Synthetic Biology Hits Newsweek
Via a chain of email forwards starting with Drew Endy (whom we've written about previously on Radar), I saw that there's a nice piece on synthetic biology by Rudy Rucker in Newsweek. Here's the best bit:
One big worry is what nanotechnologists call the “gray-goo problem.” What’s to stop a particularly virulent SynBio organism from eating everything on earth? My guess is that this could never happen. Every existing plant, animal, fungus and protozoan already aspires to world domination. There’s nothing more ruthless than viruses and bacteria—and they’ve been practicing for a very long time.... I have a mental image of germ-size MIT nerds putting on gangsta clothes and venturing into alleys to try some rough stuff. And then they meet up with the homies who’ve been keeping it real for a billion years or so.
Lovely! Although Rudy's humorous tone may keep Newsweek readers from realizing just how significant synthetic biology is as "news from the future," this is still an interesting sign of mainstream acceptance of this technology.
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Hey, there's actually an up-and-coming political issue in this area!
"Grey goo" is the name for a threat of abiological nanotech; "green goo" is what I've heard synthetic biologists talk about in their field.
"Green goo" is, indeed, an unlikely scenario for the reasons cited. But that's fairly obvious. It is a red herring to raise that spectre only to knock it down in such trite ways.
The much more serious danger -- arguably already real and present -- is simply unwelcome "non-linear" changes in the ecology. A hypothetical scenario: some biotic pesticide is developed, testing shows that it has no LD-50 for bees, it's deployed, as an unanticipated side effect a certain mite flourishes and kills all the bees, meanwhile, although the biotic pesticide uses deliberately fragile bugs intended to die out within days -- evolution happens in a couple of batches and the mite-loving, bee-hating little creation takes up permanent residence in 30% of the ag. topsoil in the U.S.
Oops. Good luck with that product recall, boys. (Scenarios abound. Start a pandemic? Poison a crop? Deaden a lake? Whatever you like: synthetic biology activities on the planet definitely improve the odds in big ways.)
In 1975, Asilomar conference ([openwetware.org], [Wikipedia] laid out some best safety practices for researchers. These came to be widely accepted and adopted as the institutional standard at most labs.
And, this brings us to the up and coming political / economic issue:
Those protocols are based on a 1975 understanding of the risks and a 1975 picture of a relatively small world of researchers. Times have changed. We can better characterize the risks than we could then. More importantly, because so much work in synthetic biology is a very fancy form of "trial and error," the rate at which new organisms are being created (and stored) is exploding explonentially. You've seen the job growth for "wet lab" qualified synthetic biologists. Also be aware that the technology for creating organisms has increased in efficiency, and will do so for some time out (perhaps in a kind of Moore's law way). And that the economic value of this research is growing ridiculously because new discoveries can be industrialized.
The labs don't stop at Asilomar for their safety protocols but neither is there any huge push to update the conferences findings and seriously consider what kind of safety protocols ought to be universal today, when we know more, and when new organisms are being cranked out off of ever-growing, ever-speeding-up assembly lines.
-t
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