Hacking the President's DNA

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/hacking-the-presidents-dna/309147/#

by guimarin • 14 years ago

3 1 14 years ago

guimarin• 14 years ago

This article puts a whole new spin on 'anti-virus'. It posits that open sourcing 'important' genomes, those of presidents and others, would be the best defense against any sort of synthetic biological attack, targeted specifically at the individual, because the group is smarter than the individual. And certainly a whole industry is better than just the secret service in the case of the US President.

It seems inevitable to me that each of us will have organisms, bacteria, that exist on our skin and in our bloodstream that make up a sort of personalized and general 'anti-virus'. Coming most likely from the Cancer research of today. The question for me becomes how quickly will we get to this point, and how many will die before we reach it. If it's true that by 2020, you will be able to replicate the Polio Virus for $3, I can only imagine what fringe crazies will be able to do with better engineered viruses.

exponential growth as applied to industries adjacent to the tech industry is really hard to grasp. I have a very difficult time seeing what the future will be like 2-5 years from now, contrasted with 1999 when it was easier to see what the world would be like by 2010. 100m iPads in 2.5 years is a perfect example of this. The idea of not a tablet is now absurd in so many instances ( airline pilots, doctors, etc. )

Hacking the President's DNA

Related Stories