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Home Bio-Hackers - Oops...
The author makes an interesting point about the 'home bio-hacker'. Read the article, but keep this happy thought in mind --
-- he's wrong.
He's not wrong about the potential risk of a home bio-hacker, but it's not because the home bio-hacker is going to generate, with deliberate and malice aforethought, something that will wipe out humankind. Rather, two things --
1) the home bio-hacker will do something incredibly stoopid and release something into the environment, and more importantly,
2) any half-way decent cell and molecular biologist in any half-way decent laboratory in a university, college, pharmaceutical company or government laboratory can do far, far worse.
I'm a cell biologist as well as a physician. I have ALL the equipment I need in my modest laboratory, and ALL the expertise, to hack not just an E coli (child's play), but some really nasty vectors if I had a mind to do so. I can take a gene, any gene, mutate it as I wish, and insert it into a plasmid. I can teach any E coli to carry that plasmid. I can put that gene into a virus like adenovirus or lentivirus and then release it into the environment. I can put that gene into a really virulent bacterium (e.g., Ebola).
Most of the basic grunt work to generate a nasty vector can be purchased in kit form. Isolate RNA? Buy a kit. Mutate a gene (targeted mutagenesis)? Buy a kit. Gel purify a plasmid? Buy a kit. These kits are comparatively inexpensive, have high quality control and just plain work. If you can bake a cake you can use these kits.
The knowledge is out there. Many of the tools are public domain and paid for by the NIH. Want a gene sequence? Hit BLAST. Need methods to do your work? Hit PubMed. Need tools, equipment and kits? All the major vendors are on-line, provide detailed information and technical reference material, and will sell to most places in the world.
I won't create such a monstrosity of a vector, of course, since I'm honest and decent and have no wish to cause misery. But there are hundreds of thousands of people trained to do these sorts of things in our country and more across the world. And it's not just the physicians and PhD's one might worry about -- it's all the various technologists and research associates. Those are the folks who actually do the work in most laboratories, and they are the ones who, if so inclined, could sneak around and put together something that would be very harmful. Particularly in the universities where the controls and security are more lax, this wouldn't be hard.
There are plenty of intelligent scientists in Muslim countries (and elsewhere) who could be tempted to create a horrific vector. They could be bankrolled. The equipment, kits and materials generally aren't rigorously controlled. In the same way AQ Khan snuck around to create the Islamic bomb, a like-minded scientist could create the Islamic phage. Or the Tamil phage. Or the FARC phage. You get the idea.
Think about that happy thought as you read about 'home bio-hackers'. |
For years, I have warned in these columns and elsewhere that the future weapon of mass destruction we should most fear is not a nuke. Rather, it is a genetically engineered plague, a plague no one has ever seen before and against which no one has any immunity. In the time it would take to identify the new disease, develop a vaccine, distribute the vaccine and have it become effective, modern societies could suffer death rates equivalent to those of the Black Death: up to two-thirds of the population.
Regrettably, it appears that dreaded future has now arrived. The May 12 Wall Street Journal carried a front-page story titled "In Attics and Closets, 'Biohackers' Discover Their Inner Frankenstein."
In Massachusetts, a young woman makes genetically modified E. coli in a closet she converted into a home lab. A part-time DJ in Berkeley, Calif., works in his attic to cultivate viruses extracted from sewage.
Posted by: 3dc 2009-05-22 |
