it's not.
For almost 100 years, despite their huge potential in war, chemical and
biological weapons have seen almost zero development because of the strict
enforcement of the Geneva convention. Let's keep it that way.

~~~
xcvbxzas
I don't think we can confidently say that chemical and biological weapons have
seen almost zero development in the last 100 years. We can say as far as we
know that's the case, but we also don't have a very compelling reason for
knowing.

The development of these types of weapons is going to be highly secretive, and
not just because of the Geneva convention. Absolutely nothing has gone on in
the world in the last 100 years that might tempt the deployment of advanced
chemical or biological weapons on any sort of scale. Naturally we haven't seen
them used.

I also don't see how burying our head in the sand is going to help on this
one. At least compared to nuclear weapons, projects on these weapons could be
useful for defensive purposes. Everybody is working more or less within the
same confines and rules, and I wouldn't be surprised if relatively similar
developments were the result. Even if they aren't, the characterization of
these weapons can be used to inform and guide the response plans to try to
minimize damage in the case of an attack.

~~~
John_KZ
I have no doubt that biological weapons have been developed to some degree,
somewhere, in a well-funded government lab, in complete secrecy. But that is
not a problem. This secrecy is what saves us from a race to the bottom. Some
government will develop a limited capability of biological warfare. They
probably already have. With no information about what their adversaries are
doing, they will simply stop. As far as they know, they have developed a
state-of-the art biological weapon system, and they are probably correct.

One of the reasons that the nuclear arms race happened, was the "openness" of
the competition. You can't hide a nuclear explosion. Your adversary knows how
sophisticated you are, and they now have to push 1 step further.

Biological warfare doesn't have to be like this. Be sure that some Darpa or
DoD funded secret project is working on countermeasures, but there's another
interesting thing: You can stop biological attacks by quarantine. It's very
simple, very effective, and doesn't require developing Armageddon-tier weapons
in the process. Another issue that's purposefully isn't discussed in the video
is how effective the delivery of these weapons are. Simply put, not very.
Viruses, the main attack vector, change in every iteration. There's no
guarantee you can infect that many people with an intact version of your
weapon. Sooner than later, you genocidal weapon will stop being so selective,
because it's evolving for it's own benefit, not yours.

And finally, if you really are concerned about this issue, as you should, the
right way to fight against it is to find a way to stop the infection and
proliferation, to find ways to stop these attacks without accelerating weapons
development. There are ways to fight these weapons without building them, and
you can definitely do better than starting a public campaign that asks people
to develop horrific bioweapons just so we can find a way to stop them later
on, maybe.

~~~
xcvbxzas
I don't think it's fair to say that development programs will just stop after
a reasonable advancement on the last known state of the art.

If you (a nation) are working on this, it's fair to assume your peers are as
well. If you have improved on the state of the art, it's safe to assume your
peers are in a similar position or will soon be.

By making advancements, all you are doing is proving that other nations with a
similar level of technical sophistication can do the same. Even if you make
strong assumptions that you are indeed the best, you can't assume other
nations will never reach where you are now. Maybe you have 5 years on them,
because you are clearly superior? Or maybe you take a more conservative stance
and assume you're behind - just in case.

Furthermore, I don't think quarantine would be an effective response to an
intentional biological attack. Even just quarantining say, New York City,
would be a nearly impossible task. And since this is an attack, why wouldn't
all major cities be targeted? There would be no way to contain it physically.

Even if you think pure quarantine is the way to go, there is a lot of useful
information that can only be gained by doing the weaponization research. What
sort of incubation times could show up? How virulent, etc. Knowing these sorts
of things would really improve the quarantine situation. There also isn't
really a good way to know without doing the research. It doesn't mean it has
to be packaged into a weapon, but the hard part is all done.

------
Real_S
This article fails to mention any privacy risks to the volunteers.

GWAS have proven to be, at best, of little value. In fact, due to the
unfortunate way that many researchers chase p-values, these analyses often
result in misdirection.

What happens? Genome privacy is exchanged for weak science.

~~~
gwern
> This article fails to mention any privacy risks to the volunteers.

What privacy risk, exactly? Who has been harmed? 23andMe has been in operation
since ~2007 and between them and Ancestry.com and the UKBB and the Japanese BB
and others, there must be somewhere on the order of 10 million+ genomes
cumulatively. UKBB alone has been the basis for what must be at least hundreds
of papers at this point by thousands of researchers or groups. Even further:
there are literally thousands of genomes available publicly online from groups
like PGP for a decade now, which you can go and download right now, including
mine. Is all this not enough? When should we expect to finally see these risks
materialize?

> GWAS have proven to be, at best, of little value. In fact, due to the
> unfortunate way that many researchers chase p-values, these analyses often
> result in misdirection.

That is completely wrong. GWASes have an excellent replication record, and
were founded on the basis of stringent p-values precisely _because_ of how
earlier candidate-gene studies were garbage due to researchers chasing
p-values.

~~~
rectang
> What privacy risk, exactly?

People will eventually be identified individually, as inevitably as the people
in the AOL search leak years ago. Then they -- and their blood relatives --
will be associated with negative health traits.

And then, companies will discriminate -- in hiring, in insurance... anywhere
they can. Because it will be financially advantageous to individual companies
even though it is detrimental to society as a whole. Because companies are
amoral organisms and it is folly to expect them to behave otherwise.

~~~
jghn
We're probably no more than a year or two away from a sequenced genome being
considered PHI for exactly this reason.

------
bob4444
I hate to sound like a shill, but this sounds similar to an area Encrypgen
(DNA) is trying to reach. ([https://encrypgen.com/](https://encrypgen.com/))

------
cottonseed
I lead the software team in the Neale lab that develops Hail, the software
that enabled this analysis: [https://hail.is](https://hail.is). If you're
excited about about applying CS and engineering to enable scientific discovery
of massive, fast-growing biological data, get in touch. We just got a bump in
funding and we're hiring a number of roles: distributed system database
internals, compilers, machine learning, scientific data viz, deployment and
operations, and web applications. See our Who's Hiring post:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288145](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288145)

~~~
dang
This is off topic outside the Who Is Hiring threads. Discussions here are
supposed to gratify intellectual curiosity. It sounds like you're in a
position to say a lot of interesting things about this topic! but a job ad
isn't interesting.

~~~
cottonseed
Fair, and thanks for clarifying the moderation.

