Putting 500k People's DNA Online
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
If you really care about his problem you should call for a ban on related research and keep yourself silent. The further we delay the development of such technology, the better. Some people argue it's inevitable; Well it's not. For almost 100 years, despite their huge potential in war, chemical and biological weapons have seen almost zero development because of the strict enforcement of the Geneva convention. Let's keep it that way.
The development of these types of weapons is going to be highly secretive, and not just because of the Geneva convention. Absolutely nothing has gone on in the world in the last 100 years that might tempt the deployment of advanced chemical or biological weapons on any sort of scale. Naturally we haven't seen them used.
I also don't see how burying our head in the sand is going to help on this one. At least compared to nuclear weapons, projects on these weapons could be useful for defensive purposes. Everybody is working more or less within the same confines and rules, and I wouldn't be surprised if relatively similar developments were the result. Even if they aren't, the characterization of these weapons can be used to inform and guide the response plans to try to minimize damage in the case of an attack.
One of the reasons that the nuclear arms race happened, was the "openness" of the competition. You can't hide a nuclear explosion. Your adversary knows how sophisticated you are, and they now have to push 1 step further.
Biological warfare doesn't have to be like this. Be sure that some Darpa or DoD funded secret project is working on countermeasures, but there's another interesting thing: You can stop biological attacks by quarantine. It's very simple, very effective, and doesn't require developing Armageddon-tier weapons in the process. Another issue that's purposefully isn't discussed in the video is how effective the delivery of these weapons are. Simply put, not very. Viruses, the main attack vector, change in every iteration. There's no guarantee you can infect that many people with an intact version of your weapon. Sooner than later, you genocidal weapon will stop being so selective, because it's evolving for it's own benefit, not yours.
And finally, if you really are concerned about this issue, as you should, the right way to fight against it is to find a way to stop the infection and proliferation, to find ways to stop these attacks without accelerating weapons development. There are ways to fight these weapons without building them, and you can definitely do better than starting a public campaign that asks people to develop horrific bioweapons just so we can find a way to stop them later on, maybe.
If you (a nation) are working on this, it's fair to assume your peers are as well. If you have improved on the state of the art, it's safe to assume your peers are in a similar position or will soon be.
By making advancements, all you are doing is proving that other nations with a similar level of technical sophistication can do the same. Even if you make strong assumptions that you are indeed the best, you can't assume other nations will never reach where you are now. Maybe you have 5 years on them, because you are clearly superior? Or maybe you take a more conservative stance and assume you're behind - just in case.
Furthermore, I don't think quarantine would be an effective response to an intentional biological attack. Even just quarantining say, New York City, would be a nearly impossible task. And since this is an attack, why wouldn't all major cities be targeted? There would be no way to contain it physically.
Even if you think pure quarantine is the way to go, there is a lot of useful information that can only be gained by doing the weaponization research. What sort of incubation times could show up? How virulent, etc. Knowing these sorts of things would really improve the quarantine situation. There also isn't really a good way to know without doing the research. It doesn't mean it has to be packaged into a weapon, but the hard part is all done.
So, according to Wikipedia America continued its biological and chemical weapons programs despite signing the Genevea Protocol until Richard Nixon supposedly ended bioweapons in 1969. Additionally, the Federation of American Scientists, founded by members of the Manhattan Project, allege that the US in continuing to illegally develop and research biological weapons in the present day. Of course, the US has continued to practice torture and a variety of human rights abuses in violation of both the US constitution and international law for the past three presidential administrations. The claim that bioweapons are not being actively developed is silly.
Nuclear weapons also follow this - tons of development, but only used once.....so far.
GWAS have proven to be, at best, of little value. In fact, due to the unfortunate way that many researchers chase p-values, these analyses often result in misdirection.
What happens? Genome privacy is exchanged for weak science.
What privacy risk, exactly? Who has been harmed? 23andMe has been in operation since ~2007 and between them and Ancestry.com and the UKBB and the Japanese BB and others, there must be somewhere on the order of 10 million+ genomes cumulatively. UKBB alone has been the basis for what must be at least hundreds of papers at this point by thousands of researchers or groups. Even further: there are literally thousands of genomes available publicly online from groups like PGP for a decade now, which you can go and download right now, including mine. Is all this not enough? When should we expect to finally see these risks materialize?
> GWAS have proven to be, at best, of little value. In fact, due to the unfortunate way that many researchers chase p-values, these analyses often result in misdirection.
That is completely wrong. GWASes have an excellent replication record, and were founded on the basis of stringent p-values precisely because of how earlier candidate-gene studies were garbage due to researchers chasing p-values.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15209306
I guess the value of the data depends on who measures its worth. Replicated p-values lead to multiple publications, which are valuable to academics. But these results can still cause misdirection. What is a low p-value worth if it doesn't lead anywhere?
Yes, so? (The face paper you link isn't a good example of this anyway, since it's so questionable and re-identification already works much better than that based on stuff like haplotypes.) That's not a real risk, not compared to, you know unlocking the secrets of human genetics. And it has little to do with the research databases: DNA is inherently as far away as it is possible to get from being anonymous, once it started becoming cheap, the loss of genetic privacy was inevitable no matter how it was handled. And it's not that big a deal. We will be much better off for it.
> Replicated p-values lead to multiple publications, which are valuable to academics.
This is very different from what you were just claiming.
So, it's you who gets to play god and decide to sacrifice individuals for the alleged greater good?
> And it's not that big a deal. We will be much better off for it.
I hope you are right! However, I have doubts. Also, just because sensitive information can be compromised doesn't mean that it should be offered freely.
There is no place on earth that lived in peace for ever. Not even for a very long time actually.
Any country goes back to times were it's at war on it's own territory, or were it's under a dictatorship.
It will be true again for France, the US, Canada, Spain, any country.
We will go back there, it's an absolute certainty.
Maybe not (hopefully not), in our lifetime.
But ignoring this is not only wearing blinders, it's a recipe for making it worse.
Things like AI, facebook, the NSA intercepting anything, image recognition, cameras in every streets, tracking devices in every pockets and... DNA databases are going to be weaponized against the population.
Even if you don't believe in this (which is always strange to me, but for the sake of the argument, I'll have to acceptit), at least consider that it will make any neutral entity in power more likely to become malevolent by giving it the opportunity to access abusable huge power.
Hence, if we want to survive and evolve as a specie, we need to deal with those tools carefully, as they are very potent, and this means what they can do for us is as great as what it can do against us.
There is always a choice. Most people saying there is none are just choosing one cost against another and say it's not a choice. Not blaming, i do the same.
But we could avoid the disasters, living by thinking about the society ou simple everyday actions produce.
However it's not only very hard to do, but most people are not interested in doing so. Or even to consider the question of society, or how to live ones live.
Living on auto pilot is one of humanity's biggest problem. It helped us a lot when we were in survival mode, but now that our own construct is the only real danger to our existence, it really is an hindrance.
Yes, you can lower the probability of exploitation happening, but you have to keep in mind that it is possible. Kind of like leaving your car open - it's quite unlikely that somebody will go and pull the handle checking if it's closed, but it's possible and you're probably better off taking that into account.
(now that I realized you are also parent of my original reply I'm a bit confused, I mean your two replies are kinda responding to each other)
I expect that companies won't be able to help themselves and that they will eventually spasm in abuse of ever-more-accessible personal data so egregious and evil that people will take notice.
People will eventually be identified individually, as inevitably as the people in the AOL search leak years ago. Then they -- and their blood relatives -- will be associated with negative health traits.
And then, companies will discriminate -- in hiring, in insurance... anywhere they can. Because it will be financially advantageous to individual companies even though it is detrimental to society as a whole. Because companies are amoral organisms and it is folly to expect them to behave otherwise.
Openly sharing your genetic information makes both you AND your relatives more vulnerable, with vulnerability decreasing as relatedness decreases. It also reveals potentially sensitive information about family traits.
Can you follow the argument if we flip it around? Your right to do anything you want should include not making it public. Others publishing "theirs" would mean publishing yours, whether you want it or not.
Over 99.9% of the genome is identical to every human being. And that genome is made public (the reference genome) and updated regularly as we understand more about the DNA.
Even identical twins don't have the same DNA. So it's not like I make public another person's DNA.
It's not, I can publish/sell/do whatever I want with any of my genomic data I have desire to
I would certainly challenge that, its just that some people considered GWAS as the solution for everything which it clearly isn't, especially because rare mutations where underestimated (and cannot be discriminated in GWAS) and because GWAS was never able to detect the causing variant, just associated/linked genomic loci. And last but not least, the regulatory genome is turning out more and more complex (with interacting variants leading to complexities of O(x^n)) and we do not know yet how it will all be understood, its just that GWAS is one of the better tools we have.