The Economist Calls For "Open Source" Biology

Socguy writes "With the announcement earlier this week that a team of researchers has created the first artificial life, The Economist has been pondering the implications of what this brave new frontier means when the power to build living organisms filters through to anyone with a laptop. Traditional methods of restricting and regulating dangerous technology have more or less worked so far, but The Economist thinks that this time may be different. They are calling for an open system where the 'good guys' can see and counter any dangerous organisms that are released, accidentally or otherwise."

Methinks the Economist doth protest too much....

[ColdWetDog]

And makes too much out of 'synthetic biology'. For every nasty, dangerous issue that purely synthetic biology is faced with, the same issues occur with our current technology. Want to weaponize an E. coli - you could do that with current recombinant techniques. Creating the sequence de novo won't necessarily make the problem more dangerous - or even easier.

TFA worries about some time in the future when some psychotic teenager with a laptop and a DNA synthesizer can dream up some evil little critter and theorizes that 'open sourcing' of all DNA sequences would make dealing with this scenario easier. I don't see that. Even if Kim Jun Il's minions manage to do create a Micheal Crichton class bug having the 'code' would not make stabilizing the problem a whole lot easier. Especially if you could grow the bug and then sequence the thing. (Sequencing is and likely will be much easier than synthesis).

Besides ol' Kim isn't likely to upload his code to the repository, is he?

Good vs. Evil

[DaMattster]

Open source, in of itself, is somewhat agnostic to these quintessentially biblical terms. Open source is neither good nor evil, it just exists in a neutral state and it is up to the mind of the user whether it will be used for beneficial purposes or harmful purposes. Early FUD spreaders tried to capitalize on the fact that something open source would be less secure because source code could be examined for flaws and exploited by those wishing to do harm. The counter argument goes that security weaknesses are inherrent because software is a human innovation and thus error-prone and source code availability can lead to faster patching of flawed code because more people are examining it. The same can be said for biology - there are always people that will try to engineer a harmful life form based on what is out there but the more knowledge there is in the public space, the faster the harm can be subverted.

It's Been Ongoing

[b4upoo]

For many years students with education in biology really could have let some horrors lose upon the world. Thankfully those who know how tend to be stable enough not to want to pursue such negative goals. After all, it takes a certain sum of stability and direction to reach upwards in the universities. These folks tend not to want to do harm.
              With synthetic life possible little has changed yet. Obviously this area can yield wonderful products to support and cure the ills of mankind.
              As to regulation of the technology that will never be available in any substantial way. The cost of watching all of the peoples' efforts to create new and different things has nothing to support it unless national economies are very, very robust. Worse yet, science that is not done here will be done elsewhere. A bright student in Ethiopia is as likely to let the genie out of the bottle than a goofy student in California. So just where would the money come from to watch the people all over the world and study their work deeply enough to predict real hazards?

Re:open source economics?

[rubycodez]

the international banking cartel, of which our Federal Reserve is a local branch office, will never allow it. That's why we can't pass a bill to audit the Fed.

Re:And so it begins

[maxume]

Let's say your nefarious person invents a machine that turns 1/2 of the earth into antimatter. What would we do then?

Yes, I'm saying your magic bug is magic, it doesn't just get to hide in the body for 20 years, it has to hide in the body for 20 years while avoiding the host immune system and competing for resources with other stuff living on the body, and then it has to be 100% effective.

More foolish narrow vision...

[TinkersDamn]

The article is way too optimistic and as expected weak on science. They start out with the old mindset of each bacterial line being completely seperate, totally missing the extensive lateral gene transfers that have spread such wonders as antibiotic resistance and the toxins that created O157...
And follow it up with assumption that knowing the code makes it so much easier to figure out how to stop or fix any problem organisms arise. We still barely understand protein folding, and then only with the help of supercomputers.
Oh, and then you add a funny thing called evolution to add random mutations...
Life is a massively parallel ongoing experiment, with the current ecological terrain/surface the result of countless battles in multiple dimensions. And we are continually making the terrain more and more fragile through the chemicals we spew and spray all about the globe with hardly a clue of their impact let alone their combinatorial influence...
Unfortunately most humans are not saints, but lazy, greedy and sometimes outright paranoid and murderous. Expecting morals and miracles to stop mistakes is foolish.

Re:Methinks the Economist doth protest too much...

[RDW]

'And makes too much out of 'synthetic biology'. For every nasty, dangerous issue that purely synthetic biology is faced with, the same issues occur with our current technology. Want to weaponize an E. coli - you could do that with current recombinant techniques. Creating the sequence de novo won't necessarily make the problem more dangerous - or even easier.'

Which is pretty much the most insightful comment in this thread. We've been manipulating bacteria and viruses for decades. Arbitrary genes encoding any nasty protein that takes your fancy can be inserted into a wide range of microorganisms using existing technology. The Venter group's work is a fantastic technical achievment, but does not increase the risk of a terrorist group or rogue state developing a biological weapon. Far easier for them to tweak an existing pathogen that billions of years of evolution have exquisitely adapted to infecting humans. Easier still (and much more plausible) to take an 'off the shelf' bug like Anthrax and weaponise it without the need for any genetic manipulation at all.

I'm also curious about how the writer of TFA thinks molecular biology research actually works. The sequences of any number of pathogens, down to the individual genes that make them virulent, are freely available on the net from sites like NCBI, making them rather easier to get hold of than The Economist's own paywalled 'premium content'. Pretty much everything else that has been sequenced is out there too, including the Venter group's synthetic mycoplasma genome, which can be found right here:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/296455217 [nih.gov]

In what way is this not already 'open source'?