Artificial Virus within 5 Years
from the bringing-bottom-up-alive dept.
PatrickUnderwood noted a BBC News article "Synthetic Virus Nearing Reality" in which Professor Clyde Hutchinson of the University of North Carolina and The Institute of Genomic Research, speaking at the AAAS meeting, predicts the ability to build a virus from scratch within five years. The article describes how this is a step along the way for the "Minimal Genome Project." The writer spends much of the story trying to link this to concerns about bioweapons, but gets told that "There's enough bad stuff out there now. So far, there is no reason to believe that this technology is going to make things any worse."
February 22nd, 2001 at 7:40 AM
WRT regulation
Staying on the regulation theme:
OK, so here's a case where there would be a clear benefit that (I think) everyone would recognize. As Bryan once pointed out to me, there has been a kind of double standard when it comes to engineered organisms for bioremediation vs. those engineered for other purposes, and he was right. So, what should be the protocol for releasing wholly novel microorganisms into the world? This is a good test case, I think, because everyone would like to do it (even us 'tree huggers'
February 22nd, 2001 at 11:00 AM
It's already been done
This is all bad press – for one thing, the AIDS virus is a man-made virus strand. (Do some research on it on the net – you'll find that the virus characteristics are not found in nature AT ALL, therefore, it's artificial) This is almost just as bad as to say that Dolly the sheep was the first living thing to be cloned, even though that statement is very much false (human beings were the first to be cloned several thousand years ago). However, regardless of who is wrong and who is right, this is a topic to worry over, nonetheless.
February 22nd, 2001 at 11:43 AM
Huh? This makes no sense at all.
Science has a process its called "peer-review". And that process says overwhelmingly that HIV is not a man made virus. While the web may be an interesting source for people ideas and ramblings if it doesn't get tied back to hard peer reviewed and reproduced data, then its nothing more than speculation. There are ample examples of even great scientists supporting flakey ideas (Roger Penrose and Kerry Mullis come to mind) for one not to trust everything on the net!
If you have some evidence that human beings were cloned several thousand years ago, I would like to hear it.
February 22nd, 2001 at 12:53 PM
Re:WRT regulation
The complete de novo engineering of microorganisms (self-replicating systems) is going to come a lot faster than people think. I can say that because that is what my current business plan proposes to enable.
There are multiple paths towards making this relatively safe.
It is worth noting that the average person thinks of Nature as this nice pretty ecosystem with everything arranged in non-interacting little boxes. It isn't that way at all. Some scientists think the dominant form of biomaterial on the planet is bacteria. These organisms swap DNA all the time. The ocean is literally teaming with viruses transfering bioinformation between the various branches of life there. There are only a few hundred genes different between nice safe E. coli and the nasty variant that periodically causes food poisonings that kill people. The human genome, way back in early mammalian development, seems to have picked up several hundred bacterial genes.
A big chunk of the biotechnology industry is built on the manufacture and sale of "restriction enzymes". What are these? They are the enzymes that bacteria make to defend themselves against foreign DNA by cutting it up. Its a war going on all around us, we just don't see it. The potential for engineered microorganisms to make it safer is much greater than the risks that are posed provided the problems of stupid and sociopathic individuals are addressed.
People like to wave red flags regarding humans transferring code between organisms but Nature is doing it all the time on much greater scales that we can possibly imagine. It is a fundamental component of natural evolution. It is unclear to me why people get upset with humans transfering code between organisms, because we at least "attempt" to not cause any problems. Anybody imagining that Nature is that careful is deluding themselves. I suspect that there is some inherent belief that the unconscious system that Nature has produced will always remain "balanced" or is the "best" system. I can't imagine a perspective more naive. Always remember Craig Venter's comment when asked if he believed in god. His response was, that in looking at the genome, it was clear that it wasn't designed by a human.
Regarding the release of microorganisms or even much larger GM crops, etc. We have to make some cost-benefit tradeoffs. Yes there are risks involved in the development and deployment of these technologies but as has been pointed out in other discussions, the same was true with horses, railroads, cars, etc.
February 22nd, 2001 at 12:59 PM
Re:Huh? This makes no sense at all.
There are several interesting theories about how and why the AIDS virus was created – my favorite theory is that it was created back in the late 50's, during the time that gentically altered bees 'killer bees' were being produced by the US government. Supposedly, some of the conspiracy theories suggest that the AIDS virus was created to be used as a 'biological' weapon against any enemy which was a threat. But, due to an oversight in its creation, the virus turned out to be a very slow killer by accident, and therefore, was considered useless in warfare. However, the government had other plans for the virus, even though they could not use it to 'gain ground' on the battlefield. So instead of using the virus against an enemy, it was proposed to release the virus globally, while at the same time produce a 'cure' for it, as well. The main goal of the government was to:
1) Make the virus' existence known to the public – (this happened in the late 70's and early 80s)
2) Once public, start releasing expensive drugs that let the victim(s) of the virus think that they are extending what is left of their life.
3) Once many people begin dying from the virus, announce to the world that it is an epidemic that must be contained, but requires research that the government can not afford – and therefore, research can only be continued through 'donations' and 'charities'.
4) Once a desireable amount of money has been obtained, announce a 'temporary' cure to the world.
5) Once people begin buying the cure in the millions, announce to the world that the cure is only good for a certain amount of time and that they will require a 'refill' before the cure expires.
I must say, whoever thought of this (if it's true) is a genius – but I'm sure not everyone will feel that way. Nonetheless, it's an ingenius money scam that not only achieves its goal, but puts many millions of people's lives on the line to achieve it. Pure brilliance.
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In regards to the proof of 'ancient cloning', that's a simple one. Human beings have over 4000 genetic errors in our DNA, while every other creature on this planet (including the Homo Erectus) has very few, or no errors at all in their DNA. Genetic Errors in any organism can only happen by 'external forces' and not by nature – therefore, genetic manipulation of some kind was done to human beings many thousands of years ago by 'external forces'. For more information on human cloning, genetic manipulation, and these 'external forces' I am refering to, please read The 12th Planet, The Wars of Gods and Men, and The Cosmic Code by Zecharia Sitchen (http://www.sitchin.com) – he explains in much more elaborate detail on this matter than I ever could.
February 22nd, 2001 at 1:55 PM
Re:Huh? This makes no sense at all.
Re: HIV
I would guess the strategy isn't working very well since the NIH research budget for HIV related research is upwards of a billion dollars a year while the charitable donations are much less than that. That is the interesting thing about conspiracy theories — how can you know for sure that that many things will go just they way you need to have them go to get the outcome you desire. You don't, so they make no sense.
They also don't explain very well the existence of viruses like SIV that are closely related to HIV unless you throw in the fact that those were developed too just to throw us off the scent of the killer bee hypothesis.
Re: 4000 genetic errors.
Well, this is going to come as a shock to the people that decoded the genome and currently have lists of several million genetic polymorphisms. It might also surprise the Physicians who have compiled over the years a list of in excess of 10,000 human genetic diseases (found in the Online Mendelian Inheritance of Man).
The "Wars of Gods and Men" haven't happened yet but I'd give you better than even odds that they could occur within this century.
February 22nd, 2001 at 4:27 PM
de novo biotech = nanotech (almost)
The claim that one could devise a new virus or bacterium "entirely from scratch" implies the ability to design bioactive proteins and protein systems from scratch, using computers I suppose. If you could do that, you might as well call it nanotechnology; although it might not take the form of computer-controlled robotic assemblers, you would be designing complex self-assembling and self-replicating molecular systems from the atoms up. I don't think anyone is going to be doing this in five years. Perhaps putting together microbes from the pieces of other microbes, but you can already do that to some limited extent, and if you were doing it at the level of all the individual proteins, you would have a lot of the same problems as if you were designing the proteins from atoms — unexpected interactions, parts that don't quite fit, and so on.
February 22nd, 2001 at 5:52 PM
Re:de novo biotech = nanotech (almost)
We may be getting into unproductive semantic hair-splitting. The original quote said "synthetic", I said "engineering". Perhaps I should have said "robust re-engineering". By that I mean we will be able to assemble biobots from small molecule starting materials. I did not mean to imply that we would get robust protein design capabilities as that may be a much more difficult problem. But we will be able to use the pre-existing parts and mix and match them in various ways to manufacture some very interesting micromachines (photosynthetic hydrogen production systems capable of repairing themselves for example).
It may be that IBM's Blue Gene will give us enough molecular modeling capacity to seriously impact the design problem. At the stage we are at now though we can just about manage to design and get to properly fold small "beta-sheets" of a few dozen of amino acids, so I'm not optimistic that we will be doing robust design of protein based nanoscale parts in the immediate future.
The point is that almost all biotech labs today violate the Foresight Guidelines with regard to "thou shalt not make self-replicators". The Ag-Bio debate is in part related to the question of "Do you let the self-replicators out of the lab?". One group (the greens) is saying "no" while another group (the do-gooders) is saying "Don't you release anything without the self-replication ability" (so 3rd-world farmers can grow their own seeds). However that plays out, we have managed work productively on this path for 25+ years without serious accidents, in part because of review groups like the RAC that don't "regulate" but function as robust peer review that people wouldn't consider ignoring unless they wanted to throw away their career.
Self-replication can be managed — it isn't something that should be attempted in the hard nanotech realm until you had in place very robust groups like the RAC that thought long and hard about how you can make systems with limited self-replication capacity "safe". A good example of that is the telomere shortening in humans which most likely functions to prevent unlimited cell division leading to cancer. But as the failures in that system show you need failsafes for your failsafes for your failsafes if you are going to deal with trillions of copies. As NASA has shown over the last couple of decades — sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong. With hard nanotech we need to get it right as often as we have gotten it right with biotech and have plans for what we intend to do in those situations when we get it wrong.
As a last point, other than the materials differences, de novo biotech is not quite full-blown nanotech because you don't know the precise position of all of the atoms (because it works on solution chemistry), diffusion generally controls the rate at which most transport is done and active heat removal is pretty difficult. So while the size scale is correct and you certainly have assemblers and disassemblers and self-replication, it is going to be a lot slower than full-blown nanotech.
February 23rd, 2001 at 5:51 AM
Re:Huh? This makes no sense at all.
Where arr you from Kadamose and how old are you? You still haven't answered my other questions. Who created the molecular nanotech idea and Can you fight for the future you believe in? That's four questions. And isn't the HIV virus, in dormant form, found in some breeds of chimpanzees?
February 23rd, 2001 at 6:00 AM
Re:Huh? This makes no sense at all.
The logic behind the "proof" that humans were cloned in ancient times totally escapes me. What do you mean by "over 4000 errors"? There are many more than 4000 differences between individual humans, let alone between humans and other species. What makes any of these differences "errors"? Human beings seem to be able to live even though their DNA has all these "errors". The idea that mutations can never occur naturally really makes zero sense. In this case, all life on earth must be cloned, and recloned constantly, the aliens must be really busy! Finally, could you give me the URL to the Homo Erectus genome project? I didn't realize that it's genome, along with all other creatures on the planet, had been sequenced, showing that it and all other life on earth have "very few, or no errors at all in their DNA". I guess you must have access to the alien mothership's DNA database, could you ask them it submit it to genebank? It would save us all a lot of time and money not having to sequence any more organisms. ( By the way, I love the X-Files movie infected killer bee reference )
February 23rd, 2001 at 6:24 AM
I still think he's a troll.
'Nuff said.
February 23rd, 2001 at 9:14 AM
Re:Huh? This makes no sense at all.
Will you be at the Foresight Gathering this year? If so, I will answer all of your questions and more – I intend to be there this time around.
But for the simple questions:
1) How old are you?
A: 24 years of age.
2) Where do you live?
A: I live in Idaho – the land of the inbreeds and the Mormons who reprodice like a festering pool of maggots.
3) Who created the molecular nanotech idea?
A: This one can be disputed – many will say that Erik Drexler was the one who invented the idea, but it was actually Richard Feynman's speech in 1959 that motivated him.
4) Can you fight for the future you believe in?
A: Most definitely. I do not care how many lives are harmed or destroyed to obtain 'my world'. If people wish to continue to live like a bunch of primates, let them – but I will not allow them to remain here, since they are the sole reason why this world is dying to begin with. Nothing can get in my way or stop me from achieving what I truly desire.
February 23rd, 2001 at 9:35 AM
Re:Huh? This makes no sense at all.
You just need to read more, that's all – I think it's funny how people freak out over things when they lack knowledge. Good reference books for you to read are:
1) The 12th Planet by Zecharia Sitchin
2) The Cosmic Code by Zecharia Sitchin
The books are relatively hard to find in some areas, so you will most likely need to Interlibrary Loan to obtain them. Once you have read these, all will be made clear to you.
Also, in regards to the genome project – you are a fool if you think the scientists working on it are giving all the information to the public. That's bullcrap. All the public is receiving now is all the watered-down, insigniificant information – while all the worthwhile information is being kept behind closed doors – where it will most likely remain.
The genetic errors found in humans is due to the mixing of the genes of the Homo Erectus and the Anunnaki (also known as the Nefilim). You want more information? Read the books I mentioned above and you will be enlightened.