When did techcrunch get bought out by Buzzfeed? 'did your head just explode' is such a link-bait-douchy title
Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
51–59 of 59 posts
Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
#52Can 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.
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Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
#53Look at my horse. My horse is amazing.
Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
#54I 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…
I don't think you need a completely custom from scratch lifeform. It seems to me you just have to find a flexible existing pathogen that can tolerate a CRISPR edit sequence tagging a long. Perhaps a virus is too small, maybe some common gut bacteria or fungus can be weaponized.
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.
Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
#55I 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…
Genecoin, cryptocurrency implemented in the human genome. We take a blood sample to check your balance. edit: putting the bank in blood bank
So vampires would suck your blood.... as a way to rob your bank account?
I think we may have a good (trashy) sci-fi novel here.
Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
#56Can 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 i…
To be fair, we do have examples of some superbugs, such as the Spanish Flu in the 1910s, where an influenza virus managed to wipe out a significant portion of the world. It would be considered by most to be airborne, infectious, and fatal. Maybe my optimism results from the fact that a supervirus has never been engineered (which I agree is fallacious), but I don’t think CRISPR, a research technique, even begins to encroach on the topic of genetically engineered superbugs.
Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
#57Can 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…
I'm not sure I understand your argument. The fact that "this technology is nothing new" isn't precisely what proves that it can be potentially used to infect humans?
Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
You are assuming growth will continue.
A flash in the pan is also exponential, for a time.
Re: Scientists have inserted a GIF of a horse into living bacteria
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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…
I don't think you need a completely custom from scratch lifeform. It seems to me you just have to find a flexible existing pathogen that can tolerate a CRISPR edit sequence tagging a long. Perhaps a virus is too small, maybe some common gut bacteria or fungus can be weaponized. 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…
> It seems to me you just have to find a flexible existing pathogen
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.