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Comment by biohacker42 | Hacker News Reader

In a paper published in Nature Biotechnology in 2007, a group of scientists and FBI officials called for better oversight of so-called synthetic DNA...
Some biologists argue that anyone wishing to custom-make new organisms, even if it's just glow-in-the-dark bacteria (a popular trick among biohackers), should have to get a license first...
A senior official in the FBI's Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate says the bureau is working with academia and industry to raise awareness about biosecurity...

George Church, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, says anyone using synthetic DNA should have to have a license, including garage biologists...

In summary: Oooh Frankenstein - scary!

Frankenstein is THE allegory for the dangers of science and it's pretty old.

If you don't like what's going on with biohacking, put your money where you mouth is and give up everything science gave you since Mary Shelley died.

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George Church supports licensing because he's on a dozen patents in this area, has significant investments in synthetic biology, and would be first in line to be involved with granting the licenses.

There are valid safety considerations which need to be taken seriously but it's important to consider his motivations when making public statements like this.

Tangentially, I took George Church's class at HMS and it was one of the worst courses I've ever taken. If a synthetic biology licensing committee ever comes into play I hope someone less scatterbrained and arbitrary is chosen to head it.

Although I agree with your viewpoint, I have an inexplicable feeling that your biases lie with the biohackers. To play devil's advocate: licensing makes sense for the type of dna recombination they do at, say, USAMRIID; and in an emerging field like this it's always hard to figure out where exactly to draw lines.

Imagine if Woz had to get a license to do what he did?

The key thing to keep in mind is that a lot, and I mean A LOT of innovation is the result of a brute force search, the more people are searching the faster we find things. And while regulation may have some benefits the costs are often devastating.

I also happen to know that big pharma has a huge backlog of promising potential drugs. But the years and hundreds of millions of dollars necessary for even early stage testing are a suffocating bottleneck. The end result is that there is absolutely no point in trying to find new cures, there's already a glut of them on the shelf.

Suffice it to say, I think the risks are worth it and regulation is a blunt weapon which eliminates most of the bad AND the good.

Imagine if Woz had to get a license to do what he did?

I'm not really an expert on biohacking but it seems like you know a bit more...

Let's say some nutjob bio-hacker synthesizes a nasty little immuno-resistant organism... is it pretty easy to just "reformat" a human being and get them back on track should they get infected? Are there readily available anti-viral vaccines that we can just simply inject to prevent some sort of man-made viral outbreak?

I've got no problem with bio-hacking so long as these biohackers have an easy way to "reformat" my system and quickly get me back to healthy living again.

What you say is true, but like all imagine a super virus/bacterium/foot fungus scenarios it omits crucial information.

The crucial information I am referring to is that the world you live in right now is chock full with nasty things doing their best to kill you.

Every step you take, ever breath you take, you're living in an ocean of things which have been perfecting ways to harm you since before there were dinosaurs.

They are not only trying to eat you alive, they are also viciously competing with each other, it's jungle out there.

And that's why I'm not worried about home grown super Ebola. It's not that it isn't possible it's just that it's like one more bullet in a machine gun fight.

Yes, that could be THE bullet that kills you, but it's not like you're living in a germ free world.

And that's why I'm not worried about home grown super Ebola. It's not that it isn't possible it's just that it's like one more bullet in a machine gun fight.

I, for one, hadn't thought about it in quite that way, before.

> the world you live in right now is chock full with nasty things doing their best to kill you.

Really? For some reason, internet people are always talking about coevolution and not killing the host and all that. I'd assume you know better since you're an actual biologist, but it is still surprising...

Really. Staphylococcus aureus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staphylococcus_aureus is most commonly found up your nose and on your skin. And by on I mean deep inside the grooves, it's practically impossible to wash it away. It's what turns your boogers yellow.

It's also the one most commonly responsible for infections, when you cut yourself. Or someone else like a surgeon cuts into you.

It is also most commonly resistant to multiple antibiotics. It's on us all the time, we take a lot of pills, it adapts.

If you have the multiply resistant strain and you go into major surgery, may God have mercy on your soul.

Also I'm not a biologist, I just write research software for chemists and biologists.

> Imagine if Woz had to get a license to do what he did?

Let's try to imagine all of the worst-case scenarios for what might have happened if Woz instead created a monumental fuck-up. I can't really come up with much beyond him losing several grand and going back to work at HP. Let's try that same exercise for some hypothetical person who imagines himself to be the Woz of DNA...

> Suffice it to say, I think the risks are worth it and regulation is a blunt weapon which eliminates most of the bad AND the good.

Given some of the potential risks involved, the good would have to be pretty big and explained pretty well to the lay public before you will ever get past some deep-seated fears of what the potential downsides are to this endeavor.

Your risk equation is overestimating the worst case scenario.

Super bugs are NOT at all easy to design. And there's plenty of natural super bugs like swine flu, etc. that come around every year.

The worst case scenario is something like the 1918 flu, but it's not 1918 anymore and we can deal with viruses like that a lot better.

> Your risk equation is overestimating the worst case scenario.

This is a claim that you have yet to back up with anything beyond general hand-waving.

> Super bugs are NOT at all easy to design. And there's plenty of natural super bugs like swine flu, etc. that come around every year.

To cause significant damage a biohacker would not need to actually design the super bug, she would just need to design some interesting sequence that has a novel and unfortunate interaction with the human immune system. Poor lab procedure (like deciding that the sequence did nothing and dumping the results down the drain) could easily introduce this sequence into the wild where other bacteria could pick it up.

The difference between hacking code and hacking biology is that broken code goes nowhere. Nothing it out there picking up the bits you delete and recombining it with existing code to see if the result gives its progeny any advantage. This is not the case with tinkering with biological systems.

This is a claim that you have yet to back up with anything beyond general hand-waving.

Much like Fermat, the time I care to devote to correcting people who are wrong on the internet is too small to contain the full argument which would go beyond hand waving.

Here's a bit more hand waving: Immune systems are complex and dynamic system designed to deal with unknown and novel agents. That's why simply coming up with something new, is not nearly enough. 99.99% of new mutations are deleterious. And the 0.001% that might be something? Like I said, just one more bullet in a machine gun shootout.

Dumping things down the drain does not make bacteria pick them up. You can dump MRSA down the drain all day long, it won't make the bacteria in there antibiotic resistant. Because there is no free lunch, even beneficial mutations are metabolically expensive, and that's why if you dump MRSA in the sewer, over time even they would lose their own antibiotic resistance. Without antibiotics they would be out competed by Staph. which doesn't waste resources on antibiotic resistance.

The difference between hacking code and hacking biology is that with code one single bit can cause the whole system to crash or behave in wildly unpredictable ways. Biology on the other hand is extremely robust.

Suffice it to say we agree to disagree.

The problem with licensing is that the people who want to do something bad are not going to be stopped by the fact that they don't have a license. If you're driving the getaway car in a bank robbery, does it matter if you don't have your driver's license?

I think the more likely dangers in this case are not people with malicious intent, but people who do something without carefully thinking through the ramifications. Remember, the first internet worm was an accident. (Made by a contemporary of pg.)

And licenses probably won't help prevent well-meaning people's accidents, either.

What licensing can do is provide an incentive for general practitioners of a particular craft to follow a certain set of standards and guidelines for basic safety. If licensing is required for access to certain materials and maintaining your license requires either passing some sort of "don't be an idiot" safety course (or having your "lab" available for inspection) then this low bar can keep some of the idiots out of the way and can be used as a stick with which to beat upon well-meaning people who engage in gross incompetence regarding safety.

What licensing can do is block competition to the established powers. Do you think it was from the goodness of their hearts that Microsoft was pushing the attempt to license "software engineers" and programmers a decade ago.

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