Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria(techcrunch.com) |
Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria(techcrunch.com) |
It seems our ability to mess stuff up is growing faster than our ability to defend against bugs. I shudder to think what happens when sloppy engineering practices or "WannaCry" meet biology. Hey, we've encrypted your germ line, and sterilized you, send Bitcoin to XXXXX to restore your fertility.
edit: putting the bank in blood bank
I think we may have a good (trashy) sci-fi novel here.
You're going to be waiting awhile.
The hard part about biology is that it often doesn't work. To get things working even semi-reliably you need tens of thousands of dollars of sensitive equipment and reagents. Equipment and reagents that would catch the attention of interested authorities if you bought it as an independent.
Computer viruses are the result of a tractable ecosystem and a low cost to participation. Biology is largely untractable, with a tremendous cost of entry.
Yes, CRISPR helps us insert DNA, but it doesn't change all the sensitive steps up to the point of transformation. Even then, CRISPR is limited to the cells being treated.
A custom biological virus is what you are imagining, with the ability to both insert DNA/RNA and with a capsule that protect it during transmission. Unfortunately we are likely centuries away from being able to code a completely custom life form, and even then, the cost and training needed to create such life forms will be cost prohibitive, leaving only corporations and governments the ability to do so.
Admittedly, we're a "long way" from that, but for me, I define "long way" as 20 years. Centuries? Seems way past the singularity horizon for me. I think it's really hard to say at this point something is too hard to be solved in 100 years unless it's something that defies the laws of physics, or takes ungodly amounts of mass or energy.
I don't think we can discard any possibility given the exponential nature of human advancement.
I'd say "myself included", but my gender transition will take care of that. Hmm... I wonder if a future version of CRISPR could get my body to produce its own estrogen.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Muybridge_horse_gall...
On a more serious note, I'm not sure, with this kind of power, if we are quickly approaching a Great Filter[4] or not.
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controvers...
We're approaching several.
We -- or rather, some members of our species -- are clever enough to build amazingly powerful technologies (nuclear weapons, biotechnology, maybe strong AI), but as a species we seem to often use them unwisely, either because political leaders are power-obsessed (in the case of nuclear weapons), or because some technologies might become able to be harnessed by individuals/groups without much resources (DIY biotechnology).
It's like toddlers playing with matches on a petrol-soaked carpet.
It doesn't have to be the whole code that's dangerous, what about a section of it?
That still makes it very improbable, but orders of magnitude more than the whole sequence.
It looks like it was a low resolution image with 5 frames, so I expect it to be about 1 Kb, max?
I think you are much too sanguine about this, which I've noticed is a tendency among programmers in general. We're used to a world where bugs always have fixes, and can be patched and the fix spread worldwide instantly, for free. None of these things are true in epidemiology, and it causes us to make really bad metaphors that don't apply in this world. For starters, "responsible disclosure is good" and "security-by-obscurity is bad" are obvious truisms in software but not even remotely true in epidemiology.
> viruses have already had DNA editing machinery for millennia, search up retroviruses.
But viruses are subject to evolutionary pressure that puts a ceiling on how bad they can be. Most of the worst human viruses have a "pick two" of 1) airborne 2) highly infectious 3) fatal, because a virus with all 3 burns itself out and can't survive. Engineered organisms do not have this ceiling.
I think most people, if not everyone, already got this.
> viruses have already had DNA editing machinery for millennia
But humans never had it. That's probably what creeps everyone out.
We can do that now. It's fairly easy for anyone to edit viruses or bacteria using non-crispr methods to make something more virulent.
The problem is there is an evolutionary trade-off. To be more virulent means dedicating resources to it, to the detriment of other kinds of fitness. The result is your virulent pathogen cannot spread, defeating the point of a weapon.
We are many decades away from achieving systemic understanding necessary to improve an organisms fitness using molecular tools, and also account for compensatory changes to fitness.
You can however use selective breeding to do this, but that's millenia old technology.
> I define "long way" as 20 years.
We don't even understand most of the existing proteins in databases yet, and it is going to take decades to meticulously characterize these sequences.
Worse, nobody has come close to a useful denovo protein sequence yet, let alone a genomes worth of proteins and their interactions. I feel safe in saying we are at least 50 years off from these goals, probably more.
A flash in the pan is also exponential, for a time.
Most likely this is just "junk" DNA that has no physical manifestation.
As for reading the picture, it is only seen when they extract the DNA and use methods of sequencing to produce the image, meaning it will only show the little gif when analyzed the way it was designed for.
