last pre-Flipside post
Have you ever wondered what it would be like if you could balance the budget yourself? Now you can. The Committee For A Responsible Federal Budget has created a simulator that gives you the information about and the dollar amounts of most of the options currently applicable to the national debt (except drug legalization). It's sort of addictive to fiddle with, if you're of a political science bent.
Recently, someone on my flist asked what could go wrong with the artificial encoding of DNA in bacteria.
What can go wrong: the same stuff that sometimes goes wrong with mutations from DNA programmed into cells the regular, haphazard way. You still have to follow rules like the inverse-square law of cell waste, and basic physics of powering the cell and maintaining cell fluidity and structure. We don't yet have the technology to re-encode mitochondrial DNA, so we can't mess with the cell's basic metabolism, and thus there is a limited amount we can do by way of genetic tampering. We can NOT make anything that breaks the laws of physics, y'all.
We already have plagues and bacteria with amazing and extraordinary capacities. Potential for zombie plagues runs like this: you could have fast zombies for a few days but they won't have full cerebral function, or hoodoo-esque poisoned/slow zombies with very limited cerebral function for maybe a few weeks, or sad, slowly-deteriorating-towards-zombiehood humans like people with creutzfeldt-jakob disease for a year. That's it. Movies and pop culture are fun to discuss, and for the morbid among us a worst case scenario is fun to think of and plan for, but realistically that's not how it's going to go down, and we know it.
Terrorism: biology on this level would require not only stealing the research, but stealing the scientists, the development budget, and all the research equipment as well: the entire lab and everyone in it. And then you'd have to take from six months to a year to get the whole team of researchers to design and fabricate the little buggers, make sure the strain does not do any strange genetic tricks with base-pair switching, etc. and really?. Anthrax and airplanes are so much cheaper.
I'm not going to say nobody will fuck anything up with it. The Law of Unintended Consequences and it's cousin Murphy are always with us. If we make germs that can clean up the Deepwater Horizon and future spills, eventually a mutation off of that could learn to metabolize plastic, and then we're fucked. There are so many ways that making the world better can and always does go wrong, but I would rather keep our ugly history, warts and all, than go back and strike from the pages of history the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, or the multitude of civil reforms that came about because of the rise of science in these new conditions. If we are not willing to fuck stuff up then we never grow or change, and. Just. No.
Bad things are going to happen. We're human. We will fuck shit up. Fucking shit up in interesting new ways: it's kind of what we do. But failure to plan ahead for the cleanup of messes we know we're going to make doesn't work very well, so the new technologies stay in the testing and talking-about-ethics stage for a long time, while we can either waste resources grizzling about our own nature or try to make contingency plans. Maybe we'll decide not to use the full capacity of gene modification, maybe we'll use it a couple of times and then abandon those methods upon figuring out a new risk factor. We've done that before with multiple kinds of research. But stopping human progress is not possible, and as much as I love sarcasm it's still a disingenuous response to an issue which now that I've gone on for a page about it I'm realizing is maybe kind of important to me.
Huh.
Recently, someone on my flist asked what could go wrong with the artificial encoding of DNA in bacteria.
What can go wrong: the same stuff that sometimes goes wrong with mutations from DNA programmed into cells the regular, haphazard way. You still have to follow rules like the inverse-square law of cell waste, and basic physics of powering the cell and maintaining cell fluidity and structure. We don't yet have the technology to re-encode mitochondrial DNA, so we can't mess with the cell's basic metabolism, and thus there is a limited amount we can do by way of genetic tampering. We can NOT make anything that breaks the laws of physics, y'all.
We already have plagues and bacteria with amazing and extraordinary capacities. Potential for zombie plagues runs like this: you could have fast zombies for a few days but they won't have full cerebral function, or hoodoo-esque poisoned/slow zombies with very limited cerebral function for maybe a few weeks, or sad, slowly-deteriorating-towards-zombiehood humans like people with creutzfeldt-jakob disease for a year. That's it. Movies and pop culture are fun to discuss, and for the morbid among us a worst case scenario is fun to think of and plan for, but realistically that's not how it's going to go down, and we know it.
Terrorism: biology on this level would require not only stealing the research, but stealing the scientists, the development budget, and all the research equipment as well: the entire lab and everyone in it. And then you'd have to take from six months to a year to get the whole team of researchers to design and fabricate the little buggers, make sure the strain does not do any strange genetic tricks with base-pair switching, etc. and really?. Anthrax and airplanes are so much cheaper.
I'm not going to say nobody will fuck anything up with it. The Law of Unintended Consequences and it's cousin Murphy are always with us. If we make germs that can clean up the Deepwater Horizon and future spills, eventually a mutation off of that could learn to metabolize plastic, and then we're fucked. There are so many ways that making the world better can and always does go wrong, but I would rather keep our ugly history, warts and all, than go back and strike from the pages of history the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution, or the multitude of civil reforms that came about because of the rise of science in these new conditions. If we are not willing to fuck stuff up then we never grow or change, and. Just. No.
Bad things are going to happen. We're human. We will fuck shit up. Fucking shit up in interesting new ways: it's kind of what we do. But failure to plan ahead for the cleanup of messes we know we're going to make doesn't work very well, so the new technologies stay in the testing and talking-about-ethics stage for a long time, while we can either waste resources grizzling about our own nature or try to make contingency plans. Maybe we'll decide not to use the full capacity of gene modification, maybe we'll use it a couple of times and then abandon those methods upon figuring out a new risk factor. We've done that before with multiple kinds of research. But stopping human progress is not possible, and as much as I love sarcasm it's still a disingenuous response to an issue which now that I've gone on for a page about it I'm realizing is maybe kind of important to me.
Huh.