Goodbye Dolly, Hello Synthia. Venture Institute Seeks Monopoly Patents on the World's First-Ever Human-Made Life Form 

We can't let this go forward or even come to fruition. Complete story at:

http://www.etcgroup.org/en/materials/publications.html?pub_id=631

Biohacking. Synthetic biology. Geez, genetics has come a long way since I studied molecular biology back before dirt was invented. Blade Runner indeed.

"In 2000, Elowitz (at MIT) had described a small circuit he'd engineered into E. coli that consisted of three so-called repressor genes rhythmically turning one another on and off. Tie a fluorescent protein to one of those genes and you get bacteria that flash like fireflies. Elowitz called his system a repressilator - an oscillator made of repressors. The IAP students studied it, admired its simplicity, and convinced themselves that, as MIT's crack studbunnies of geekdom, they'd be able to do something cooler yet. They designed several circuits that were more sophisticated and, in principle, more stable. Then they sent their designs to Blue Heron to be synthesized.

The result is a library of standardized parts, much like the transistors, capacitors, and resistors of electronics, with a standard kind of signal to run through them. That is, synthetic biology is approaching the sophistication of a child's first electronics kit.

There are dangers in such power. The first dramatic demonstration of DNA synthesis was the creation of a polio virus, assembled in 2002 by researchers at SUNY Stony Brook. The event itself wasn't especially worrisome; if a terrorist wanted to obtain polio, a few easily purchased doses of live vaccine would be a much easier starting point. It was, however, a vivid illustration of challenges to come. Blue Heron and its competitors check every sequence they're asked to make against the genomes of all known pathogens. But what if people find ways to create nasty life-forms unlike anything in nature, whose capacity for hurt looks like nothing seen before?

The best defense against rogues and evildoers, Endy says, is a community of technologists committed to finding ways to thwart them, bigger and better-resourced than the Dark Side could ever be. He believes in an open source approach to the task of programming life, modeled explicitly on the open source approach to programming computers, long popular at MIT. This ethos might also defend against implementations that are simply inept, rather than malicious, but nonetheless capable of great harm. As Endy (at MIT) points out, do you really want staple crops fitted with proprietary programming as secure as, say, Windows 95?

Imagine typing all the three-letter words of a bacterial genome in a text editor and changing all uses of the four less common words for arginine to the two most common. This would preserve the meaning of every gene while giving you four spare words. Presumably you could reassign them to new amino acids - amino acids that living creatures have never used before. This may sound far out, but it has already been done. Scientists at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California, have modified a bacterium to read a word that normally means "stop making protein" as "add a weird amino acid here."

Rather than just listening to what nature chooses to tell us, we can now ask questions in nature's native tongue and compel it to reply."

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.01/mit.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_Biology

http://syntheticbiology.org/

shibadiva

This is friggin nuts. A bacteria of all things, and then when it gets loose and mutates and we have no immunities to it, then does the plague come. This reminds me of another bad sci-fi film.

Here we are back into risk assessment, is the ultimate value of this new life form worth the risk? How much good will it do compared to how much damage?

I swear some of these engineers/scientists are just friggin looney.

What next ..... You know I am not going to give them any ideas.

db

Klondike

See my above post for how all these things get into the environment, they inevitabily get loose.
The introduction of all kinds of species into new environments by man has always been a disaster. The mongoose in Hawaii is a prime example, brought in to keep the snake population down, they destroyed the snakes, then the lizards, then the birds.

Genetic mice can mate with the regular ones so then do we end up with super mice??

And what makes you think they haven't cloned a human yet, just haven't published it yet because it is still illegal, but I am sure there are some little clonettes running around out there already. Just wait until it becomes legal and watch how long it takes for the first one.

head exploding again
db

Replicant (F) Des: PRIS

NEXUS-6 N6FAB21416

Incept Date: 14 FEB., 2016

Func: Military/Leisure

Phys: LEV. A
Mental: LEV. B

Klondike

Someone already beat you to it, think it was the 12 monkeys wasn't it with Bruce Willis, I think there were a few others to, like the Island of Dr Moreau. So nothing new here, but it was just movies, not real life.

scary

db

Klondike, Dingbat He was so ... dangerous, you know?

Hi All,

I received an email from the ETC Group with an update to "Venter Institute Seeks Patent on Synthetic Life-Form Good-bye, Dolly...Hello, Synthia!" that reads in part:

The G(e)nomes of Zurich: Civil Society Calls for Urgent Controls on Synthetic Life states that this, "attempts to build synthetic life forms". Synthetic biologists contend that all the parts of life can be made synthetically (that is, by chemistry) and then engineered together in the laboratory to produce “living machines” – fully working organisms programmed for particular tasks."

And, if that is not scary enough, the article reveals there is not a regulatory agency for such technology.
 
“Once more a new technology is storming ahead with no government or international body able to regulate or control it,” says biologist Florianne Koechlin from SAG (the Swiss Working Group on Gene Technology). “Once more we hear from the scientific community, supported by industry and the military, that they have life under control and will soon be able to construct it." 

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, the very first complacent, do whatever the government/military/organization says to do, human clone could be born in a petri dish in a few weeks and he, she or it could very well be part and parcel to Craig Venter's institute which filed "US patent application no. 20070122826, entitled “Minimal bacterial genome,” claims monopoly ownership of a “free-living organism that can grow and replicate” whose genome (full genetic information) has been built entirely through mechanical means."

The rest of the emailed article can be found at the ETC Group. http://www.etcgroup.org/en/

Scientists are meeting this very week in Zurich to discuss the latest developments in this field of genetic engineering.  This is indeed out of control, out of the normal, and a flagrant display of technological abuse, as I see it.  I concur, this should not and cannot go further, but it looks like it already got its "seal of approval".

The ETC Group is one hell of an organization and I highly suggest signing up for their emails.  You will not be disappointed with their deliveries.

Sincerely,
Donna

~ The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them. ~
    Lois McMaster Bujold, 2002 Diplomatic Immunity, US Science Fiction Author