Now Here's a Comforting Thought . . .

or like at lot of things that were developed by accident throughout history.... penicillin, the recipe for automobile tires, chicklets gum....

problem is the stakes are growing higher.

The difference is that Penicillin was developed in a lab using lab protocols and protective equipment. It was not due to an accidental contamination as is popularly described, but instead was a directed attempt to find previously unstudied microorganisms that might have potential uses.

This is not at all unlike the story of "The Radioactive Boy Scout" where people tamper with things that they do not fully understand and which have the potential for great harm, thereby putting everyone around them in grave danger.

Rorschach:

The point I was trying to make, is that a number of discoveries were discovered by ignorance.

This also included accidents made in the Manhattan project. And tampering with the unknown. (along with ignoring safe guards) Which some I'm sure is classified.

Some with good preparation and procedures, and others by the sit of their pants

As I stated from my original post.........The stakes are higher. Would that be a deterrent? I think not.

phoenix911

That was me.

How about killer bees?

I don't think there is much risk anybody will be playing with Cholera in the living room.

I am more worried that the natural yoghurts will lose their protective white coats and be unable to survive being picked off by predators

Seriously, the fact that GMO tech is cheap and available for the home hobby is pretty gross. The regulate-dysregulate debate is a tough one. But regulation and ethics has to start at home, and home is industry, and industry is profit-driven and by its nature pushes against regulation. Industry has 'isolation facilities' but then they mass produce the stuff and we're snowed under it. Far more likely, at that scale, to have catastrophic results.

Likewise modifying viruses to insert cancer genes into human cells: look to big business if you want your scary story. Anyone who reads medical research knows that it is the industry standard in animal research, to induce the disease or the symptom being studied, in otherwise healthy animals. This is where your terror scenario comes from, and this is where the dysregulated technology is found: in the hands of the same corporate entities who stand to profit by people being ill.. If you could go to your doctor and expect to be told exactly how you got cancer it would be a different approach altogether. Medical protocols are not in place to screen new cases of cancer, diabetes, etc etc for causal agents which are well known in the research lit. They could do it to you with very little chance that it would ever be known.

BTW what makes you so sure about Alexander Fleming? It's true it happened in a lab and not his rumpus room, but the story is pretty clear, the plate got mouldy due to a housekeeping oversight, and Fleming noticed that the bacteria were inhibited by it, and used that insight to develop penicillin... Don't spoil it by telling me you are his old roommate and have the inside track... If this is true, Fleming's pimps and their allies may decide to eradicate the gene for bad housekeeping, and then you can truly kiss this universe goodbye..

Not only that, The chance that an inserted gene would be viable do anything good or bad is very slim. There is more to coding a gene than just snipping it and slipping it into the DNA strand. More likely if it is active it will kill the host cell or remotely possible the Lab tech by accident but not be contagious.

I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be more likely done in a graduate school lab or company lab by trained professionals than Joe public.

For someone who knows what it takes and miss uses it, withholding the home lab is not going to stop them.

I studied genetic engineering in 85 and still read some, not most of the peer review articles. So I may have missed somethings but to re code a virus is nothing like C++.

Could it be miss used in other ways, sure but so can a petri dish.

Brad

As I understand standard bacterial genetics practice, one of the standard ways in which a researcher tells if the gene splice worked is to insert a gene for antibiotic resistance (usually tetracycline, but it could be methicillin too if the researcher has decided to deviate from standard practice. methicillin resistance is concievably one of the problems these biohackers might decide to try to address.) along with the specific gene that you wish to insert, then culture the bacteria in agar laced with tetracycline to winnow out the bacteria that did not take up the gene. So the process itself not only imparts antibiotic resistance but it then amplifies it. Yes the actual success rate is very low but the process, being biological, amplifies what little success there is by millions of times. What happens when due to poor sterile practice the culture is contaminated with E. Coli? or Staph? or Strep? or yes, Cholera? now you have a antibiotic resistant variant of one of these nasties. Then what if again the homebrew researcher decides to pour the contaminated culture down the drain without first zapping it with bleach or hard UV? Now they've gone and released it into the wild and allowed it to swap liposomes with wild bacterial strains which also may have some nasty genes due to overuse of antibiotics.

That is an important risk that you have identified. Here we have an industry practice that is risky.

Anyone big or small who is free to fool around with risky technology should be required to understand and mitigate risks.

This is not my area of expertise, so I cannot tell you if there is attention to mitigating this risk. How would you mitigate risk, in using this technique? Is it possible to choose a resistance plasmid with assurance that it can be wiped out at will with another antibiotic, for example. The common knowledge is that antibiotic resistance is out of control, as you've pointed out, so it looks like the horse is out of the barn on this one. Risks were not identified: mitigation wasn't thought of: they blew it. This is just one more example of an obvious risk standardized into practice without adequate thought or care.

Your comment about housekeeping in homebrew is also right. Everyone should be educated about sound antimicrobial practice in the home. So we can avoid catastrophes by ignorance and error. Motives to deliberate harm are another matter.

In the question of antimicrobial resistance, I think the antibiotics treatment model is defunct. What we need is a completely different model IMO that satisfies the economy of nature and ecology instead of the economics of maximum profit.

Morning Rorschach,

This is what growing animals in unsanitary confined conditions do.

I worry much more of a poorly supervised government lab working on just these projects. The algae that is taking over the Mediterranean is from a first world government lab not private hobbyist.

Besides the machines at least let you know where things are going. A collage library and the internet will have all the knowledge regardless and a home piece meal system is more likely to have accidents and radical results than a professional unit.

As we see, regulation is a joke because we the people are reactive not proactive.

Brad

you right, with government back projects, the investments are alot larger.

The algae that is taking over the Mediterranean

There are also grasses that came from a zoo of some type, that were introduced by flushing them down the drain during cleaning, and is taking over the sea bed.

Yeah, like the day the Christies Biscuits eggheads added a new strain of yeast to the mix and blew the factory sky high.

For ordinary warfare (the kind conducted by guvermints) I wouldn't worry so much because hopefully, eventually they'd realize the disease would probably kill them too. But with the modern model (suicide bombers fer instance) I doubt there's any compunction against doing their worst. And possibly the thought of a blessed afterlife as a martyr. Don't be afraid, be VERY afraid...

eh, maybe maybe not there Eman. there is biowarfare and then there is biowarfare. When the word biowarfare comes to mind, most of us think ebola or smallpox or anthrax or something like that, but what about noroviruses or e. coli or cholera? They won't kill large numbers of people, at least not in first world cities with adequate health care, but they will can certainly cause a lot of misery and loss of economic production. They'd be perfect for a tactical weapon on a battlefield too. you can't fight if you are too busy puking up your guts and crapping yourself. and you don't need anything more than a mask and gloves and bleach to work with them safely too.

They won't kill large numbers of people, at least not in first world cities with adequate health care

I believe health care can easily be overwhelmed. And indirectly have negative effects on the population of first world cities.

true enough, the UK is battling that right now with over 200K people coming down with a new case of norovirus every day week and almost 3 million people sick.

Malik and Goyal report sodium bicarbonate is recommended for disinfecting food contact surfaces to stop spread of norovirus.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16540196?ordinalpos=15&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ICTVdb/ICTVdB/00.012.htm

re: norovirus defense

"Under in vitro conditions virions are stable in acid environment of pH 4-5. Virions are not stable at raised temperature in presence of high concentration of Mg++."

Cheer up! With all the information that's available on line and in text books, any half-vast chemist, or half-educated Muslim terrorist can make mustard gas, any of three or four nerve gases, various war gases, dirty or small nukes, assuming he/she can get their hands on some decent Pu or super-enriched uranium 235 and the associated electronic switches that is a must for a decent bomb. Look at the Columbians who have turned from picking coffee beans to cooking up cocaine, et al. Almost every day, one reads stories on line or in the news about some aggressive teenager who has made a home-made mixed liquid explosive that he's found the formula for on-line, usually the story ends with him/her in the hospital minus limbs or eyes. Years ago, a youngster made some home-made nitroglycerine (glycerine trinitrate), and was taking a soup can of it across the street to show his PhD friend. After he stepped off the curb stone, all they found one shoe. We had a worker at duPont who's job it was to take nitro samples to the analytical people. He claimed that if the vial was perfectly full, with no air bubbles present, it wouldn't detonate. I never tried the experiment to see if he was correct..

"He claimed that if the vial was perfectly full, with no air bubbles present, it wouldn't detonate."

And if it DID detonate, it wouldn't matter how full the vial had been, right?

This reminds me of a guy who welded a leak in my Dad's car's gas tank when I was a kid. He said as long as he made sure the tank was completely full, there was no risk of explosion. We watched from a hillside far away. It didn't blow up, but it didn't make a believer out of me, either.

Micah

I've heard that from welders/mechanics before. Truth is, it's near impossible to get all of the fumes out if you empty it, even using soapy water, so it's probably a good practice. It's done on pipelines too (called a "hot tap").

I guess if the fluid in the tank/pipeline does not carry enough free oxygen or oxidizers to support its own combustion once vaporized, its better not to leave it any spare air to use in the combustion process. Then the worst you'd have to expect would be a burn-through, resulting in a flare-up in the vaporizing liquid, vice an explosion in the already vaporized gases (fumes) sitting on top of the liquid when you started the weld.

But it would still give me the shakes, I think.

Micah

This just makes me laugh. HOLY CRAP! I had no idea it was so easy. Of course the odds of something going wrong even outweighs the odds of something going right. But who wants to play odds with this stuff.

I liked it when it was simpler. Like when idiots only made bombs and most times they accidentally eliminated themselves from the equation before becoming a threat.

One more reason to go live in the woods.

Anyone else ever read (some version of) The Anarchist's Cookbook? I was a compendium of ideas, practical stuff done by the author, and stuff which, upon reading, it was apparent had not been done as written, because it would have killed the author before he/she (yep, sometimes women and girls get this stupid, too) could have written it.

I found a lot of really useful stuff, if done very, very carefully (but most would get you looked at in the "Tim McVeigh Mirror" no matter where you decided to try it out), but most of it looked like the kind of stuff that makes candidates for the Darwin Awards.

Frightening to think of anyone doing the really big stuff, even if he/she removes himself/herself from the gene pool, because of the risk that he/she might take a lot of non-Darwin-Award-Candidates with him or her in the resulting blast/fallout/wind drift.

Micah