I recognize that committees/groups of people can distill rapidly into CYA committees/groups and function so woodenly as to make the whole process useless, but I’d say we need such a bare minimum to ensure that educated people (other than @Shaddack and the other smart people doing research) have a chance to evaluate research with a fresh pair of eyes so we don’t go down the grey-goo slope. I recognize that it slows the process down, although I couldn’t say how much as I’m not a researcher, but it seems like it is the least we can do to prevent horrible things from occurring.
For instance, I don’t like crab grass because it gets into my veggie patch. Working in my garage lab, I figure out an herbicide that kills the strain of grass in my yard, and I use it. But what if it works really, really well and kills all the grass in my neighborhood? I would be responsible for killing all the grass, and while that’s a fairly simple example it illustrates the issue.
Put another way, I walk down the pesticide aisle at the home improvement store and see a constellation of bug-murdering chemicals offered up in practically any size whatsoever. People use these things without the slightest thought as to where they’re spraying, how much is being used, and whether it’s the right chemical for the job. It strikes me that if everyone could create their own chemical, or bug, then we’d have a constellation of nasty stuff times a few thousand or million.
While I’m not comfortable with allowing a free-for-all laboratory, I can certainly see the positives of having enough DIY citizen scientists doing research to analyze and single out nasty bugs–I just don’t trust people enough to do those things without considering the repercussions. And yeah, that kinda leads me back to the old white men acting like frogs in the well…or Institutional Research committees. They’re not the end-all, but I haven’t heard a better solution yet.
I worry about both the mammals who create nasty things and the nasty things run amok without the mammals having the faintest idea of what to do about it.
It doesn’t help that I’ve just read WWZ because I can absolutely see people and governments handling things as badly as the book’s plot plays out.
I found it and read it and it is short and such future sounds like…
#…FUN!
Edit: The other day I was thinking about a way to bypass the drug industry. The first thought was an implanted microreactor that directly produces the chemicals in question. But that would work rather poorly, because of insufficient reconfigurability of such devices when built in situ. The second variant that sounds more promising is a RNA “printer” instead, that can deal with pathogens using RNAi or similar countermeasure, can provide synthesis of proteins by exploiting existing cellular mechanisms (don’t forget to synth also the chaperones for the proteins, where needed), and can provide other molecules as well indirectly by providing the enzymes for the synth pathway. That way the only thing needed as technology is an electronically controlled “enzyme” fed by nucleotides and electrical signals telling it how to assemble them together. The enzymes could be controlled and powered by attached chromophores, the energy selectively provided by semiconductor lasers of the desired wavelength (LEDs have too wide emission peaks; if the chromophores have very narrow absorption peaks, something similar to wavelength division multiplexing from fiber optics could be used here too, for more channels, if needed; for four bases such finesses aren’t needed though). Essentially give the enzyme the energy it needs from light instead of from ATP. (And make it bistable, with reset with fifth wavelength, so we won’t get a polynucleotide chain if we blink the control laser, but only one base added. A flip-flop circuit, essentially.)
With this approach there is no need for chemical stores (everything is already present in the organism) that could be accessibility-limited or overpriced, no reactors per se that would require much of space and reconfiguration.
A similar possibility is coupling this “RNA printer” with a vessel for harboring symbiotic bacteria; plasmids then can be directly injected, and once the germs get useless they get killed by e.g. peroxide (white blood cells do this) and replenished with fresh unmodded ones for production of something else.
Tampering with natural symbiotic bacteria can have quite a lot of potential. See e.g. fecal transplants. Or the military research aimed towards giving soldiers the ability to digest cellulose, to literally eat grass (and therefore simplifying their mission logistics).
The story is a beat-up – low-rent clickbait churnalism. From a couple of political science lecturers FFS. Couldn’t Nature find any experts on biosynthesis to check whether the story had any substance? Or did the experts decline to offer a sufficiently hysterical opinion?
My impression was that the researchers doing the actual work are not terribly interested in morphine(on the illegal side, that’d be a bad thing to admit to, on the legal side, poppies are not terribly difficult or expensive to grow, so if you have the appropriate authorization, morphine precursors are not markedly expensive); but in relatively high purity, low cost, biological synthesis of various compounds, with the ideal endgame being a more or less ‘turnkey’ “choose compound desired, splice in correct DNA, yeast and/or e coli do what they do best”.
From the perspective of an illegal producer, this only becomes interesting if the cost of a (relatively sophisticated; but small footprint) illicit bioreactor facility is less than a (dirt cheap; but sprawling, potentially multinational) supply chain. The former requires a lot of expertise and some moderately expensive hardware; but requires protecting little more than a warehouse or a random chemical plant in some downmarket industrial zone. The latter requires only helotized peasants; but involves hundreds or thousands of acres that are potentially vulnerable to government intrusion, assorted middlemen to collect and transport intermediate stage product, and so on.
Just for giggles, of course, one might be tempted to splice the necessary genes into a virus to be released in DEA HQ, in order to produce a strain of opiate-synthesizing antinarcotics officials…
I am all in favor of merry DIY, and find the prospect of the DEA sniffing around yet another area deeply distasteful; but the one issue that is…likely to get a little touchy… is that gene flow can be a bit unpredictable, especially when you are actively assisting it in the lab in order to get results that you couldn’t obtain naturally.
Just as I have no problem with model rocketry types; but would be deeply annoyed by somebody’s sloppy chemical storage burning my house down; I’d really rather not have some putz accidentally release the viral vector he was using to add novel genes to yeast where it might add novel genes to me.
You could buy a bioreactor off the shelf. It’s sold as “electric yoghurt maker”.
That said, lactobacilli are much less fussy hosts to work with for such home labs than the notoriously finicky E.coli.
Ah, but I’m not thinking about joining Al-Queda or ISIS, so I’m all good, right? (Incidentally, I’d be a hilariously bad candidate for either group, unless you count ‘star of next snuff film’ as a membership role)
The ‘relatively sophisticated’ is more in dealing with contamination, ensuring that your bioreactor is producing the finicky-but-valuable GMO strain, not some useless but street-hardened wild type organism; and the various other details of that nature.
Not really fundamentally hard, most of the problems have been considered, on some scale, by home brewers, cheese enthusiasts, people who have passed undergrad to grad bio courses, etc. but there’s a reason why even breweries, among the oldest users of selected yeasts, and the ones with a good selection of fairly time tested strains, not sterile-lab primadonnas, tend to have a lot of scrubbing, sanitary technique, and stainless steel around.
You need a good glovebox, with good sterilization system. A hermetically enclosed box with ozone generator and/or UV lamp (ozone will get to nooks and crannies but will rot rubber seals FAST so you need silicone or other ozone-compatible material), perhaps some access port.
I made a proof-of-concept of a glovebox with an airlock on a dare, using chimney sleeve steel parts (what’s the name?) for the glove holders/ports and their flanges, silicone caulk, and a pair of sealed-lid food storage boxes from a kitchen goods store mounted bottom-to-bottom across the master box wall. (The master box lid is not sealed, that was a proof of concept.) Next gen is intended to have 3d-printed glove ports, these are the most annoying parts to make.
As of figuring out what you are growing, you can do a lot of proteomics fingerprinting with a humble mass spectrometer (also here and many more places) (and an electrophoresis rig which is trivial in comparison). A low-cost one is however still quite a challenge, though not insurmountable - small portable TOF MS units are routinely used in defense applications.
There was a 3d-printed 33,000 rpm turbine (or was it jet engine?) in the news recently. This opens the way to cheap, compact turbomolecular pumps; with vacuum source, a MS unit is not much more than a bunch of electrodes and magnets.
You know, I wonder if easy access to this yeast and similar ones for other drugs wouldn’t be a net positive. It would eliminate drug cartels overnight.
Given that we already have both legallized poppy cultivation and synthetic opiates like fentanyl; it’d really only take some political guts to answer that question…
We’ve demonstrated that we can’t handle the challenge of taking down the cartels the law enforcement/military way; but we could crush them like insects in the marketplace about as fast as we could ramp up any necessary production, if we had the poltical will to do so.
Remember that the authors are using their awesome Political-Science skills to hypothesise an as-yet-unavailable technology and chin-stroke about the legal consequences. Whether the hypothetical, exceedingly-specialised yeast would in fact be easy to grow and conceal is an open question, but the rules of the “Let’s Pretend” game allow the authors to make it so, and to add the further stipulation that “criminal syndicates and law-enforcement agencies” will not acquire any improvements in their technology for tracing and detecting the bio-reactors.
This is an entertaining although pointless game to play while you’re drinking with friends, but it seems an odd topic to occupy the webpages of Nature.
Now, think how would you detect this? You can run the whole rig under an activated charcoal filter for the egress CO2. That traps the volatiles. You can destroy the chemical signatures in the product with a strong oxidizer, e.g. hydrogen peroxide. That neutralizes the trace-detection sniffers that could be deployed to the streets or to the waste sewers even before the agencies can start thinking about getting them deployed.
Bioreactors are pretty common. Everybody who does homemade yoghurt or bread runs one. They have no specific signatures. You’d have to go after signatures of the specific strain of the host organism, generic strains will give you a plethora of false positives. Going specific then achieves only proliferation of more variants that your test gear is not set for. And if you know what you are doing, you can destroy those signatures or enclose them so they are not detectable remotely, and then handle the local access using conventional means.
