Hacking goes squishy

http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14299634

by fauigerzigerk • 17 years ago

45 37 17 years ago

fgh• 17 years ago

Hmm, interesting, although I'm not sure that we're quite comfortable yet about GM here in Europe, especially for things that enter the food chain.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

I don't give a damn about food GM. It's not about feeding the hungry or helping the planet. That's the marketing speak. The reality is that it's hacking roundup resistant genes into crops so that you can (or have to) buy and spray MORE roundup. That's very good for Monsanto and DuPont's bottom line.

GM work in industry, think bio manufacturing of industrial compounds, and obviously human health is absolutely worth pursuing.

c3o• 17 years ago

Just in case anyone from Vienna, Austria is reading this: There's a talk on exactly this topic at local hacker space Metalab tonight: http://metalab.at/wiki/Metaday_25 [german]

noverloop• 17 years ago

reminds me of "Our Neural Chernobyl" by Bruce Sterling

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_(anthology)#.22Our_Neur...

pbhjpbhj5• 17 years ago

Article concerns biohacking particularly manipulating living organisms - could HN have some editorial system to ensure articles posted have a proper descriptive title or maybe a categorisation system.

gehant2• 17 years ago

Squishy was a pretty good indicator that it wasn't going to be your typical hacking article IMO...

But if you are insinuating that biohacking is not relevant: http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

pbhjpbhj5• 17 years ago

No insinuation.

Squishy suggested it may not be programming, but there's no reason why it couldn't be a neologism or brand name in that field.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

I had no difficulty guessing the content from the title, and the Economist (which chose the title) has quite a good editorial system already.

pbhjpbhj5• 17 years ago

You guessed merely from the term "squishy" that it concerned moving towards low-cost of access to bioengineering DNA enabling non-professionals to participate? That's a pretty good guess IMO, so good that I think you're lying.

The Economist have a good editorial system but they don't choose the title simply to inform. I thought that part of the HN ethos was presenting useful information in a succinct way avoiding cruft and unnecessary marketing tactics. An uninformative title is a marketing tactic designed to get you to see adverts around an article that you wouldn't otherwise have perused - that presumably is why the Economist chose that title (yes also to be mildly entertaining and close enough to the subject to avoid alienating users).

mustpax• 17 years ago

This might be the first time I've seen a mainstream news publication use the work "hacking" to mean something other than "criminal subversion of computer systems." And we're talking Economist here, not Wired or another geeky outlet.

fauigerzigerk2• 17 years ago

True, but they used it a little too often in the sense of "amateur", which doesn't do justice to what hackers are in computing today. In biohacking it's a different matter in 2009.

anigbrowl3• 17 years ago

amateur is one who loves a particular activity; doing something for nothing is a matter of choice, not of inability.

biohacker422• 17 years ago

But the FBI may genuinely be wary of biohackers

Obviously, the government has never seen any invention it's not scared of. This goes all the way back to the steam engine.

Before anyone here dredges out the old tired super virus or gray goo.

There's no such thing as gray goo and never will be because you'd have to violate the fundamental laws of thermodynamics to get it.

There are plenty of super viruses and bacteria in nature. Neither HIV nor MRSA came from biohacking. As I have said before, anything we create would be like just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout. Sure it could be the one that gets you, but then again, there's an infinity of stuff out there that can also get you.

darien• 17 years ago

I think it was stephen hawking who said that the only way for humans to ensure their salvation from man-made super viruses in the next 100 years would be to colonize space. Outrageous? Sure, but so is cancer, atomic energy and quatum entanglement.

asdlfj2sd338• 17 years ago

I think that was more of hard sell for space exploration then a warning against super viruses.

steveklabnik2• 17 years ago

> There's no such thing as gray goo and never will be because you'd have to violate the fundamental laws of thermodynamics to get it.

As someone who only heard of "grey goo" very recently, care to explain why this is the case?

asdlfj2sd338• 17 years ago

In one way gray goo already exists. The world is literally covered in tiny nano machines eating and multiplying as fast as they can. And many of them are deadly to us. We call them bacteria and fungi.

"grey goo" beyond the natural goo, as often seen in fiction, multiplies and moves so fast as to violate basic laws of physics. For example there's only so much energy stored in stuff that could be eaten.

tigerthink5• 17 years ago

>There are plenty of super viruses and bacteria in nature. Neither HIV nor MRSA came from biohacking. As I have said before, anything we create would be like just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout. Sure it could be the one that gets you, but then again, there's an infinity of stuff out there that can also get you.

It sounds like you're saying that each supervirus mankind creates marginally increases the chance that a Bad Thing will happen. Isn't marginally increasing the chance that a Bad Thing will happen also Bad?

Also, how close do you think that HIV and MRSA are to the upper bound on supervirus potency?

tigerthink5• 17 years ago

Have you read this book?

http://www.amazon.com/Hot-Zone-Terrifying-True-Story/dp/0385...

asdlfj2sd338• 17 years ago

MRSA is pretty close to sending us back in time, a time before penicillin, it wasn't a good time, but obviously we survived.

We got super lucky with HIV because you have to exchange bodily fluids to catch it. If it ever becomes as easy to catch as the common cold, we're screwed.

And while the marginal danger may increase with research, the marginal utility will also increase, in fact it will increase faster. We'll discover more cures then diseases. And yes, regulation is a blunt weapon which stops not only the bad, but also the good.

Locke1689• 17 years ago

That is one freaky picture. http://media.economist.com/images/20090905/D3609TQ7.jpg

Hacking goes squishy

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