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Science & Technology
Home Bio-Hackers - Oops...
2009-05-22
The author makes an interesting point about the 'home bio-hacker'. Read the article, but keep this happy thought in mind --

-- he's wrong.

He's not wrong about the potential risk of a home bio-hacker, but it's not because the home bio-hacker is going to generate, with deliberate and malice aforethought, something that will wipe out humankind. Rather, two things --

1) the home bio-hacker will do something incredibly stoopid and release something into the environment, and more importantly,

2) any half-way decent cell and molecular biologist in any half-way decent laboratory in a university, college, pharmaceutical company or government laboratory can do far, far worse.

I'm a cell biologist as well as a physician. I have ALL the equipment I need in my modest laboratory, and ALL the expertise, to hack not just an E coli (child's play), but some really nasty vectors if I had a mind to do so. I can take a gene, any gene, mutate it as I wish, and insert it into a plasmid. I can teach any E coli to carry that plasmid. I can put that gene into a virus like adenovirus or lentivirus and then release it into the environment. I can put that gene into a really virulent bacterium (e.g., Ebola).

Most of the basic grunt work to generate a nasty vector can be purchased in kit form. Isolate RNA? Buy a kit. Mutate a gene (targeted mutagenesis)? Buy a kit. Gel purify a plasmid? Buy a kit. These kits are comparatively inexpensive, have high quality control and just plain work. If you can bake a cake you can use these kits.

The knowledge is out there. Many of the tools are public domain and paid for by the NIH. Want a gene sequence? Hit BLAST. Need methods to do your work? Hit PubMed. Need tools, equipment and kits? All the major vendors are on-line, provide detailed information and technical reference material, and will sell to most places in the world.

I won't create such a monstrosity of a vector, of course, since I'm honest and decent and have no wish to cause misery. But there are hundreds of thousands of people trained to do these sorts of things in our country and more across the world. And it's not just the physicians and PhD's one might worry about -- it's all the various technologists and research associates. Those are the folks who actually do the work in most laboratories, and they are the ones who, if so inclined, could sneak around and put together something that would be very harmful. Particularly in the universities where the controls and security are more lax, this wouldn't be hard.

There are plenty of intelligent scientists in Muslim countries (and elsewhere) who could be tempted to create a horrific vector. They could be bankrolled. The equipment, kits and materials generally aren't rigorously controlled. In the same way AQ Khan snuck around to create the Islamic bomb, a like-minded scientist could create the Islamic phage. Or the Tamil phage. Or the FARC phage. You get the idea.

Think about that happy thought as you read about 'home bio-hackers'.
For years, I have warned in these columns and elsewhere that the future weapon of mass destruction we should most fear is not a nuke. Rather, it is a genetically engineered plague, a plague no one has ever seen before and against which no one has any immunity. In the time it would take to identify the new disease, develop a vaccine, distribute the vaccine and have it become effective, modern societies could suffer death rates equivalent to those of the Black Death: up to two-thirds of the population.

Regrettably, it appears that dreaded future has now arrived. The May 12 Wall Street Journal carried a front-page story titled "In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein."

In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage.
Posted by:3dc

#3  The worst bio threats may be engineered, but indirect, as it were.

"In the early 1990s a European genetic engineering company was preparing to field test and then commercialize on a major scale a genetically engineered soil bacteria called Klebsiella planticola.

"What they discovered was not only startling, but terrifying-- the biotech industry had created a biological monster--a genetically engineered microorganism that would kill all terrestrial plants."

"K. planticola was designed to increase the production of lactose fermentation of agricultural wastes. But research showed this GM-strain actually killed any wheat planted into the soil where the GM-strain was dispersed.

"K. planticola actually sticks to the root system of plants by creating a slime-like layer. The GM- K. planticola would then be connected to the plants root system and while it is there it would produce ethanol in levels of 17 ppm (~1-2 ppm ethanol is deadly for plants).

"K. planticola can attach to any plants, not just wheat, so essentially all global plant life could have been put into jeopardy because of a genetically altered bacteria."
Posted by: Anonymoose   2009-05-22 10:21  

#2  Oh thanks.

That's all I needed to add to my impotent frustration rage list. Along with the Obamatron, tanking economy, nuclear dirt bags in the Mid-East, NORKville, etc. I'm going to quit interacting with anyone that might bring me down even farther. As it is I'm looking up at soles.

Luckily I'm old enough that when the manure hits the rotary impeller for the big one I can just c'est la vie.

Of course my kids and grand-kids.................

Posted by: AlanC   2009-05-22 09:59  

#1  As haphazard and mismanaged our Public Health and sanitation system is, it's a millennium beyond various pits around the world. They will be hit the hardest and with the West scrambling to cover its own with resources dwindling [as transportation is shut down in the isolation phase], the usual 'trouble spots' will basically disappear figuratively and literally. I too believe that nukes are so 20th century and that DNA knowledge and the ability to create 'designer' plagues [and their antidote] will be something to really get humanity to the edge. What the 'bad boys' don't consider is that in one of the media event acts of terrorism may take out a loved one of somebody who can in fact make this stuff and who will not wait upon diplomacy or 'human rights' groups to mangle justice to get his/her own.
Posted by: Procopius2k   2009-05-22 08:08  

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