GENOMICON

Now want to put a rootkit/drm on DNA

According to Wired etc -

“Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:”

Jesus Jumping H Jehosephat. I mean what could possibly go wrong?

Mind you – $6 million is bugger all. That’s how much Steve Austin cost back in the 70s, and although he could run really fast and do fast things with one arm… well… I doubt that you’d get $6 Million for him today.

No – the worrying thing about this is more to do with the fact that the people that we pay to act in our interests are fucking INSANE enough to think that

a) DRM is a good idea
b) DRM works
c) DRMed biotech weapons might be a good idea
d) DRMed biotech weapons wont lead to some sort of biotech weapons arms race which is even less controllable than the nuke one.
e) So we should make some and find out.
f) because this is somehow “defence”

And a kill switch? Isn’t that what Baron von Harkonnen had in his slaves? Fuck that. At least staring at goats was relatively harmless… I hear some of the goats actually quite enjoyed it.

This is one I’ve had in the back of my mind for a while… a hothouse with amped up mutations, and an environment tweaked to drive the forces of natural selection into overdrive. An insectoid, microbial, vegetative piranhasphere. An evolutionary fast-breeder for creating new and useful monsters.

Which is obviously as good an excuse as any to dig up this clip again, which is not connected in any way.

So anyway, something that’s turned up recently is a Multiplex Automated Genome Engineering machine, which as far as I can gather is this concept operating at a microbial level – though I’m not sure if this isn’t just a mass-mutation creator rather than a sphere where competition actually happens – “instead of trying to directly create double-mutants, Wang and Farren’s approach produced hundreds, even thousands of mutations simultaneously, resulting in billions of different strains. Because lycopene colours cells red, the researchers simply selected the brightest bacteria.”

Still. A step on the way I think. Combine this with the machine in Wales that can perform its own experiments, and we could well wind up with something… well, utterly ungovernable.

Here’s some insane person’s fantasy about using robotic bugs to spy on and kill people. The voice-over is flirting with that whole hollywood macho tone – an indication that they’re living in movie-land rather than the real world. Just like Ronald Reagan – who had an alarming habit of telling anecdotes about his life which were actually from movies, and they named a battleship after him. I’m talking about The US Air Force.

Some other people, equally demented have seen Terminator and instead of trying to kill off the inventor of Skynet before he managed to do any damage, they’ve set up a thing where AI systems can compete with each other to see who’s best at killing off the human race.

So anyway, robotic insects. Marvelous. I followed all the links from the BotJunkie post above, and spent a morning perusing for others etc…

It flies, it crawls, it gives me the creeps. It’s got that whole scrabbly bat-bug vibe going on.

(from)

Then there’s this one:

The The DelFly Micro, (from), with photo/vid of it’s older sibling here.

Another, prettier one here…

So what do these all have in common.

1) they’re all little flying robots that look a bit like bugs
2) they all employ first-personism
3) they’re all evil. Either for spying or killing people – apart from the last one maybe. Or any of the other ones.

4) they’re all a bit rubbish.

I mean no offence etc, they’re a lot better than I could do – I can barely tie my shoelaces, but if you compare them to an actual insect… they’re crap. Take a proper hornet for example. It can :

• fly : really accurately. Straight through holes the same size that it is without hesitation.
• walk : like the clappers, up walls, upside down on the ceiling, all limbs individually sensored and controlled.
• see / smell / feel / hear / taste? and god knows what else
• fight.
• cope with being waterlogged.
• 3D print using locally sourced materials (their nests are 3d printed)
• self-fuel using locally sourced materials.
• reproduce itself from locally sourced materials, with sexual selection and variation so evolution happens.
• work/live/fight/build communally.

Now that, my friends is quite a feat of engineering. Think of the best flying machine we have today… a stealth bomber? It doesn’t come close to what a simple wasp can achieve.

So I’m guessing that we’re going to learn to make “brains” that learn how to use alien systems faster than we’re going to learn how to build robots that actually manage to do what mad-scientists want them to. I’m guessing that the biotech revolution is going to merge with and eclipse all the others – robotics, nanotech etc… they’re not going to be like they are in sci-fi movies because it’s easier (and a lot more potent) to program/adapt existing creatures than it is to make them from scratch.

It’s a question of interface… and there have been movements in that direction of late. Rat brains controlling robots, synthetic cells making electronics, protein making cell machinery etc etc. There was a talk on TED a couple of years ago where someone had programmed a machine to “learn how to walk”…

…to be honest, I can’t see any other approach working as system complexity increases. Genetic Algorithms etc.

Make a hardware problem a software problem. That’s my advice. Machines that learn. Then we’re really in trouble.

These people are from the future: I have no idea what any of them are talking about.

Still, shiney happy people holding hands. It could be worse, and good to see Terence Taylor, the Washington biosecurity guy saying that “overall, our best defence against biological risks is the rapid dissemination of the life-sciences”.

“what we have to do, and this is so important in the approach that we take, is to safeguard the advance of this technology. That’s a very different approach to restrict, control, prevent… that is… not the way to do it”.

An idea that’s been kicking around for a while… but which I first came across on the DIYbio mailing list is that of a Bio-Weathermap.

Basically it’s a way of keeping tabs on what’s going on in the world… by means of local bird-watchers uploading their observations to a central location… and by ‘bird-watcher’, I obviously mean train-spotter, or anyone else who has a fascination with a particular niche etc… and there are a surprisingly large number of these, they’re just not coordinated yet.

I find this quite an interesting idea – partly because I’m interested in Algae, as a potential source of great wealth, and because it nearly killed a local lake… though I visited it today, and I’ve never (in 40-odd years) seen it so clear.

This turned up recently:

Which is Joe DeRisi giving a talk on Virus-Hunting in which he talks about automated diagnosis of virii… using a virus library on a chip… and this…

Jamais Cascio talking about “Tools for building a better world”… in which he suggests the possibility of using cell-phones to monitor… well, everything. The Earth-Witness Project he calls it.

These two concepts coming together could be… well, cool… although Jamais is specifically talking about a de-coupling of observation and analysis. There’s more of a viral push to being able to see the results yourself, straight away etc – especially if there’s some chance you might discover gold… or at least a new species that could be named after you etc.

I’ve been noticing the possibility of cell-phone based distributed monitoring more and more – plugins for phones. One that turned up today is this:

A cellphone that can detect diseases in a user’s breath (via).

To be honest, I was invisaging something a little bit more like this :

Except a lot smaller – fused or plugged into your phone so you forget it’s there… so people strolling round lakes or fishing in rivers or driving a tractor round their farm etc, can take a couple of seconds out to snap a micro-photo and have it auto-uploaded to a central point where people thousands of miles away can analyse, track etc… to be honest, I just have this picture in my head of an absolutely massive website that looks like this:

It always was about the art… but I’m also interested in resilience… and in the areas where we have in-built, inherent, unavoidable single-points-of-failure… because we only have “one system”… eg:, the biosphere, the internet… we really need to keep an eye on things because the waters ahead are likely to be fairly stormy by all accounts.

ps: also turning up recently is this : A gadget that looks like a cellphone for gardeners to gauge the sugar content in fruit – and if the first decade of the 21st Century has taught us anything it’s “things that look like cellphones but aren’t cellphones tend to get swallowed by a cellphones”.

Or more accurately, cellphones are telephones that have been swallowed from the inside (without anyone noticing) by computers… so they’re basically computers… they’re just a bit lacking on the peripheral front at the moment.

Well people have been doing it for years of course… what with Crufts dog show, and those little yapper-type dogs (who are bastards) and the RSPCA finally coming out and saying that they’re boycotting Crufts from now on because the whole thing is a freak show and some of the specially bred variations are possibly a bit cruel…

(from)

But the point is we’ve been making toy animals for years. I’m quite interested in the notion that when a new technology breaks, it quit often turns up as toys first… so naturally this caught my eye… the first geneticaly engineered pets:

(Glofish : Wikipedia)

Which look like this, pre-tinkering

And the Jazz-Purists of the animal world are already expressing concern over the toyification of animals… as per this article from a hermit-crab blog with regards painting/modifying their shells which alerted me to the fact that there’s actually a severe hermit-crab shell-shortage (christ, is anything going right on this planet?) and a voluntary ban that many pet stores impose on “painting fish“, ie: injecting them with dye, which sounds slightly insane to me and the sort of thing Hitler would do, but there you go.

The toyification of weapons, the toyification of animals. I think we need a subtle redesign of our ethical systems – not that I have a problem with creating new species per se, but I think that the revolution in human dignity that has taken place over the last couple of hundred years needs to extend to animals.

Ok, that was the bad news, now the reasons why I think DIYbio is probably going to become the biggest driver for just about everything, from here to the singularity.

Imagine all of these videos as one of those overlapping circle charts that people always use in powerpoint presentation. There’s an overlapping bit in the middle… and out of this I suspect will emerge, what Craig Venter in the second video describes as a new version of the Cambrian Explosion. The biggest challenge in the next 30 years, may not be climate change, it may be surviving this explosion, but that minor worry belongs (for the moment) elsewhere.

There’s a couple of hours worth of videos here, which is about 4 Gilligans, (A Gilligan being a measure of time spent doing something other than watching a sitcom. (from here (kindof)))

Ok. I’ve mentioned this one elsewhere, but it’s an easy-in, as it were. Short, simple and to the point, and I really like the design.

 

Now a talk by one of the people who sequenced the genome. Everyone claps at the end, and not without reason. This is why we ought to do this.

 

Then this one… more on possibility etc, but the imperative kicks in at about 17.00. This is why we need to do this.

 

Then this one on crowd-sourced innovation. This is why it has to be us that does this.

 

And finally a guy talking about mushrooms. It’s not actually about genetic engineering, but I like him and it does show what can be achieved with what we’ve already got.

 

So there you go. I’d also add, that seeing what centrally owned energy/pharma/(etc) industries did to the 20th century, it’s absolutely vital that this technology is democratised. We need this.