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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 for

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.

kirse 17y ago
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.
- biohacker42 17y ago
  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.
  - randallsquared 17y ago
    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.
  - jibiki 17y ago
    > 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...
    - biohacker42 17y ago
      Really. Staphylococcus aureus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
evgen 17y ago
> 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.
- biohacker42 17y ago
  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.
  - evgen 17y ago
    > 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.
    - 17y ago

kirse 17y ago

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.

biohacker42 17y ago
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.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  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.
- jibiki 17y ago
  > 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...
  - biohacker42 17y ago
    Really. Staphylococcus aureus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]

evgen 17y ago

> 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.

biohacker42 17y ago
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.
- evgen 17y ago
  > 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.
  - 17y ago