[ExI] Fwd: Synthetic biology and the proactionary principle in The Economist

[Bryan Bishop]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tristan Eversole <customerservice at trioptimum.com>
Date: Sun, May 23, 2010 at 4:02 PM
Subject: Re: Synthetic biology and the proactionary principle in The Economist
To: diybio at googlegroups.com



On May 22, 2010, at 11:02 AM, Bryan Bishop wrote:

> Thoughtful observers of synthetic biology favour a different approach:
> openness. This avoids shutting out the good in a belated attempt to
> prevent the bad. Knowledge cannot be unlearned, so the best way to
> oppose the villains is to have lots of heroes on your side. Then, when
> a problem arises, an answer can be found quickly. If pathogens can be
> designed by laptop, vaccines can be, too. And, just as “open source”
> software lets white-hat computer nerds work against the black-hats, so
> open-source biology would encourage white-hat geneticists.

I worry that perhaps biological weapons will turn out to be a lot like
ICBMs— much easier to develop than to counter. This belief stems in
part from the fact that the biggest gains in biodefense stem from
quick, very highly reliable detection and a rapid and robust medical
response(*). A synthetic biological weapon could exploit a novel
vector we don't anticipate, or use a novel means of attack that we
have no effective counter to. Likewise, if the technology to develop
these weapons becomes widespread, it will mostly be used for peaceful
purposes, and the intelligence issue of picking up on
biological-weapons-in-development will become very difficult and,
worse, prone to false positives. (I should temper these statements
with the note that I know quite little about biodefense; my major
model for thinking about it comes from the PNAS paper about a
bioterror attack using botulinum in the milk supply. The worst case
for that scenario, no detection, leaves 568,000 casualties with 10g
botulinum. Quick detection reduces this number in a very dramatic
fashion, which, I suspect, is why that paper wasn't classified.) I
have to conclude that Bill Joy's assessment of the malicious
possibilities of self-replicating weapons is at least plausible.

The major hope I have is that the techniques of synthetic biology
particularly will result in pathogens that are significantly easier to
understand and counter than natural organisms, owing to their reliance
on standardized parts.

My argument against the proactionary principle would be grounded in
the observation that we are headed towards a world in which we are
good at genetics and horrendously lousy at ecology; in other words, a
world in which we are great at creating organisms and awful at
figuring out how they will interact. Evidence supporting this position
is abundant, in the sense that we have already seen substantial harm
caused by humans mucking with natural organisms: one can easily recall
several high-profile ecological mysteries, such as colony collapse
disorder, the white-nose syndrome (caused by a fungus) that has
attacked bats, and the ongoing destruction of amphibian populations.
One might also point to the essentially global havoc that has been
caused by invasive species generally— and this is no joke, either;
invasives have caused many billions of dollars' worth of damage. In
the US, examples would include gypsy moths, zebra mussels, the
critters attacking the Dungeness crabs in the Pacific Northwest, and
the Asian tiger mosquito. (This last case is illustrative. The Asian
tiger mosquito probably reached the US in shipments of used tires, and
it brought the West Nile virus with it. If you had told the people
shipping tires that their activity would ultimately kill people in the
US, they would probably have laughed at you.) Invasive species studies
have proved so fundamentally bad at predicting which species will
become successful invaders that the field has been called a
pseudoscience. To summarize, if we can't reliably control natural
species, what makes us believe we can control synthetic ones? It's not
a problem in the near term, but if the field is as revolutionary and
awesome as its proponents suggest, we're going to confront this
question sooner or later.

(This is why I roll my eyes at Freeman Dyson's utopian visions for
synthetic biology.)

Reference for the milk paper (I bet everyone on the list has read it
already, but I might as well include it anyway, just in case):

Wein and Liu. Analyzing a bioterror attack on the food supply: the
case of botulinum toxin in milk. Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences of the United States of America (2005) vol. 102 (28) pp.
9984-9

*It's hard to resist making a snarky remark about the US medical system here.

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- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
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