So anyway, it turns out that Wood's Hole, being one of the nations finer scientific establishments, actually has internet access. Who'd a thunk it? A technological widget developed for the transmission of porn, spam, and offers from deposed Nigerian dictators, being used by scientists as a means of remote collaboration. Just goes to show the innovative and unexpected uses to which researchers can turn everyday objects.

Obviously I'm being a little ironic above. More seriously, my wife just showed me a really cool little trick that allows a >$10,000 piece of scientific equipment to be replaced by common items costing under $100. It's a neat little illustration of nonlinear thinking and creative problem solving on the part of a graduate student who simply did not have enough money to buy the high end gear, so she tried to figure out a way to do it on the cheap. Nobody told her it wouldn't work, and she was really keen on getting the work done, so she kept trying until she made it work. It's a very cool little application, so why am I being evasive about details? Well, it involves a basic technique for genetic engineering. If this was September 10th 2001, I'd blissfully blog away. In the current environment I think dropping the cost of making genetically modified organisms by over $10,000 is not necessarily in the best interest of anyone. I had a nice little post all lined up to talk about technology and creativity and the importance of persistence, but I think I'll just leave well enough alone.

It's only a matter of time before genetic engineering techniques come within reach of basically anyone with a couple million dollars. The long pole in the tent right now is just the sheer amount of time it takes to carry out all the work, and the scattershot nature of the results. Given time, and especially given volunteers willing to die, a terrorist attack using GMOs is a real possibility. Technology is advancing rapidly, and established technologies are becoming cheaper and more accessible. The only effective way of reducing the risk of a mass casualty attack is to undermine the ideas behind the ideologies that drive the attackers. There will always be people who want to cause destruction, but the fewer collaborators they have the lower their chances of success.

If the grad student's trick involved a coffeemaker (or toaster oven) and a cycling timer, then (for better or worse) that technique is already known.

Freeman Dyson has written on this topic, for example in a review (which can be found here) of Timothy Ferris's "Seeing in the Dark":

"New tools which might give power to amateur biologists are already visible on the horizon. The new tools will be cheaper and smaller versions of the tools now used by professional biologists to do genetic engineering. It took thirty years for the expensive and cumbersome mainframe computers of the 1950s to evolve into the cheap and convenient personal computers of the 1980s. In a similar fashion, the expensive genome-sequencing and protein-synthesizing machines of today will evolve into cheap machines that can stand on a desktop. The personal computer is not only cheaper and smaller, but also faster and more powerful than the mainframe that it replaced. The desktop sequencers and synthesizers of the future will be faster and more powerful than the machines that they will replace, and will be controlled by more sophisticated computer programs.

When these tools are available, the demand for them will be irresistible, just as the demand for laptop computers is irresistible today. . ."

And yes, it does tend to give me the willies. Dyson addresses both the potential for harm and the good it'll do for science to have such things available. But either way, I think he's right, and that this is the world we're heading toward.

Although I have never done any drugs. I look forward to the day they put in the MJ THC gene in the tomato.

ummm...Tomaccos!

Your fears are certainly understandable post 9/11, however have you considered (and blogged about) the good that will undoubtedly come about when more people have access to cheaper and better tools to make GMO?

The current state of the art has enabled the production of hormones, enzymes and other biologically useful things by engineered bacteria. Insulin takers treatments are much cheaper because of this.

Despite great controversy in Europe, GMO food products promise better nutrition for billions of people, including those in the desperately poor third world.

One can envision many, many applications for GMO in agriculture, industrial production, and even environmental remediation. Lowering the economic barriers to entry to this technology is a good thing. It may the THE technology the drives growth in the 21 Century.

I'm all for fighting the ideas and philosophies of our enemies ( the terrorists ), but in general I don't think that it makes sense to try to limit general purpose tech that "might" be used to make weapons. (Exceptions: Nuclear materials, some chemicals ) I do think gov't monitoring makes sense for dangerous items, but banning things hurts many many unseen sectors of the economy and that is a much bigger threat than the imagined possibilities.

Unfortunately, many people in a democracy are willing to give up things (by banning them) they don't have yet, like trans-continental rockets, high-grade personal email encryption, or GMOs, on the mere suggestion that they may be a threat. They wouldn't give up 747s or TNT even though they are demonstrable weapons.

Cheers

--Fred

Every tool that comes down the pike can be used by the good guys as well as the bad guys.

A terrorist with a cheap gene splicer can cook up a nifty new disease. Good guys with cheap gene splicers can counter the bad guys and cure all sorts of pre-existing diseases besides. And the good guys will be looking into it long before the bad guys get into the game.

A terrorist with a cheap rocket can crash it into a skyscraper. The masses with cheap rockets can make skyscrapers and even cities obsolete, by commuting thousands of miles to office, schools, and shops scattered across the countryside.

And even if you find a case where a new technology presents a problem, unfettered technological progress also throws up lots of solutions to other problems that more than compensate us for putting up with it. For instance, if cheap genetic engineering yields a cure for aging, then the bad guys would have to somehow kill 100,000 people per day with cheap genetic engineering to make that development a net loss.

At any rate, the prospect that terrorists might use tools that I'm hoping to see come down the pike and (perhaps worse) scare us into preventing these tools from coming into existence, is enough to eliminate any interest I might have had in "containment" and advocate for hunting them down and exterminating them.

Has it ever occured to anyone that if the tools and instrumentation involved in doing biotechnology become cheaper and cheaper, this will make developing effective anti-aging therapies cheaper as well? Given this, why does everyone think that effective anti-aging therapies will be available only to the rich?

It seems to me that if it is not done by then, it should be possible that by 2030, for a lone researcher to develop effective anti-aging therapies by wortking in his own lab.

Any comments?

IANAB (I am not a biologist), but I bet that "aging" is a complex web of factors, many of which involve vital functions that cannot be simply switched off safely.

For example, there is an idea that the number of cell divisions is a fixed number per cell. Increase this and you've solved aging, the theory goes. But as others have pointed out, if a cell can divide indefinitely, mistakes in its DNA also propagate causing other problems.

Better, cheaper tools will make research more fruitful, but I don't expect anti-aging research to solve the aging problem by huge leaps and bounds even with better tools.

"In the current environment I think dropping the cost of making genetically modified organisms by over $10,000 is not necessarily in the best interest of anyone."

I wonder. The bunch that launched the 9/11 attacks were not paupers by any stretch - if they were willing to pay for flying lessons at umpty thousand dollers per, an expensive machine wouldn't be beyond their means either.

Still, the counterpart to a hundred dollar gene-fiddler would be the desktop computer. Anyone can buy one, and for the cost of time learn how to program computer malware. Not always very _good_ malware but still.

Consider, however, that the knowledge needed to STOP malware is gained the same way. And there are far more hackers/computer users who won't write malware as those socially mis-adjusted children who do.

Personally, my favorite potential use for GMO is in the energy field. And the energy field is a bone of conflict in the war on Jihadism.

Instead of modifying plants with the intention of actually eating them, what if the modifications were to produce some particularly energy intensive product? One of the current 'best' methods of making ethanol - grow corn, harvest corn, process corn, ferment mash, purify.... -> energy. But it isn't very efficient. There's a LOT of room for improvement in there. (This isn't a panacea, but plants are a lot better at the whole solar energy game than we are.)

But as others have pointed out, if a cell can divide indefinitely, mistakes in its DNA also propagate causing other problems.

If cells can't divide indefinitely, you'll be hard pressed to explain how life continues to exist at all.

Derek - It's an entirely different trick. I'll have to ask around about the coffeemaker trick. Sounds interesting.

As to making GMO research cheaper being a good thing - the people who have the resources to do it with proper safety protocols and scientific controls can easily afford a $10,000. It's the ones that can't be bothered with safety and science that I'm worried about. The case I blogged about took place within an established reasearch institution that had everything in place, but just not enough money to spend on one gradstudent's experiment.