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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

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.
- biohacker42 17y ago
  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.

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.

biohacker42 17y ago
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.