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First Reproducing Artificial Virus Created
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The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
Chilling (Score:4, Insightful)
I still don't really think the benefits (gene expression research, gene therapy in general) are good enough, considering the potential problems.
I'd like to know who's funding them. Is it civilian or military?
As if there weren't enough virii on the planet already, we have to go making more. Fantastic academic achievement, but wish they hadn't done it. A bit like a nuclear bomb, in its own way...
Simon.
An software anecdote (Score:2, Insightful)
Just to find a metaphor that will bring this home to some of us...
I once had a prolonged discussion on the pros and cons of GM food and the mixing of seperate genetic organisms (as has produced this virus) with a Phd in Computer Science. Eventually I grabbed a textbook on UML from his desk and waved it at him. "Look," I cried, "they're breaking encapsulation!" My friend immediately reversed his stance on Genetic Engineering and wanted more testing.
Viruses and weapons (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think anybody should be making any new life forms or modifying any existing life forms, at least until we've had a serious societal discussion regarding its possible role and impact on terrorism and biowarfare.
Imagine a scenario where terrorists could alter a disease or organic biological weapon gene by gene to make it immune to current antidotes. Beyond that, I worry that the US itself might use it for its own cache of new-age weapons.
If WE convert it to a weapon, what's the difference? We can claim we're the good guys and we won't use it. But we can look at Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
I hope I'm not fear-mongering here, but, I worry.
duh.. I guess humans will do it themselves (Score:1, Insightful)
I saw a news report on goats the made to have genetic information of silk spinning spiders.. They are milking the goats to extract commericial production levels of silk!!!!
What happens when they engineer a virus and design it to only activate (attack) a specific genetic sequence (or genetic defect common in certain races).. tinfoil hat people are right, the Nazi's didn't disappear.. they are just working for the US military.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:5, Insightful)
You would hope that they take great pains to make access to the virii as secure as possible.
But, things like this are very important in the fight to create vaccines to illnesses. Anyone who has taken apart and built a car, computer, or whatever will tell you that thier level of understanding is now MUCH greater than it was before they did it. Knowing how to assemble a virus, will hopefully allow us to defend ourselves against them.
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I think this sort of research is as or more likely to radically benefit society as it is to create catastrophe. Look at the genie released when we first split the atom; I'd argue that the current and future benefits from nuclear power alone outweigh the concern about the misuse of this knowledge. But I feel that ethical concerns must become a stronger part of scientific research and funding, not only because of this breakthrough but because of the ones we're about to make (nanotechnology will present similar worrying potential...)
Re:Chilling (Score:2, Insightful)
Sometimes it feels like this might apply to Craig Venter. I mean his intellectual achievements are staggering, world-class, unimpeachably brilliant. but his choice of topics is sometimes very unnerving.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Which is perfectly reasonable. People seem to be exremely afraid of anything made in a lab, but fail to recognize that the greater danger (by far) is from natural evolution of new viruses.
By the same token, the dangers of bio-weapons seem to be greatly excaggerated, when compared to natural pathogens. Some anthrax letters that killed half a dozen people seemed to get more attention and resources than the flu and aids, which kill tens of thousands of people per year in the US alone.
Tor
Re:Chilling (Score:5, Insightful)
Simon.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Perhaps bio weapons get more attention than natural viruses simply because if a natural virus kills you, it's an act of [insert deity here] and simply one of the risks of life, like getting hit by a bus.
Bio weapons on the other hand are purposely engineered to maximize the lethality of a disease for the intentional purpose of killing as many people as possible. In other words, it's the intent that matters.
human interference.... (Score:3, Insightful)
So, what kind of checks and balances will there be on man-made viruses? None- you just cannot introduce anything into nature so quickly. I think the possible outcome is clear. This is downright frightening. I think I'll go rent The Stand this weekend.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Scared now (Score:4, Insightful)
As anyone can tell you, learning how to copy something that already exists doesn't really mean you know that much more about how it works. Just because I could write out a copy of a Chinese story doesn't mean I know anything more about what the story says, just that I can duplicate the writing correctly.
Creating NEW life forms, not just copying existing ones, is still a ways off.
Theoretically, they should be able to do this with a mammal like a feline. Sequence the DNA, build a copy, and replace the DNA in a freshly fertilized egg, and it should grow up just fine. Though the complexity of the animal would add issues that I'm not educated enough to be aware of, certainly.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Right or wrong, an incident that is the result of deliberate intent is seen as much more heinous than an act of nature, even if it does much less danger. School shootings have killed only a handful of youngsers over several years. How many died from traffic incidents over the same time frame? Where is your child safer - sitting in school or sitting in the front seat of a car? You don't see parents panicking over the thought of their child riding in a car but you see huge discussions over how to make our schools safer.
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Morals Schmorals (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, the microbe would presumably die as well, and much more quickly than the plants, while the CO2 is replenished by mammal activity.
but that might not happen before the atmosphere goes up in flames since that carbon dioxide is being turned into hydrogen.
Well, if they can create a microbe that can transmute a carbon and two oxygens into hydrogen, color *me* impressed.
Hmm... would that require or release energy? Forget about going up in flames, the atmosphere might undergo spontaneous nuclear fission. :-o Hey, wasn't that in Battlefield Earth? :-P
How about a microbe than can split water into hydrogen and oxygen?
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:4, Insightful)
why do you keep selling them weapons??
Who sold Saddam chemical and biological weapons?
The US insists on a monopoly on WMD technology
not for the safety of the world, but for
its own economic interests and to maintain
its power.
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:2, Insightful)
Ethics are not the same the world over. If X can be discovered with current technology, then someone somewhere (probably several someones in several somewheres) are busily discovering X as we speak. If X can be used as a weapon, then you can be doubly sure of this. You cannot halt the progress of science. In a 'best case', you can halt the progress of science by law-abiding and well-intentioned people. This is worse than the alternative.
Yes, new technologies do pose threats to our way of life. Usually, these disruptions are for the good. In the case where they are for ill, then it behooves us to understand them, rather than to intentionally blind ourselves to them.
Imagine a scenario where terrorists could alter a disease or organic biological weapon gene by gene to make it immune to current antidotes. Imagine further a victim nation whose biologists shrug their collective shoulders and say, "We know nothing about plague engineering. Try next door, it's legal there."
Re:Scared now (Score:1, Insightful)
radiUS -> radii
virUS -> viri
If you're gonna be pseudo-latin-like instead of using the correct ``virusses'', at least get rid of ONE FRIGGIN `i'!
It's probably not a very effective virus (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because it's man-made doesn't make it more advanced than naturally-occurring viruses. It's been possible for a long time to build viruses from collected stocks, and these are generally much more frightening. What will be scary is when we have some clue as to how to design proteins, and could construct a virus with specific properties. Until then, we're not likely to create anything that doesn't arise in nature.
(Genetically modified foods are a slightly different issue; just because it might arise in nature doesn't mean we'd eat it if it did. Also, most of the organisms involved are much more resistant to mutation and genetic mixing than viruses and bacteria)
Re:Life? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that with bio-weapons, there's a big problem... There's no "safe haven" for those that release it. Even the wackiest of terrorists want their people to survive. If you ram a couple planes in a building (US), gas the subway (Japan) or even nuke a city off the map (Nowhere... yet), you know where the damage is. But if you release a bio-weapon anywhere in the world, you can suddenly find it in your own back-yard in a week.
Releasing a reproducing bio-weapon with no known antidote requires a level of insanity unmatched in human history. Never before could anything truly endanger the entire human race, not even in the worst nuclear holocaust scenarios of the Cold War. Think something like the black plague, except 100% lethal, air-borne and spreading at 800km/hr by plane until someone realizes just how deep shit we're all in. And yes, I mean all, friends and foes alike.
Kjella
Re:eesh (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:4, Insightful)
1 - Terrorism isn't generaly a R&D effort. The act of terrorism isn't anything new, contrary to what GW Bush Inc. seems to belive. For centuries people have been committing acts of terrorism, but these are not the organizations that develop the new and frightening weapons of war.
Terrorism is, by it's very nature, a low budget enterprise. Until Mr and Mrs Smith can grow little Susie a custom built kitten with neon pink fur by hitting some buttons on the Recombinator (tm) you won't see gene level modifications as something available to terrorists.
2 - We've been making viruses resistance to treatment/immunization for years now. Read Ken Alblik's autobiography on his roll in the Soviet Bioweapons program. Until the 1970s the United States was engaged in offensive biological warfare . Today we still research defensive biowarfare, which means that we use developing treatments as an excuse to weaponize deadly organisims.
The former Soviet Union (according to most sources) weaponized the small pox virus. Weaponization, for the unaware, is a process of making a virus resistant to treatment and immunization techniques while increasing it's kill rate.
As was pointed out elsewhere in this thread, if you have something insanely dangerous and you want to it to fall into the wrong hands, the best thing you can do with it it hand it to the Russian Army to guard.
I have the utmost respsect for the scientific community. The work they do is amazing and valuable research, but this isn't something I'm worried about. Somehow, I doubt that a bunch of PhDs in a lab can come up with anything (much) more deadly than billions of years of evolution and 50 years of cold war has produced.
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:3, Insightful)
I can't prove it is right, but you can't prove it is wrong.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless somebody figures out how to make an artificial microbe that takes advantage of chemical processes that just aren't found in natural evolution. For example, the human body might not even be capable of attacking a hypothetical microbe that has a teflon or silicone-enhanced outer membrane.
At any rate, natural evolution proceeds at a slow rate, so the defending species has time to adapt. Anthrax, for example, implements a tricky chemical hack to breach animal cells and destroy them. Most animals are pretty defenseless against the special back door that antrax uses, and without it the anthrax bacteria would be no more harmful than a pimple. However, anthrax is a rather obscure organism that mostly lives in the dirt. The reason that animals haven't evolved a defense against its chemical attack is that it just doesn't spread that easily in a natural setting. If anthrax were contagious like a cold, animals would have evolved a defense against it long ago.
Now, people may soon have the knowledge to install anthrax's chemical attack into something like a common cold virus. This short-ciruits the evolutionary process. Instead of just having to resist natural random improvemts in microbes, we may soon also face improvements that take advantage of god-like knowledge of the weaknesses of the defenders.
By simultaneously combining the best parts of various different microbes found in nature, then adding unnatural chemical improvements and using our newly available schematics of human cell defense design, we will certainly be able to create microbes far more dangerous than anything nature is likely to randomly come up with.
I doubt that trying to control this kind of technology is going to do any good, however. Somebody somewhere in the world is going to work on this stuff whether its banned or not. Our only hope is probably to develop means to quickly detect any new microbes, along with adaptive technology to create unnatural defenses to unnatural new organisms in real time.
"Discussion"? (Score:5, Insightful)
But the problem is that we're not *going* to have a serious societal discussion because that phrase means nothing. Who's talking with whom? Who makes decisions? Who gets input?
When I hear "societal discussion", I get an image in my head of the entire country sitting at a great big table having a little chat about what to do. But in real life, that sort of thing doesn't happen. You have kooks who think that anything that looks like "playing God" is evil, you have people who think that every new invention must immediately be used to aid/fight terrorism, you have people who don't even understand the basic science behind what's going on(like Slashdot...oops, did I say that out loud?). And in the end, after all of these people have "had their say"(who are they talking to?), who decides what will be done? You want the government to say "Sorry, no more research on microorganisms"? Because that's about all it could do. What right does "society" have to control science? Most people will tell you that they don't even understand what "science" is! Who is qualified to do cost/benefit analysis of this sort of thing? Does anybody even *care* about cost/benefit analysis?
I understand(and sympathize with) your concerns, but no amount of talking is going to do anything about this situation. We can't halt our understanding of the world where it is just because a few people might cause problems with it. Hell, if we had taken that attitude to begin with, we'd be lucky to have fire by now!
Re:Scared now (Score:5, Insightful)
Whether virus is life or not depends on the definition of life. There is no consensus on this defintion, so debates on the matter are rather meaningless, it is really disputes over the definition of a word.
What makes viruses controversial is that they cannot reproduce by themselves; they need to infect antoher cell. But then again, many parasites cannot live without some other organism, and they are usuually considered alive.
Tor
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the recent record of the US of bombing and invading countries on purely imaginary perceived threats and very real economic reasons, I'd rather NOT have the US be the only one with such a weapon. I'd like a lot of different people to have it. Balance of terror is bad, but I've come to appreciate the advantages of unstable equilibrium compared to a (albeit very stable) death.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:2, Insightful)
In the same light, the US has never created a weapon it has not used.
Re:Viruses, not virii (Score:3, Insightful)
And since you're clearly an authority on the history of English, you're no doubt already aware that the trend over at least the last century has been toward stricter disciplines of spelling and grammar, not looser. Thanks to mass publication, we're no longer in the era of Andrew Jackson's "It's a damn poor mind that can think of only one way to spell a word!"
The rules change over time, it's true, but that doesn't mean there aren't any rules.
Deal with it.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:3, Insightful)
1. The "I don't understand it, we're all gonna die" crowd and...
2. The "I understand it, I don't trust those irresponsible buggers, if we don't do something we're all gonna die" crowd.
Large corporations (and some small ones) have repeated proven themselves to be untrustworthy and irresponsible. Crowd #2 have every reason to fear what they fear.
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sort of gives the idea of keeping your virus definitions up-to-date a whole new meaning.
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:1, Insightful)
They're called farmers...
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to flame you, but that is an arrogant and inherently dangerous presumption to make. Take for example Ted Kaczynski. Incredibly intelligent, incredibly crafty, incredibly deadly. And he's just one example. Sure, you could argue that he is insane. So take the invention of the atomic bomb as another example. Following your logic, the Unabomber would have seen the devastation of his ways and been deterred, and Einstein would have kept his findings closely guarded from government exploitation. No one needs to be reminded of the outcome of either scenario.
Intelligence does not imply wisdom, and quite often you'll find one without the other, especially in the race for discovery and/or acheivement.
Re:Viruses and weapons (Score:3, Insightful)
My grandfather bred chickens. His father corresponded with Charles Darwin about it (my aunt has the letters). Breeding animals to enhance or supress certain traits has been going on for ages.
> Imagine a scenario where terrorists could
I can imagine any scenario "where terrorists could.." do just about anything (brainwash my children into blowing up their schools... putting poison in the water supply... the list is frickin endless). But that is not a good reason not to conduct this research. If it was, the world WOULD be run by terrorists.
> I hope I'm not fear-mongering here, but, I worry.
Don't worry - you're just being ridiculous, that's all. We can all be ridiculous occasionally
Why not Do it on the moon? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:2, Insightful)
Ted Kaczynski (not sure if either of us spelled that right, and I'm not going to take the time to look it up now:) was indeed highly intelligent. However, I don't think he works very well as an example that intelligence does not guarantee wisdom. In fact, I would argue that his success for many years implies that he was indeed "crafty" (often used as a synonym for wise, or clever). His failure was not in wisdom or intelligence but in the fact that his choices were immoral (some would argue evil) to the large majority of the society. The decision to commit evil acts does not preclude the wisdom of the decision maker. Sometimes evil acts can make more sense than good ones, given the proper moral outlook.
In the case of Einstein, he knew full well the implications of application of his theories. It was a letter signed by him that encouraged Roosevelt to devote resources to building the first atomic bombs. Granted the only reason he wrote the letter was because he believed the Nazis were very close to building their own nuclear weapons, and IIRC, he said later in life that he regretted that decision. But, he never regretted publishing his theories, and anyone who claims the world would have been a better place if he hadn't is a fool. First of all, they would have been eventually discovered by someone else. What if that someone else was someone who agreed with the Fascists, and therefore took the discovery directly to his government, who didn't release it publically, and instead used the research to create atomic weapons. Only this time, no one else in the world had even the theoretical groundwork to be able to develop their own weapons to counter. Also, Einstein's theories created a revolution in physics, allowing us to discover not only nuclear weapons but integrated circuits and other modern technologies. I think more benefits have come out of Einstein's work than bad, and that the wisest decision possible was to publish it and allow it to be referenced freely.
Does this mean that intelligent people are inherently wise? Not at all. There are countless examples of intelligent people doing stupid things--Maxim created his machine gun believing that the massive volume of fire would so frighten people that war would be impossible. Elia Kazan provided names, the names of many of his friends, no less, to McCarthy and the Un-American Activities Committee, names that were promptly blacklisted. These are far better examples of naivete and foolishness among the intelligentsia.
umm... no (Score:1, Insightful)
The title says "first artificial...", but the blurb says "...previous attempts had taken". Can we please have a logic consistency check?
So then the gist of the article becomes Craig Venter having gobs of money and equipment to throw at doing *exactly* the same thing as reported before, gobs of connections to use in making a huge hullabaloo about it, and an even larger head than I previously thought. And this is the guy that used his *own* DNA in a large (>$1bn) investor-funded human genome sequencing effort.
And the previous virus to be synthesized? That was friggin *polio*! And the polio genome is about 50% longer than phi-X174. So these guys did something which is technically easier than before, with a less dangerous virus, and somehow I'm supposed to be impressed? Oh yeah, the original effort for polio was widely derided (in my lab at least) as being incredibly derivative anyway: they used existing DNA synthesis technologies to make fragments of the genome (probably bought it from a company), and then use an existing technique (PCR) to assemble it. And it's not like assembling stuff with PCR is that innovative either: people have been doing it for years when they had a DNA sequence and wanted to randomly reshuffle it. So they cut the sequence up with enzymes and then run PCR on that mix, and call it "PCR recombination".
Besides which, this whole thing about "artificial", "from scratch", etc... is utter bullsh*t. All they've done is use synthetic chemistry to make short (100 basepair or less) segments and then use biological enzymes to assemble those fragments into the full length genome. And that genome is copied base-for-base from an existing virus. So they've just spend a huge amount of money and manpower to get in a few weeks what I can buy from Sigma and have here tomorrow. I'm, like, incredibly underwhelmed. And don't give me that crap about "arbitrary control over the sequence", yadayadaya. We're a long way off from designing our own viruses, especially of the phi-X174 ilk with coding sequences on both strands of the DNA double helix (think segments of machine code that still work when you shift the whole string by like 4 bits). So all we'd be doing anyway is either making small changes in existing viruses, or taking larger segments of different viruses and piecing them together. It's *all* doable, with much less work, using other molecular techniques.
(deep breath)
I feel better now. Now to do some real work...
Re:Should we really be doing things like this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Knowing how to assemble a virus, will hopefully allow us to defend ourselves against them.
As long as the rate at which the virus reproduces and the level of devastation it causes is not too fast or too irreversible.
Consider the effects of some natural virus and other life forms that have been unleased.
A fungus from the Eastern hemisphere pretty well wiped out the American chestnut tree in short order.
Russian thistle, introduced to North America in the 19th century has likewise become endemic, to the point where tumbleweeds are considered an essential ingredient in any Western film set.
Rabbits in Australia, etc., provide some indication of how rapidly reproducing organisms can spread and how much change they can cause.
Do we trust our knowledge of virus mechanics enough to believe that an inadvertent release of "grey goo [wired.com]" can be undone?
To put it another way:
need to see the data (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What they did, why it is hard (Score:1, Insightful)
I could imagine a machine into which:
You type the letters of a desired DNA sequence.
It attempts to make a certain number of copies of the DNA sequence. The number is such that statiscallly at least some of them are without errors.
***This is the hard part*****
You determine which is the good copy. I don't know how.
***This is the hard part*****
You use this good string of DNA as a template to produce mass quantities. The mass quantities are checked against the original and known good copies of the original. You do the checking with the same mechanism real cells use.
The end result are thousands, millions of copies of the original virus.
If such a machine could work, you are basically at where computers were when people programmed them in machine language, typing in hexadecimal code.
By analogy, assemblers could be written. Programmers type in amino acids instead of individual letters.
Compilers might allow you to just input the component proteins. (Fortran).
If we ever learn enough about how proteins are made from DNA and how they fold etc. We may be able to create languages that describe features of an simple creature. We could reverse engineer an existing simple organism and write patches, and then recompile the code to produce a nucleus that could be implanted into a zygote using cloning techniques. (Simple Organism == C.elegans??)
Eventually, people who are good at patching existing organisms might develope tools and libraries that would let them be able to write new creatures from scratch, basing them on an existing creature, sort of like Linux is based on Unix.
People could trade the codes for making purple frogs and flying pigs on the Internet.
The downside is that someone is going to come up with DRM for this sort of thing the day after someone invents it.
Fascinating but spooky (Score:1, Insightful)