Open Source, Genetically Engineered Machines From a Kit? 157
An anonymous reader writes "Students in an MIT competition are helping to build a dev-kit for cells. Together with synthetic biologists, they're building a Registry of Standard Biological Parts called BioBricks. They aim to do for cells what open source software has done for computers. 'The competition is a showcase for the burgeoning field of synthetic biology. Knight and his colleagues Randy Rettberg and Drew Endy, who created the contest in 2004, want to make biological systems easy to build by applying the tools of computer science and engineering: using standard parts and modular design to simplify complex systems. The goal is to create "genetic Legos" that could produce any chemical, from ethanol to pharmaceuticals.'"
Ha! I love it (Score:3, Interesting)
I would love to stick this web page in his face.
New License on Life (Score:4, Interesting)
What is this crap about a license taking months to produce and release? They should just release it with a license saying everything made with the kit is in the public domain, with the single exception to that disclaimer of all rights that any derivative must also come with that license. Why would it take more than 5 minutes to agree to release that license, and release it?
When some university comes after me for metabolizing glucose as part of my job (moving a muscle during business hours, just like you sometimes do), I don't want to have to argue about some license they've got on some DNA they synthesized.
All these patents on discovered genes are the purest BS violation of prior art. Any complexity in this BioBrick Public License will create more problems than it could ever solve.
Saw a talk by Tom Knight recently (Score:5, Interesting)
Some interesting points I remember from the talk:
- His lab and others like it are trying to take the craft out of manipulating cells and make it an engineering discipline.
- They've got ready-made kits of cell building blocks that you can piece together like Legos, and are adding thousands of new ones each year.
- Cells are enormously more efficient at storing information that we can in silicon - 5 or 6 orders of magnitude more dense - but most cells aren't good at writing new data, just reading it.
- Cells are really good at making precise structures at the atomic level, but our mechanical processes rely on statistics and probabilities to get things right. The smaller the structures get, the more a small statistical variation can really mess things up. Carbon nanotubes are much-hyped, and guess what's really good at making carbon structures?
- Another useful critter that was created for the last competition detected arsenic in water. The best manufactured/chemical solution costs is tens of dollars per test; using these kits, undergraduates from Edinburgh created something over a summer that is so cheap the bottles to put it in are the dominate cost.
Re:Just what we need (Score:5, Interesting)
This is simply a probability function. The more people that have the ability to create a biowarfare agent, the higher the chances that you'll have one released into the wild.
Consider this. The DNA sequence for the 1918 avian flu virus is public domain. You can buy base pair sequences online. It's not that difficult to add 1 and 1 to get 2. This isn't really technology you want to democratize to the masses. The number of angst ridden hate the world biochemists is much smaller than the number of angst ridden pimple faced teenagers. Given the ability, sooner or later one of them is going to think it's a cool idea to wipe out half the human species and will try.
Scares me (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think about it a whole lot, but back in my mind, I've thought that this is what will kill off all humans on the planet before the end of my natural life. Once you have cheap, easy engineering of microbial life, then all it takes is exactly ONE maniac to design a transmittable disease that will wipe out everyone.
Don't think anyone would do that? Look at some of the more rabid environmentalists who think the worst thing that ever happened to Earth was humanity. Theodore Kaczinsky was a genius, and with only a slight modification of his psychosis, he would've been a guy who would've thought about wiping everyone out.
Designing a disease like this would be almost pathetically simple with the right tools. Design it to be extremely infectious, but with an incubation period of 10 years before it starts killing. By the time people start dropping dead, it will be everywhere. 99% of everyone would be dead within months.
I honestly don't see how it could NOT happen -- eventually. Yet another reason why we need to get people into space habitats.
If any technology should be tightly controlled, this is it.
Re:Just what we need (Score:4, Interesting)
If I'm being alarmist about this, why not let anyone buy weapons grade plutonium or uranium and publish functional weapons designs along with the CAD/CAM instructions? After all, using your logic it's alarmist to think anyone would actually go to the trouble of actually constructing and using a bomb.
After all, the technical and monetary investment needed to build a nuclear bomb is several orders of magnitude greater than what is required to build a biological agent. If we don't have anything to worry about with biological agents, then obviously our nuke fears are overblown as well.
Re:Scares me (Score:2, Interesting)
kind of on the right path (Score:3, Interesting)
that's the kind of "less genocide" teenagers are concerned with