The Future is Now
d-n-i.net
d-n-i.net
I just get massively incensed with the tone of pieces like this - their strong implication that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently A Bad Thing and the readiness with which they are prepared to be scared is so pervasive that sometimes I honestly get the impression that, to the average person, I must seem like an absolute lunatic for my intellectual pursuits.
For example, I've recently been playing around a lot with the Arduino. An acquaintance of mine, upon seeing my desk strewn with various wires and components, immediately asked "Wow, are you making a bomb or something?" - how crazy is that? Now, this person may not be particularly well versed in science or technology, but the fact that the first thing he thought of when exposed to a bit of it was "BOMB!" could well tell you a little about just how dangerous articles like this one can be once they've become the norm.
Maybe it's just human nature to be scared of things we don't understand, but something seems to be eroding the average person's very desire to understand in the first place. I can't help but think that scaremongering such as this is not helping in the slightest.
(And I apologise for jumping on this article as an excuse to have a bit of a rant, but it just makes me so very, very angry.)
"if you've done nothing wrong, you've nothing to hide" isn't going to work, is it?
These sorts of diseases walk a fine line -- too lethal and they kill their hosts before spreading, too benign and they're ineffective; too many mutations and they quickly mutate into a benign strain, too few mutations and the immune system can build resistance (and a vaccine can be found). Personally, I'm going to put the likelihood of this threat in the same basket as "terrorists developing functional nuclear bomb."
The scientific knowledge isn't too hard to get, but acquiring enough resources to make a sizable bomb without attracting too much attention is difficult. Add to that the fact that while the theory of the bomb is relatively simple, I'd imagine that actually engineering it would be the hardest part. One would need to fit the bomb into a relatively small space (no larger than a car) and testing the thing would be well near impossible (a successful test would give you away completely).
So, the only people capable of pulling this off would have to be educated, engineering geniuses, in a convenient position in which they can obtain materials without attracting undue attention, and have an intense desire to blow as many people as possible off the face of the planet. It doesn't surprise me that the intersection of these sets approaches the null set.
Yet it hasn't happened. It's not clear to me whether this is luck, heroic yet mostly secret effort by various national governments, something systemic to terrorism, or some combination. Well, we know at least that the CIA used to buy fissionables, no questions asked and no consequences meted, but I, at least, don't know how much they actually got that way.
And even though the likelihood may still be less than that of a plane crash, it's worth bearing in mind that we're all riding on this plane...
I'm not suggesting that these people somehow need to be rounded up or something... I don't think that would work, for a start. But perhaps the subject does deserve some thought. Perhaps biohackers can be provided with free access to secure facilities, expertise and oversight that will enable them to conduct their experiments safely.
Sure, that might cost a bit, to build all the infrastructure... but it's less expensive than a Black Plague 2.0, as you call it.
But we seem to be comfortable with this existential threat on some level given that we switched on the LHC and we have thousands of nukes ready to destroy every major city on the face of the earth within hours.
It all comes down to costs and benefits. If we try to minimize this existential threat by building some sort of infrastructure so that biohackers can conduct their experiments with oversight we're going to lose something. In this case, we'd be losing research that qualified scientists could be doing instead of babysitting people who, on average, probably have no idea what they're doing.
Plus, institutionalizing the process seems to me to defeat the purpose of biohacking--using unconventional techniques to solve problems. In the facilities you describe, I'm not sure the biohackers would have the freedom to perform the experiments they want. True, it would significantly reduce the odds of a catastrophic virus leaking to the general population, but it would also reduce the odds that someone discovers some "miracle cure." (Of course, the odds of this happening either way are pretty small, but I'd reckon that the odds of something good coming out of these garage experiments is at least an order of magnitude greater than the odds of anything bad happening.)
I must say that my feelings on bioengineered plagues are somewhat mixed. One one hand, I'd rather not be killed, esp. in a grotesque and uncommonly painful way. On the other hand, I think perhaps there ought to be a death penalty for civilizations which alienate and oppress their intelligent, creative and free-spirited minority.
Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism
Okay. Right.
If so, how are you sure?
For one thing, recall that these are amateur hackers at the beginning of the hacking curve; today playing with E. Coli, five years from now in possession of full-on sequencers, producing and inserting arbitrary DNA, ten years who knows?
He may in fact be right. As much as we'd all like to dismiss the possibility, I don't actually see a rational basis to declare that he's absolutely wrong. We don't know. Nobody know. There are some arguments you can make about why he's wrong, but all the arguments are probabilistic, about how evolution probably would have discovered something of that lethality, but it's only probabilistic.
Read through my recent comments for a slightly more elaborate explanation in an that amateur bio hackers thread.
For even more information take some college classes in the life sciences.
It's like, in the Sarah Connor chronicles, she's trying to hold back the singularity by firebombing the houses of AI researchers when the only real answer is to set off the singularity yourself so at least you can hope to sculpt it.
http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/busting_anthrax_myth
A lot of the same logic applies to Mr. Lind's article too.
(1) The earliest killer plague created and released by a biohacker kills thousands, but isn't even close to being fine-tuned enough to be an existential threat to civilization.
(2) The powers that be, and society, now that their attention has been focused, react to this threat by restructuring themselves slightly to better handle more virulent threats of this sort in the future.
(3) Go to (1), only with a somewhat more virulent outbreak. Then go to (2), only with a somewhat larger restructuring. By the time biohackers have gotten far enough up the learning curve to release truly effective plagues, society will have gotten far enough along the restructuring curve to handle them without being wiped out or even seriously set back.
Putting that in quotes signifies that you both don't know what it is, and are afraid of it. For $59 off ebay? I'd guess it's something evil and scary like a "warming plate".
Well, my dear, the fact is
Yes, why don't you who tell her what she was doing, hmm? You clearly have a good understanding of what it would take to engineer ecoli into the black death 2.0 if you can judge that she was "one mistake" away from doing so.
A calm, measured, thoughtful response to biohacking would be to run around madly in one’s underwear screaming “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” It is impossible to overstate this threat.
What can we do about it? Probably nothing
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