8 ms·

Mail-Order CRISPR Kits Allow Anyone to Hack DNA

135 points by G8WyaX 9y ago

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
blacksmith_tb 9y ago
Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15640921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15640921
- dang 9y ago
  That's true but we'll let this one pass since the earlier discussion was anemic.
ilamont 9y ago
Finally, what about the nightmare scenario: Is CRISPR so easy to use that we need to worry about biohackers—either accidentally or intentionally—creating dangerous pathogens? Carroll and others think that the danger of putting CRISPR in the hands of the average person is relatively low. “People have imagined scenarios where scientists could use CRISPR to generate a virulent pathogen, ” he says. “How big is the risk? It’s not zero, but it’s fairly small.” Gersbach agrees. “Right now, it’s difficult to imagine how it’d be dangerous in a real way,” he explains It's hard for "normal" people to imagine how sociopaths or those with destructive aims will behave when given flexible tools like this. It's kind of like how no one anticipated how social media networks whose ostensible purpose is to connect friends could be used to undermine elections, abet fraud, commit character assassination, and drive people to suicide. And while the real-life example of using CRISPR to switch the limbs of tiny crustaceans sounds harmless, wait til someone mutates something bigger and more familiar for "better" attributes or capabilities that can cause direct harm or inadvertent effects. It's probably already happened ... but we may not understand the impact for years.
- Danihan 9y ago
  I wonder what it says about me that it's extremely easy for me to think of most of these implications.. People are just territorial, violent animals that are barely domesticated via a few thousand years of society.
- api 9y ago
  When I was a bio undergrad student I learned once (in discussion with a professor) about a disturbingly simple and effective GMO path to weaponized microbes discovered back in the 70s by some bio-weapons researchers. This was long before CRISPR. Totally ingenious, simple, and absolute nightmare fuel. I will not repeat it here. The ideas are out there but I'm not going to help anyone find it. Suffice to say that I think it's pure luck that we have not yet had a biological 9/11 attack or worse. Normal people do have trouble imagining what psychopaths will do with things. Our brains do not naturally go there. A good example is what is now being done with social media, mobile, and the Internet in general: radical "dopamine" gamification to make it actually addictive, extreme political manipulation, and all powered by ubiquitous surveillance. There's presently a race to develop the first true AI con artist capable of autonomously conning humans into believing arbitrary things. I did not imagine most of this in 2000 because I'm not a psychopath. I was aware of the surveillance dangers of the Internet but I never pictured the degree to which it would be weaponized against the population by amoral or actively malicious actors. https://thinkprogress.org/hermann-park-protest-houston-28895d563f38/ https://thinkprogress.org/hermann-park-protest-houston-28895... Now whoever triggered that "flash mob" for teh lulz can mail order CRISPR. Sleep well.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    I've been worrying about this since the late 90s. It's so easy to create and release a zero-resistance >99% kill rate pandemic nightmare that I absolutely agree. And the power of the Internet makes it trivially easy to research and design that nightmare. CRISPR is the equivalent of selling megaton nukes on Amazon.
    - api 9y ago
devereaux 9y ago
Why a moral panic instead of celebrating the achievement? xx years ago, mail-order computer kits allowed absolutely anyone to hack code (and, gasp! illegally copy software or create computer viruses!) yy years ago, mail-order color printers and scanners allowed absolutely anyone to hack paper (and, gasp! forge documents) Is this part of a war against freedom? Then we are inconsistent. We should also lament on how Intel ME backdoors have become less efficient due to free software activist disabling them, or the demise of the Clipper chip promoted during the Clinton years.
- ringaroundthetx 9y ago
  People are worried about the humans lives that will be wiped out as free software activists disable the broken ones.
- bayesian_horse 9y ago
  These DIY Crispr kits aren't even remotely close to mail order computer kits. At the moment, they are about as sophisticated as sea monkey kits, and less reliable at that.
- criddell 9y ago
  > Why a moral panic instead of celebrating the achievement? Maybe they did some A-B testing and found that the story with the moral panic resulted in more ad views than the uplifting version?
- mrkstu 9y ago
  CRISPR allows germ-line propagating modifications. Think about creating a combo modification that expresses itself only after a 2nd or 3rd generation but also increases reproduction success for intervening generations- you could wipe out whole species, in a fairly straightforward manner. A modified flu could deliver a 'Children of Men' style germline infertility. This is like making everyone a little Kim Jong-un.
LeoJiWoo 9y ago
This will really take homebrew beer to the next level. I can't imagine these kits allow modification of anything more than a bacteria,virus, or fungus. I'm no biologist though. Is someone making a black death 2.0 in their garage even possible ?
- bayesian_horse 9y ago
  There's a reason bioterrorism isn't a thing, even though terrorism-minded people could get access to dangerous pathogens like Y. pestis or EBV if they wanted to. At least in my opinion, it's just too damn hard for them to merit the effort, even compared to a sophisticated bomb. Trying to engineer (and test) a strain, "weaponize" it, takes a lot of space, time and resources. And then the delivery is also very difficult.. So hard, that even militaries haven't totally figured it out.
  - TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
    The hard part is protecting your side against the effects. If you're not worried about protecting a population, pathogen production and delivery becomes rather simpler.
    - bayesian_horse 9y ago
      Protecting anyone hasn't historically been a concern for terrorists at all. Islamic terrorists, in particular, hit entirely Muslim targets all the time. And no, even then, production and delivery isn't easy. There are no pathogens which are both highly infectious and highly pathogenic, both because those traits are mutually inhibiting, and such a pathogen would already have run its course in the world. Any attempt to increase infectiousness and pathogenic potential, however, would require a very large foot print, virtually guaranteeing discovery by law enforcement.
      - ben_w 9y ago
        “Islamic” is probably the wrong level to group them. I would be surprised if many people in Daesh are cool with their own terrorists killing lots of Daesh supporters no matter how many Shia Muslims they kill without losing sleep.
bayesian_horse 9y ago
I am not afraid of what "biohackers" can do with CRISPR. It's very hard to come up with "pandemic viruses", even for nature, let alone for scientists, or even hobbyists. At worst, the capabilities CRISPR and other techniques from synthetic biology give to genuine researchers will offset any mischief a hobbyist can do.
- has2k1 9y ago
  The democratisation/commoditization of a technology increases the probability that any given one capability of that technology will be discovered [1]. If what you think of as "very hard" is rooted in historical and present capabilities, those with angst on the issue are uncertain how long it will remain "very hard". Given that there is radical change, I do not think that sense of dread is misplaced. [1] This is no a frivolous statistical argument. It helps establish a lower threshold and when other factors are considered the effect is strictly increased. The are some counter reasons, they help to think about he problem, but they are less convincing.
  - bayesian_horse 9y ago
    "Hard" in evolutionary terms means that there are dozens or hundreds of steps, which are individually very unlikely, compounding to the improbability of them happening. Evolution solves these things by brute force, but only if there is an evolutionary pressure. "Pandemicity" is at best an accident, from an evolutionary standpoint, and so is lethality. Both happening at once, thus, is very hard. An engineer could arrive at a solution faster, given that he knows the steps. But knowing which steps to take is actually the hardest part of synthetic biology.
- ben_w 9y ago
  Nature doesn’t ”want” lethal pandemic diseases. It’s evolutionary suicide to wipe out your own host.
kanzure 9y ago
Here's a transcript of a recent talk given by Josiah Zayner: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/diy-human-gene-therapy-with-crispr/ http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/diy-human-gene-therapy-wit... [20:40] “If you look at Step 3 - which is, uh, you know, I like steps and lists, they are awesome - uhm, there are actually websites out there that have this infrastructure completely built. You can go in, type in the name of a gene. Not even the name, you could type in the name you think a gene should be named, and what it will do is predict the best guide RNAs, the best 20 bases, to use, so that Cas9 enzyme can cut in your genome in this exact place." "Literally, you don’t have to do anything, right? You have to go in, type in the name of a gene, and press enter, and you could modify yourself with CRISPR. Right? That’s what this DNA basically is. This DNA, if you think about, took me about 5 minutes to make. Actually, it happened so fast, I had to go back and verify it a couple of times. I didn’t think I could create DNA that could modify my own genetics with CRISPR in 5 minutes. Now, if that doesn’t blow your mind, I, I really don’t know what does. And, the next question comes down to, 'What’s holding us back; what’s stopping us?' And I dunno, to me, I, I don’t really know what’s stopping us, you know? I, I think about it a lot, because, I have this really, you know, bad snaggle-tooth, and I think like what happens if I could change that?" "No but if you think about, people are born with things that they have no decision over. And then everybody else says, 'Oh, no, fuck you, I'm athletic and 6 feet tall and, you know, good looking, and you just, you just, the genetic lottery - you lost. That's the truth. You lost the genetic lottery and you have to suffer through it.' How does it make sense?" http://www.the-odin.com/diyhumancrispr http://www.the-odin.com/diyhumancrispr personally i'm down to fund projects like this, so if any of you are interested, get in touch & let's deploy.
- ben_w 9y ago
  Back in the days of Mac OS classic, there was a tool called ResEdit. You could use it to explore and modify apps. Or the core OS. While it was running. It warned you this was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. It took ten years before I saw a computer lock up that hard again. That’s how I see humans DIY hacking their own genome. If you’re lucky you’ll get what you were after. If not, you now have sexuality transmissible lycanthropy which (as a side effect) lobotomies you as your new skull shape was designed by an artist and not a biologist.
crewman 9y ago
Fortunately there is difference between creating deadly virus or bacteria and weaponizing it. Effective weaponization requires stabilization. Biwoweapon must survive in the environment and there must good delivery mechanism. Creating epidemic requires optimizing the delivery, contagiousness and symptoms. It seems that North Korea has remote islands dedicated to bioweapon development and testing. Biosafety level 4 laboratories are must if your researches go to home each night. But if you can do the most dangerous parts in islands where people are in quarantine and have prisoners to experiment with, it's easier. It's impossible to know how well they have weaponized their bioweapons. Description of North Korea’s BW Program from ROK Parliamentary Audit 2015: >North Korea has 13 types of biological weapons in the form of agents, and it can cultivate and weap- onize them within ten days. In an emergency, it is likely that the North would prioritize using anthrax which is highly fatal and smallpox which is highly contagious. Special forces, airplanes, and contam- inated carcasses are the potential delivery means. It appears that the North has not developed missile warheads with BW payload.
ihaveahadron 9y ago
like anything this will cause problems until it gets figured out by society. eventually it'll be like wearing glasses. this is a history take on this. sorry I'm the history and nacisicist guy until I get more edumacated on computers maybe you geniuses can make some kind of system where people could go to school who otherwise can't. faggots. we could call it something crazy like "government send people to school" or something faggots
amelius 9y ago
What if someone targets genotypes that are prevalent in, say, a specific race, and puts this in the drinking water?
patcheudor 9y ago
I saw John Sotos, Chief Medical Officer of Intel talk at DEF CON 25 about bio-hacking. This guy is at the top of his field and whip-smart. He's without a doubt an expert in this field and it was one of the most terrifying talks I've ever attended at DEF CON. Bio-hacking has the potential of being one of the gravest threats to humanity in far more ways than just killing people. This is a MUST WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY

135 points by G8WyaX 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

blacksmith_tb 9y ago

Dupe: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15640921 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15640921

dang 9y ago
That's true but we'll let this one pass since the earlier discussion was anemic.

ilamont 9y ago

Finally, what about the nightmare scenario: Is CRISPR so easy to use that we need to worry about biohackers—either accidentally or intentionally—creating dangerous pathogens? Carroll and others think that the danger of putting CRISPR in the hands of the average person is relatively low. “People have imagined scenarios where scientists could use CRISPR to generate a virulent pathogen, ” he says. “How big is the risk? It’s not zero, but it’s fairly small.” Gersbach agrees. “Right now, it’s difficult to imagine how it’d be dangerous in a real way,” he explains It's hard for "normal" people to imagine how sociopaths or those with destructive aims will behave when given flexible tools like this. It's kind of like how no one anticipated how social media networks whose ostensible purpose is to connect friends could be used to undermine elections, abet fraud, commit character assassination, and drive people to suicide. And while the real-life example of using CRISPR to switch the limbs of tiny crustaceans sounds harmless, wait til someone mutates something bigger and more familiar for "better" attributes or capabilities that can cause direct harm or inadvertent effects. It's probably already happened ... but we may not understand the impact for years.

Danihan 9y ago
I wonder what it says about me that it's extremely easy for me to think of most of these implications.. People are just territorial, violent animals that are barely domesticated via a few thousand years of society.
api 9y ago
When I was a bio undergrad student I learned once (in discussion with a professor) about a disturbingly simple and effective GMO path to weaponized microbes discovered back in the 70s by some bio-weapons researchers. This was long before CRISPR. Totally ingenious, simple, and absolute nightmare fuel. I will not repeat it here. The ideas are out there but I'm not going to help anyone find it. Suffice to say that I think it's pure luck that we have not yet had a biological 9/11 attack or worse. Normal people do have trouble imagining what psychopaths will do with things. Our brains do not naturally go there. A good example is what is now being done with social media, mobile, and the Internet in general: radical "dopamine" gamification to make it actually addictive, extreme political manipulation, and all powered by ubiquitous surveillance. There's presently a race to develop the first true AI con artist capable of autonomously conning humans into believing arbitrary things. I did not imagine most of this in 2000 because I'm not a psychopath. I was aware of the surveillance dangers of the Internet but I never pictured the degree to which it would be weaponized against the population by amoral or actively malicious actors. https://thinkprogress.org/hermann-park-protest-houston-28895d563f38/ https://thinkprogress.org/hermann-park-protest-houston-28895... Now whoever triggered that "flash mob" for teh lulz can mail order CRISPR. Sleep well.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  I've been worrying about this since the late 90s. It's so easy to create and release a zero-resistance >99% kill rate pandemic nightmare that I absolutely agree. And the power of the Internet makes it trivially easy to research and design that nightmare. CRISPR is the equivalent of selling megaton nukes on Amazon.
  - api 9y ago

devereaux 9y ago

Why a moral panic instead of celebrating the achievement? xx years ago, mail-order computer kits allowed absolutely anyone to hack code (and, gasp! illegally copy software or create computer viruses!) yy years ago, mail-order color printers and scanners allowed absolutely anyone to hack paper (and, gasp! forge documents) Is this part of a war against freedom? Then we are inconsistent. We should also lament on how Intel ME backdoors have become less efficient due to free software activist disabling them, or the demise of the Clipper chip promoted during the Clinton years.

ringaroundthetx 9y ago
People are worried about the humans lives that will be wiped out as free software activists disable the broken ones.
bayesian_horse 9y ago
These DIY Crispr kits aren't even remotely close to mail order computer kits. At the moment, they are about as sophisticated as sea monkey kits, and less reliable at that.
criddell 9y ago
> Why a moral panic instead of celebrating the achievement? Maybe they did some A-B testing and found that the story with the moral panic resulted in more ad views than the uplifting version?
mrkstu 9y ago
CRISPR allows germ-line propagating modifications. Think about creating a combo modification that expresses itself only after a 2nd or 3rd generation but also increases reproduction success for intervening generations- you could wipe out whole species, in a fairly straightforward manner. A modified flu could deliver a 'Children of Men' style germline infertility. This is like making everyone a little Kim Jong-un.

LeoJiWoo 9y ago

This will really take homebrew beer to the next level. I can't imagine these kits allow modification of anything more than a bacteria,virus, or fungus. I'm no biologist though. Is someone making a black death 2.0 in their garage even possible ?

bayesian_horse 9y ago
There's a reason bioterrorism isn't a thing, even though terrorism-minded people could get access to dangerous pathogens like Y. pestis or EBV if they wanted to. At least in my opinion, it's just too damn hard for them to merit the effort, even compared to a sophisticated bomb. Trying to engineer (and test) a strain, "weaponize" it, takes a lot of space, time and resources. And then the delivery is also very difficult.. So hard, that even militaries haven't totally figured it out.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  The hard part is protecting your side against the effects. If you're not worried about protecting a population, pathogen production and delivery becomes rather simpler.
  - bayesian_horse 9y ago
    Protecting anyone hasn't historically been a concern for terrorists at all. Islamic terrorists, in particular, hit entirely Muslim targets all the time. And no, even then, production and delivery isn't easy. There are no pathogens which are both highly infectious and highly pathogenic, both because those traits are mutually inhibiting, and such a pathogen would already have run its course in the world. Any attempt to increase infectiousness and pathogenic potential, however, would require a very large foot print, virtually guaranteeing discovery by law enforcement.
    - ben_w 9y ago
      “Islamic” is probably the wrong level to group them. I would be surprised if many people in Daesh are cool with their own terrorists killing lots of Daesh supporters no matter how many Shia Muslims they kill without losing sleep.

bayesian_horse 9y ago

I am not afraid of what "biohackers" can do with CRISPR. It's very hard to come up with "pandemic viruses", even for nature, let alone for scientists, or even hobbyists. At worst, the capabilities CRISPR and other techniques from synthetic biology give to genuine researchers will offset any mischief a hobbyist can do.

has2k1 9y ago
The democratisation/commoditization of a technology increases the probability that any given one capability of that technology will be discovered [1]. If what you think of as "very hard" is rooted in historical and present capabilities, those with angst on the issue are uncertain how long it will remain "very hard". Given that there is radical change, I do not think that sense of dread is misplaced. [1] This is no a frivolous statistical argument. It helps establish a lower threshold and when other factors are considered the effect is strictly increased. The are some counter reasons, they help to think about he problem, but they are less convincing.
- bayesian_horse 9y ago
  "Hard" in evolutionary terms means that there are dozens or hundreds of steps, which are individually very unlikely, compounding to the improbability of them happening. Evolution solves these things by brute force, but only if there is an evolutionary pressure. "Pandemicity" is at best an accident, from an evolutionary standpoint, and so is lethality. Both happening at once, thus, is very hard. An engineer could arrive at a solution faster, given that he knows the steps. But knowing which steps to take is actually the hardest part of synthetic biology.
ben_w 9y ago
Nature doesn’t ”want” lethal pandemic diseases. It’s evolutionary suicide to wipe out your own host.

kanzure 9y ago

Here's a transcript of a recent talk given by Josiah Zayner: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/diy-human-gene-therapy-with-crispr/ http://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/diy-human-gene-therapy-wit... [20:40] “If you look at Step 3 - which is, uh, you know, I like steps and lists, they are awesome - uhm, there are actually websites out there that have this infrastructure completely built. You can go in, type in the name of a gene. Not even the name, you could type in the name you think a gene should be named, and what it will do is predict the best guide RNAs, the best 20 bases, to use, so that Cas9 enzyme can cut in your genome in this exact place." "Literally, you don’t have to do anything, right? You have to go in, type in the name of a gene, and press enter, and you could modify yourself with CRISPR. Right? That’s what this DNA basically is. This DNA, if you think about, took me about 5 minutes to make. Actually, it happened so fast, I had to go back and verify it a couple of times. I didn’t think I could create DNA that could modify my own genetics with CRISPR in 5 minutes. Now, if that doesn’t blow your mind, I, I really don’t know what does. And, the next question comes down to, 'What’s holding us back; what’s stopping us?' And I dunno, to me, I, I don’t really know what’s stopping us, you know? I, I think about it a lot, because, I have this really, you know, bad snaggle-tooth, and I think like what happens if I could change that?" "No but if you think about, people are born with things that they have no decision over. And then everybody else says, 'Oh, no, fuck you, I'm athletic and 6 feet tall and, you know, good looking, and you just, you just, the genetic lottery - you lost. That's the truth. You lost the genetic lottery and you have to suffer through it.' How does it make sense?" http://www.the-odin.com/diyhumancrispr http://www.the-odin.com/diyhumancrispr personally i'm down to fund projects like this, so if any of you are interested, get in touch & let's deploy.

ben_w 9y ago
Back in the days of Mac OS classic, there was a tool called ResEdit. You could use it to explore and modify apps. Or the core OS. While it was running. It warned you this was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. It took ten years before I saw a computer lock up that hard again. That’s how I see humans DIY hacking their own genome. If you’re lucky you’ll get what you were after. If not, you now have sexuality transmissible lycanthropy which (as a side effect) lobotomies you as your new skull shape was designed by an artist and not a biologist.

crewman 9y ago

Fortunately there is difference between creating deadly virus or bacteria and weaponizing it. Effective weaponization requires stabilization. Biwoweapon must survive in the environment and there must good delivery mechanism. Creating epidemic requires optimizing the delivery, contagiousness and symptoms. It seems that North Korea has remote islands dedicated to bioweapon development and testing. Biosafety level 4 laboratories are must if your researches go to home each night. But if you can do the most dangerous parts in islands where people are in quarantine and have prisoners to experiment with, it's easier. It's impossible to know how well they have weaponized their bioweapons. Description of North Korea’s BW Program from ROK Parliamentary Audit 2015: >North Korea has 13 types of biological weapons in the form of agents, and it can cultivate and weap- onize them within ten days. In an emergency, it is likely that the North would prioritize using anthrax which is highly fatal and smallpox which is highly contagious. Special forces, airplanes, and contam- inated carcasses are the potential delivery means. It appears that the North has not developed missile warheads with BW payload.

ihaveahadron 9y ago

like anything this will cause problems until it gets figured out by society. eventually it'll be like wearing glasses. this is a history take on this. sorry I'm the history and nacisicist guy until I get more edumacated on computers maybe you geniuses can make some kind of system where people could go to school who otherwise can't. faggots. we could call it something crazy like "government send people to school" or something faggots

amelius 9y ago

What if someone targets genotypes that are prevalent in, say, a specific race, and puts this in the drinking water?

patcheudor 9y ago

I saw John Sotos, Chief Medical Officer of Intel talk at DEF CON 25 about bio-hacking. This guy is at the top of his field and whip-smart. He's without a doubt an expert in this field and it was one of the most terrifying talks I've ever attended at DEF CON. Bio-hacking has the potential of being one of the gravest threats to humanity in far more ways than just killing people. This is a MUST WATCH: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY