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Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

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Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#41

Post by positivecomment »

rubatuga wrote: post #36

Can we stop with the slippery slope arguments? No, CRISPR will not be used be teenage hackers in the future to infect humans and keep them hostage. CRISPR can’t be “spread” or “transmitted” and is a local technique to introduce DNA snippets into the main genome of the organism. And to anyone who thinks that CRISPR could be potentially used to infect humans, this technology is nothing new: viruses have already had DNA…

> No, CRISPR will not be used be teenage hackers in the future to infect humans and keep them hostage. CRISPR can’t be “spread” or “transmitted” and is a local technique to introduce DNA snippets into the main genome of the organism

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.

Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#42

Post by JumpCrisscross »

What are the odds this is being used for exfiltrating sensitive data? (Reminds me of a Culture novel, I think Excession, where one character tries to sneak information out of a ship by encoding it into the DNA of bacteria on, essentially, packages.)

Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#44

Post by ballenf »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #42

What are the odds this is being used for exfiltrating sensitive data? (Reminds me of a Culture novel, I think Excession , where one character tries to sneak information out of a ship by encoding it into the DNA of bacteria on, essentially, packages.)

Zero right now, but the future where borders agents require you to unlock your DNA as well as your phone makes for a great sci-fi dystopia.

Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#45

Post by progval »

dmoy wrote: post #16
yazan94 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know much about how DNA works, but by inserting ATGC sequences, does that not mess up the bacteria's replication process or something? How would the cell 'read' this encoded gif in the DNA? Would it try to build a protein because of it, or would it ignore the sequence? Do cells usually have a checksum-type of functionality to detect if their DNA is valid/unmutated? The article itself didn't make any mention,…

Right I'm no biologist, but my understanding is that there's vast amount of dna that doesn't really do anything (doesn't encode any proteins). I don't remember why... maybe it used to do stuff a long time ago.

You are thinking of introns. Their function is still not very well-known. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intron#Biological_functions_an...

Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#46

Post by Giroflex »

searine wrote: post #37
cromwellian wrote: post #18

I gloriously await from teenage hackers 10 years from now release CRISPR viruses/worms that insert GIF meme pranks into the human population germ line, eventually triggering the apocalypse. 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, an…

>I gloriously await from teenage hackers 10 years from now release CRISPR viruses/worms 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. Comput…

Not too many decades ago, computers were also prohibitively expensive and largely only available to corporations and governments.

I don't think we can discard any possibility given the exponential nature of human advancement.

Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#47

Post by cabalamat »

positivecomment wrote: post #34
cabalamat wrote: post #23

They should encode some music on it and then watch the RIAA go apeshit trying to track down and kill all the copyright-infringing bacteria.

If someone finds some protected data as controversial as AACS encryption key[2] and creates a "fork" of HIV which contains that information, I'm optimistic that we will get a cure for it in a few years. 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…

> I'm not sure, with this kind of power, if we are quickly approaching a Great Filter or not

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.

Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#48

Post by netheril96 »

ballenf wrote: post #44
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #42

What are the odds this is being used for exfiltrating sensitive data? (Reminds me of a Culture novel, I think Excession , where one character tries to sneak information out of a ship by encoding it into the DNA of bacteria on, essentially, packages.)

Zero right now, but the future where borders agents require you to unlock your DNA as well as your phone makes for a great sci-fi dystopia.

DNA of which organs should the border agents examine in that future?

Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#49

Post by Analemma_ »

rubatuga wrote: post #36

Can we stop with the slippery slope arguments? No, CRISPR will not be used be teenage hackers in the future to infect humans and keep them hostage. CRISPR can’t be “spread” or “transmitted” and is a local technique to introduce DNA snippets into the main genome of the organism. And to anyone who thinks that CRISPR could be potentially used to infect humans, this technology is nothing new: viruses have already had DNA…

Note that when the popular press worries about the destructive potential of "CRISPR", they don't mean CRISPR specifically. They're using the word as a stand-in for the general trend of the exponentially decreasing cost of genome sequencing and editing techniques which probably, eventually, will reach the level where they can be done by teenage hackers. And that is something that requires concern and attention, even if I don't think it merits panic.

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.

Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria

#50

Post by cromwellian »

rubatuga wrote: post #32
cromwellian wrote: post #18

I gloriously await from teenage hackers 10 years from now release CRISPR viruses/worms that insert GIF meme pranks into the human population germ line, eventually triggering the apocalypse. 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, an…

Aren’t you just afraid because you don’t really understand how CRISPR works? It’s not a virus or anything, nor is it airborne.

No, at a high level I understand how it works. I didn't claim CRISPR is a virus. I'm talking about people using other pathogens to piggyback CRISPR edits.
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