Internet unleashes mad scientists who will destroy us all

[Merusk]

How?  In the form of genetic engineering as a hobby.   

Hobbyists try genetic engineering at home

  MSNBC.com


Hobbyists try genetic engineering at home
Critics worry amateurs could unleash an environmental or medical disaster
By Marcus Wohlsen
The Associated Press
updated 12:10 p.m. ET, Fri., Dec. 26, 2008
SAN FRANCISCO - The Apple computer was invented in a garage. Same with the Google search engine. Now, tinkerers are working at home with the basic building blocks of life itself.

Using homemade lab equipment and the wealth of scientific knowledge available online, these hobbyists are trying to create new life forms through genetic engineering — a field long dominated by Ph.D.s toiling in university and corporate laboratories.

In her San Francisco dining room lab, for example, 31-year-old computer programmer Meredith L. Patterson is trying to develop genetically altered yogurt bacteria that will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that turned Chinese-made baby formula and pet food deadly.

"People can really work on projects for the good of humanity while learning about something they want to learn about in the process," she said.

So far, no major gene-splicing discoveries have come out anybody's kitchen or garage.

But critics of the movement worry that these amateurs could one day unleash an environmental or medical disaster. Defenders say the future Bill Gates of biotech could be developing a cure for cancer in the garage.

Many of these amateurs may have studied biology in college but have no advanced degrees and are not earning a living in the biotechnology field. Some proudly call themselves "biohackers" — innovators who push technological boundaries and put the spread of knowledge before profits.

In Cambridge, Mass., a group called DIYbio is setting up a community lab where the public could use chemicals and lab equipment, including a used freezer, scored for free off Craigslist, that drops to 80 degrees below zero, the temperature needed to keep many kinds of bacteria alive.

Co-founder Mackenzie Cowell, a 24-year-old who majored in biology in college, said amateurs will probably pursue serious work such as new vaccines and super-efficient biofuels, but they might also try, for example, to use squid genes to create tattoos that glow.

Cowell said such unfettered creativity could produce important discoveries.

"We should try to make science more sexy and more fun and more like a game," he said.

Patterson, the computer programmer, wants to insert the gene for fluorescence into yogurt bacteria, applying techniques developed in the 1970s.

She learned about genetic engineering by reading scientific papers and getting tips from online forums. She ordered jellyfish DNA for a green fluorescent protein from a biological supply company for less than $100. And she built her own lab equipment, including a gel electrophoresis chamber, or DNA analyzer, which she constructed for less than $25, versus more than $200 for a low-end off-the-shelf model.

Jim Thomas of ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog organization, warned that synthetic organisms in the hands of amateurs could escape and cause outbreaks of incurable diseases or unpredictable environmental damage.


"Once you move to people working in their garage or other informal location, there's no safety process in place," he said.

Some also fear that terrorists might attempt do-it-yourself genetic engineering. But Patterson said: "A terrorist doesn't need to go to the DIYbio community. They can just enroll in their local community college."

Woo hoo! Nothing bad could ever come of this!

[Venkman]

"... and getting tips from online forums".

Jeezus. I barely trust forums for game advice!

[Oban]

I have two kids, I must be a fucking genius genetic engineer.

[schild]

"... and getting tips from online forums".

Jeezus. I barely trust forums for game advice!

I barely trust forums for forum advice.

But for some reason I'm ok with home bioengineering.

[Hawkbit]

The next XPrize should be to create a monkey with four asses. 

[Hindenburg]

 

[Lantyssa]

I'm going to genetically engineer an organism that grows a substance which produces a pleasurable feeling when smoked or ingested.

[MahrinSkel]

I'm going to genetically engineer an organism that grows a substance which produces a pleasurable feeling when smoked or ingested.

Now that's interesting....  If you spliced a Boston Fern to produce THC and concentrate it in the leaves, would existing drug laws cover the result?  If a drug-producing plant could look like *anything*, would backyard gardening and houseplants be outlawed?  What if someone splices ergot fungoids to not only produce ergotamine and traces of lysergic acid, but go all the way to lysergic acid diathylamide with no refining needed?

--Dave

[Hindenburg]

Given that they criminalize the use and production of the active principle down here, and not of the plant itself, I'd say that it would still be ilegal. You'd obviously get away with it for quite a long time.
Most probable course of action would be to legalize and tax that crap.
They'd most likely make it a crime to splice stuff without a special license.

[Samwise]

[K9]

There is some serious hyperbole in that report. Genetic engineering is still prohibitavely expensive for home users and if a 24 year old biology major thinks that hobbyists are going to stumble across some new super vaccine which has eluded pharmatech and biotech companies or academic research scientists then I'd be inclined to think that she didn't understand most of her undergraduate studies. While DNA is cheap, and you can build a DNA electrophoresis machine pretty cheap, that's like saying you can build a Ferrari because car manuals and screwdrivers are cheap. Genetic manipulation still requires significant quantities of restriction enzymes, which are decently pricey. Even a common restriction enzyme like Bam HI could cost you ~$50 per run. Then there are other lab costs, such as Agar (expeinsive once you start using significant quantities), freezers, sterile containers and so on. The notion of someone doing this in their kitchen is both ludicrous and scary, not only are they going to struggle to keep their experiments free from cross infection, but breeding microorganisms in the same place where you prepare food is worryingly reckless.

The comparison between this and Bill Gates is pretty bad, since while Bill Gate's tools were effectively free (code) and easy to rapidly test and edit/re-create, biological materials are still expensive, consumed upon use, and still largely limited in how directed they can be. There is still a large random element in any given experiment, and improvement is not intuitive. So I do not see these people doing any good.

I'm going to genetically engineer an organism that grows a substance which produces a pleasurable feeling when smoked or ingested.

Now that's interesting....  If you spliced a Boston Fern to produce THC and concentrate it in the leaves, would existing drug laws cover the result?  If a drug-producing plant could look like *anything*, would backyard gardening and houseplants be outlawed?  What if someone splices ergot fungoids to not only produce ergotamine and traces of lysergic acid, but go all the way to lysergic acid diathylamide with no refining needed?

--Dave

In principle there's nothing to stop you doing this. However in practise there are a few hurdles in your way. Firstly, the cannabis plant (C.sativa.sativa) has not been even partially sequenced, there's no record of it in any major DNA database. This is not your first challenge though, first you would need to reconstruct the biosynthethic pathway of THC within the cannabis plant. You would need to understand how the production of the enzymes which are used in the pathway is regulated, and you would have to establish a starter compound for the pathway, and then find another species where this compound is already produced, and could be induced to overproduce. It would be no good to splice the genes into another plant only for your desired compound to be produced at trace levels, limited by the abundance of the initial compound. Once this is done you would need to do a sequencing project for the cannabis plant which could take several years, and cost several million dollars. You can obviously speed this up by using closely related species as a framework, but you'll probably end up needing to sequence most or all the genome in order to find all the genes encoding the enzymes you desire, as well as their control sequences and flanking regions. Once this is done you have to extract the DNA from some cannabis and amplify it using PCR. This step could be decently expensive, as the primer sequences needed for PCR are generally far from cheap. With this done, and a supply of the DNA encoding the genes you need, you then have to transfect these genes into the embyonic cells of your intended target species. This is a very hit and miss process. While transfecting genes into bacterial cells is fairly straightforward, using plasmids as vectors, transfecting into eukaryotic cells (cells from higher organisms i.e. Plants and Animals) is difficult as there is likely to be a high rate of rejection and faliure. You would also have to add genes sequentially, and following each round of insertions you would need to culture your embyronic cells to verify that the genes had in fact been taken up, and that where they had been taken up, that they had not disrupted any other important genes. After many rounds of this (adding a biosynthetic gene with each successful round) you will have your end product.

The whole process will probably take ~5 years or more, and cost several million dollars, and it is not guaranteed to have the desired result. You have no guarantee that your final plant will produce your compound as desired, grow normally or be able to reproduce. So you may make a lot of effort for nothing.

[schild]

That process sounds like something you would come up with while high.

[Venkman]

Genetic engineering is still prohibitavely expensive for home users

So were telegraphs, telephones, radio, TV and computers. It's never about what can be done right now. It's about projecting how far the genie has been spilt from the bottle and the point down the road when it becomes a major pita.

But I'm more concerned about the few thousand bioweapon research facilities that have popped up since we "began trying to eliminate" bioweapons. That shit really be freaky.

[Merusk]

Ever since I first started learning about humans fucking with genes and genetic manipulations I've had one nightmare that I can recall.  Some dipshit decides manipulating animals and humans into hybrids that can breed is a good idea, and they get out.  Combined with the plagues and other silly crap that were in said lab, humankind is forced down to medieval or prehistoric levels of technology as modern society collapses.  Humanity spends the rest of my nightmare struggling against these genetic horrors who the 'whimsical' idiot called things like "Orcs" and "goblins" because he read too damn many fantasy books and didn't believe "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" was really practical advice.

So yeah, homebrewed genetics, no matter how expensive NOW, give me the fucking willies.

[Lantyssa]

Actually I was just thinking of cross-breeding a couple of pot plants.  It may not be as specific, but we've been genetically engineering plants for as long as we've known about agriculture.

[Yoru]

So yeah, homebrewed genetics, no matter how expensive NOW, give me the fucking willies.

You should go read Frank Herbert's The White Plague. Okay, it's a pretty awful novel, but you'll never sleep again if these mere refrigerator scientists creep you out.

[Venkman]

I was thinking more along the lines of Ilium from Dan Simmons. It wasn't about genetic manipulation directly, but included a healthy history of them, leading up to and through the resuts of quantum probability manipulation that literally turned fiction into fact. Good read, if a bit lengthy.

And my nightmare is the same as Merusk's.

[Lantyssa]

My nightmare is that a couple of nerdy dudes genetically engineer the perfect woman in their basement and she totally ignores me!

[Furiously]

No worries there. We all love attractive lesbians.

[Krakrok]

In principle there's nothing to stop you doing this. However in practise there are a few hurdles in your way. Firstly, the cannabis plant (C.sativa.sativa) has not been even partially sequenced, there's no record of it in any major DNA database. This is not your first challenge though, first you would need to reconstruct the biosynthethic pathway of THC within the cannabis plant.

Not a problem. You can build a super computer to do it out of PS3s for $4k.

[Lantyssa]

Not a problem. You can build a super computer to do it out of PS3s for $4k.

Oh noes!  That monstrosity might Want To Play a Game -- Thermonuclear War!  We're dooooooooooomed!  Run for your bunkers!

Aiiiieeeee!

[MahrinSkel]

The whole process will probably take ~5 years or more, and cost several million dollars, and it is not guaranteed to have the desired result. You have no guarantee that your final plant will produce your compound as desired, grow normally or be able to reproduce. So you may make a lot of effort for nothing.

How many of those restrictions will go away as technology improves?  Sequencing the human genome started out as a world-wide "moon shot" decades scale program, was beat to the punch by a single lab using technology developed after the project started, and now can be done by any of several hundred labs in a few weeks.  We've already reached the point where virus genomes can be recreated from scratch in the lab (and there's not much else to a virus).

In 1970, computers still occupied rooms on the scale of a gymnasium and required multiple engineers to keep them operating.  By 1980 you could buy one the size of a large briefcase, by 1990 you could build your own from parts, by 2000 you could in theory build your own supercomputer, and now you actually can (that PS3 cluster linked above).  Seems to me that bio-tech is at around 1970 levels, not quite ready for amateurs, but going there.  Plants are likely to get there first, both because they're easier to work with and because there's more commercial interest.

--Dave

[Mrbloodworth]

My nightmare is that a couple of nerdy dudes genetically engineer the perfect woman in their basement and she totally ignores me!

[DraconianOne]

Actually I was just thinking of cross-breeding a couple of pot plants.  It may not be as specific, but we've been genetically engineering plants for as long as we've known about agriculture.

And dogs.  Don't forget the dogs.

[Tebonas]

Dogs genetically engineering plants? Now I'm really afraid, I don't trust those shifty-eyed canines with genetics!

[Oz]

you could always try to get some seeds from that crazy professor down at Florida State University.  The one that genetically engineered oranges to produce THC...

[Yegolev]

Ever since I first started learning about humans fucking with genes and genetic manipulations I've had one nightmare that I can recall.  Some dipshit decides manipulating animals and humans into hybrids that can breed is a good idea, and they get out.  Combined with the plagues and other silly crap that were in said lab, humankind is forced down to medieval or prehistoric levels of technology as modern society collapses.  Humanity spends the rest of my nightmare struggling against these genetic horrors who the 'whimsical' idiot called things like "Orcs" and "goblins" because he read too damn many fantasy books and didn't believe "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" was really practical advice.

This is incredibly racist.  Although giving half a vote to an actual half-human does have some logical backing.

[Endie]

If we start a nuclear chain reaction then it will destroy the world/if we turn on the large hadron collider then it will consume the earth in a black hole/if we allow IBM's nanoengineers to do their vile work the world will be turned into grey goo/if we go to the moon we will bring back space plague/if we continue broadcasting on the electromagnetic spectrum we will attract the attention of aliens/if we keep using horses for transport the world will be knee-deep in manure inside half a century/if we don't stop building ever-smarter computers they will take over and destroy us.

I'm glad I live in a different world from these people.  Mine is full of new, exciting things, and I'm pretty aware it'll be cancer or a haemhorrage that gets me, not the rampaging, radioactive squid-ink tattoo of barbed wire round someone's upper forearm that has gone rogue.  More likely to go rouge, anyway.

[Merusk]

I hadn't heard about the horses. That's a very good point, we must kill them all and then on to the cows! The creator gave us legs so we can walk on our own, dammit!

Oh, and yeah fuck Co2 worries too, with that in mind.

[Endie]

I hadn't heard about the horses. That's a very good point, we must kill them all and then on to the cows! The creator gave us legs so we can walk on our own, dammit!

Oh, and yeah fuck Co2 worries too, with that in mind.

The horse manure one was one of the earliest environmentalist scare stories, dating back to the 19th century, but I didn't make it (or any of them) up.

[Merusk]

Yeah I know you didn't on the rest since I'd heard them so I trusted that the horse was a legit one from the past.

My co2 bit was to point out that sometimes the alarmists are right.