RE: Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for November 3, 2019
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Biological malware is something long undertaken by various governments today. Ethics is probably not much of a factor considered by those producing it.
The advent of CRISPR is the event of our age, the signal tech of the 21st Century. The actual developments that will ensue will result in a future beyond reckoning. The list of industries mentioned by Ms. Dunn is woefully short. There is no aspect of our lives CRISPR will not radically change shortly. Pharmaceuticals, health care, construction, species preservation/environmental activism, politics, security, war, finance, the list of ways I have considered CRISPR being used to disrupt industry is almost longer than I can recall off the top of my head.
The key aspect of the science is that, like coding software for computers, it's something you can learn young, at home, and do cutting edge work while living in your mom's basement. It's not something that can be centrally controlled, or banned by government. It's in the wild now, and smart people are doing it today. In the 1980s we didn't have many problems with hackers. We didn't have Android or IOS phones either.
CRISPR is gonna make a far larger splash in a decade or two, just as it took a decade or two for computer programmers to impact the masses, but programmers were limited by hardware that was being incrementally developed. Biohackers aren't. Billions of years of evolution has enabled their hardware to already possess illimitable capabilities, and all they have to do is learn how to use it.
It's gonna be amazing.
Thanks!
Edit: I just watched Dunn's talk, and I have to note that she is incredibly naive. She actually says you can't do this from a garden shed, when the documentary 'Unnatural selection' is basically about people doing exactly that today. Ivory tower intellectual? I dunno, but she's wrong about that, and probably a lot more.
I haven't read a whole lot about CRISPR - just enough to be peripherally aware of it. I'll have to start paying more attention to it in my RSS feeed. Thanks for the feedback!
It's basically a magic knife that allows you to insert DNA at any site in any genome. It's very simple to use. The only complex thing about it is knowing what to insert where to achieve a particular goal. The cost of the equipment is negligible, and is easy to get and deploy.
For the cost of a weekend stay at a hotel you could take a course (that supplied all necessary hardware and research materials) that teaches you how to genetically engineer yourself. Not even joking. Thousands of people are doing this today. People are making custom yeasts for brewing beer. People are making dogs that glow in the dark, and curing AIDS (oddly, that guy 'died' during the filming of 'Unnatural Selection'. Plenty of suspects, none of whom seem to be the NIH, CDC, or WHO). These are topics covered in the documentary 'Unnatural Selection', but there are also people doing whatever they want to whatever they want to do it to, and if they don't tell us we won't know, because there's no way to find out what they're doing in their bathroom, or garden shed.
One prediction I will make now: some people will grow antlers, just because they can.
Interesting. I see that the documentary is available on Netflix. I hadn't heard of it before your comments. I'll have to check it out.
Given what I have seen of human nature, I'm inclined to believe your prediction. And after that, maybe we'll have crowds of people on Steem who dedicate a month to sharing photos of their antlers. ; -)