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More on "biohackers" being a very real threat

Posted at 2004-07-27 00:31:30 by Declan McCullagh
in Politech category "bio"

Below is a followup to last week's Politech post about biohacking.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [Politech] Will synthetic biology spawn biohackers?
Date: Thu, 22 Jul 2004 19:42:33 -0700
From: fbj lists <mark@universaltransparency.org>
To: Declan McCullagh <declan@well.com>
References: <40F370AC.1070509@well.com>

Declan,

You may remember me from last year, we corresponded a bit. I help run the
website www.universaltransparency.org and have a degree in Molecular
Biology. This article is exactly the reason I started the website, my
background made me very concerned about technological innovation, especially
in the biological sciences. There would seem to be only two ways to prevent
the type of catastrophe that this article mentions - stop technology (a la
Bill Joy), or massive transparency to help see this type of problem before
it gets manufactured.

At any rate, biohackers are a very real threat. Many people may say it is
not, many computer scientists, business people and others who really have
few credentials to voice such an opinion. Biological Scientists may be shy
about confirming this threat as well, as it may panic people and cut
funding. Of course mentioning it also gives some people the idea to do it in
the first place. Even I have been very quiet on the topic as it gives me
nightmares and it also gives nightmares to my friends.

I was at a biotech conference in 1997 when a scientist mentioned that they
knew of a lab that just as a experiment, made a bacteria resistant to every
known antibiotic. This took a few scientists a week to do in between other
experiments. They quit quickly after they realized how scary it was. That
was 7 years ago! The main reason this kind of thing has not happened yet, in
my opinion, is most bioscientists are highly educated "good" people with
many oversights. Sociopaths are usually identified before they get a PhD.
Unfortunately, automated instrumentation is being exported to many other
countries and being used by less educated people. In the near future,
automated instruments may be in the hands of less educated or more desperate
people.

I still have the site up, but have not been doing much with it for health
reasons (carpal issues), as well as that mamy people think my ideas are
totalitarian. But in the face of biohackers, serious defenses need to be
discussed, and I believe that transparency is the most realistic solution.

Mark
<pre>

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