The Wild World of DIY Synthetic Biology

buckrodgers
Scarey!!! If these bioaugmented organisms get out into the open environment the interactions will be unpredictable, unstoppable and contaminate the indiginous biology. And cause ????? We do not know all the ramifications. Every one doing this reasearch may not have 100% biocontamination contaimment in their facilities. We are creating alien biology on Earth and only God knows the ultimate results.
I know this will continue, even increase and could be very beneficial. But, I have always been scared when men play omnicient God with an average IQ of only around 100 to 150.

@ orangebloodedal You have a point. Whenever a technology gets to the point that you can "Do it yourself", there are inevitably a bunch of yahoos who simply do it WRONG. This might not be so bad when a DIY motorcycle builded accidentally puts the parts in the wrong places, or when a guy trying to build his own tool shed wakes up the next morning to discover it lying on its side.

But messed-up bikes and tool sheds don't replicate, infest their creators' bodies, and spread to those of others. This could potentially happen if one of these "citizen scientists, amateur biologists, and DIY biological engineers" tries to create a cancer-killing bacterium and instead produces a human-killing bacterium.

Open-source genetic coding opens up a lot of potential, both good and bad. Most likely, this idea will be pursued, in hopes of developing better biofuels and other products. Let's just hope we don't kill ourselves off with DIY plagues before we start seeing the benefits.

Though I support this sort of research, I do have apprehensions about it. I happened to watch a very poor movie (a ripoff of the late 1960's cult classic, "Night of the Living Dead") a few nights ago in which government scientists develop a biological organism that locks up a person's neural system for 6-7 hours without leaving any damage. It mutates -- of course -- and infects people, kills them, then they become flesh-eating zombies. But it did remind me of the "Law of Unintended Consequences."

Perhaps this sort of research ought to be limited, by law if necessary, to professional scientists working is isolated labs with every conceivable fail-safe device and procedure conceivable in place.

I was led by this article to wonder about another aspect of this sort of research, made available as open source information: can someone develop something then give out the knowledge freely -- only to see someone else come along, snatch it up, and patent it? Were someone to develop, say, a truly effective medication this way but didn't him-/herself patent it, I could easily see drug companies swooping right on it in a heartbeat -- and then pricing it exorbitantly. Or does open-source material already have protections keeping this from happening -- have it in *any* jurisdiction, not just the U.S.???