In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124207326903607931.html

by scott_s • 17 years ago

33 28 17 years ago

online.wsj.com

biohacker426• 17 years ago

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• 17 years ago

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.

biohacker426• 17 years ago

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.

imgabe• 17 years ago

The problem with licensing is that the people who want to do something bad are not going to be stopped by the fact that they don't have a license. If you're driving the getaway car in a bank robbery, does it matter if you don't have your driver's license?

menloparkbum• 17 years ago

George Church supports licensing because he's on a dozen patents in this area, has significant investments in synthetic biology, and would be first in line to be involved with granting the licenses.

There are valid safety considerations which need to be taken seriously but it's important to consider his motivations when making public statements like this.

Tangentially, I took George Church's class at HMS and it was one of the worst courses I've ever taken. If a synthetic biology licensing committee ever comes into play I hope someone less scatterbrained and arbitrary is chosen to head it.

grinich3• 17 years ago

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?

jerf2• 17 years ago

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.

grinich3• 17 years ago

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.

derefr• 17 years ago

"Open drug testing." If everyone already has little drug-replicator-dispensers attached to their desktops, they can sign up with much less hassle than a conventional drug trial to test something. A lower barrier to entry means that, further, you'll get way more people signing up, and therefore even better statistics and faster trials.

Of course, animal testing and such will still happen, and happen slowly; this will only speed up the trial once the drugs have been declared potentially safe for human testing.

hs2• 17 years ago

i use simple chemistry recipes from the internet, like fertilizer, soap, making tofu and other simple stuffs

fear? don't! ... the beauty of chemistry is that you can dilute the concentration

so if a random guy say use a tablespoon of baking soda, try a teaspoon instead or use more water to dilute

the scariest thing i did was cleaning contact lens with baking soda (feaing it will make me blind) ... i'm not blind yet and found you can use saline (nacl) sterile solution to replace commercial solution

overall my costs decreased by a factor of ten

1 kg of baking soda can provide my basic cleaning (soap, toothpaste, contact lense, etc) for a year -- nowadays i don't go to personal health section (i used to go there every week whenever i go to grocery store -> 52 x 5 mins = 260 mins not wasted)

rdixit• 17 years ago

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?

hs2• 17 years ago

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

In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein

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