[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
personally i'm down to fund projects like this, so if any of you are interested, get in touch & let's deploy.
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.
But it's also not how CRISPR/CAS9 works either. Gene therapies usually involve a process of extracting stem cells, modifying a small number of them in vitro, growing them, and then either using them to grow tissues out of the body for later implantation, or injecting them into targeted tissues.
It's not an injection you take that goes out and edits every cell and you magically change shape. It makes for good scifi, not so much good science.
No, if you're lucky, nothing happens. The majority of the other alternatives are just death.
Just imagine a complex codebase and then you start changing parts of it randomly. What are you going to get? Either nothing or more likely, some sort of a crash which in biology means death.
What's the probability that you'll get a feature or fix a bug doing that? Almost 0.
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.
There are a few reasons I think. Firstly, there is a cultural disconnect between fundamentalism and science heavy weapons development. In the same way that ISIS is not building gigawatt lasers or rail guns, the groups capable of terrorism don't prioritise research. They are often very atavistic, wanting a return to a less technical, less advanced society.
The second thing is that engineering even the simplest organsim is still hard. If you are trying to build a pandemic virus, you need a fairly elaborate set up to do it and avoid killing yourself first. This is far less accessible than making explosives, or obtaining guns.
The biggest risk is state funded labs in eg North Korea, or the emergence of contract labs willing to do anything for a fee, eg a 'biohacking' equivalent of Hacking Team.
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-28895...
Now whoever triggered that "flash mob" for teh lulz can mail order CRISPR.
Sleep well.
For what it's worth, I think I know how to make a directed energy weapon that could cause 50% probabilty of lethal effects that are only noticable hours afterwards (you could probably get a lethal shot even if you power it with a potato battery, too); and I realised a few years ago that when I was 9 years old I already knew enough basic chemistry to make a chemical weapon that could kill everyone on a London underground station. I'm neither a chemist nor a physicist, these are both things other people invented and I just saw a way they could be abused.
Despite that, I don't fear terrorists. They're demonstrably idiots, because it took them how long to realise that guns are highly effective tools for killing lots of people quickly? And then they decided to switch from guns to mimicing Carmageddon?
Edit:
Just to add, yes, I agree, ban it. All it takes is one, so the risk outweighs any benefit from encouraging more biologists.
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.
Given enough time, you just need one misanthropic individual.
Edit: and it doesn't just need to be CRISPR. It could be AI, fusion, you name it. The power of the individual to impose their will on larger and larger numbers of people and parts of the planet keeps increasing with technology.
People are just territorial, violent animals that are barely domesticated via a few thousand years of society.
At worst, the capabilities CRISPR and other techniques from synthetic biology give to genuine researchers will offset any mischief a hobbyist can do.
[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.
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.
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 ?
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.
If you're not worried about protecting a population, pathogen production and delivery becomes rather simpler.
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.
A modified flu could deliver a 'Children of Men' style germline infertility. This is like making everyone a little Kim Jong-un.
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?
At the moment, they are about as sophisticated as sea monkey kits, and less reliable at that.
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.
