On Wed, Mar 7, 2012 at 12:20 PM, Chris Templeman <christempleman@gmail.com> wrote:
I do think Carl shrunk the context of our conversation considerably...all the way down from a 1 hour phone conversation to less than 20 words. It was a short article, after all.
@Jason, thanks a bunch for the response and thank you very much for the links. this is what I was looking for.I appreciate your clarification and I should not take the last part of your quote ("... underestimate our ethics") lightly. I find myself often thinking about the technology too much and not relying on the good of people.I am not singling out an individual here, but the discussion I wanted to start was around this idea:I am very optimistic about the power of synbio to shape our world and as such there will the ability to shape it positively and negatively. I for one, as an instrument designer / technology developer are concerned about making equipment that will be used for...well evil. I hear people (amateurs and professionals alike) say that there is not a risk of people in the garage making the next killer virus because we don't have the skills and we don't have the equipment. Is that true? I am interested in DIY Bio because I believe in the great power that synbio will have in our world. I believe that it is a good idea to democratize equipment so that more people get involved. So more people can do amazing feats on their own. So I have a hard time reconciling the argument individuals can't do incredible feats (good and bad) on their own with my view of the future where they can. I don't want to make instruments for people so they can just rehash old experiments. I want to make instruments so that pioneers can make discoveries and shape the world. If we can shape the world then how do we do it safely and assure the world that we are doing this for good? I think those people telling the world not to worry because we don't have the technology nor the skills is doing a disservice to those who want to be taken seriously and do cutting edge work.
I think this is an excellent set of topics for personal reflection and group discussion.
I think everyone should want to make policy about technology that has a basis in practical reality (versus fantasies of what might be real in the future). So in the course of discussions like this, people want to know what is real today and sometimes that is not always obvious, as the bird flu debate very clearly illuminates. This is true in physics too (Are teenagers really making yellow cake in their garages today? Should we worry or celebrate?).
It is important to be vigilant about potential misuse. If misuse is potentially very serious, or even potentially catastrophic, then it would be a luxury to deal only with the practical realities of today and not think about tomorrow or next week or next year, etc. Another point of reference for reading: the other day in Nature, there was an article: "Four steps to avoid a synthetic-biology disaster". (One of the co-authors is Todd Kuiken, who was quoted in the NYTimes and attends many DIYbio events).
On a much deeper level, as a society we must also decide how much we want to organize the world and our ethics according to "worst case scenarios". For that, you might look at George Annas's new book Worse Case Bioethics.
BTW, Carl Zimmer is pretty active in social media especially Google+. I have been following him for a while and he is responsive to readers who directly address him through G+ so I would suggest people directly address him with your concerns about the nature of the article and things being out of context.
I don't have a bone to pick w/ Carl. I don't think his intention was to write a hit piece on amateur science and I don't think he took any my quotes "out-of-context". The fact that he reported is that people involved in reviewing the publication of the flu research -- like Michael T. Osterholm (a member of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity or NSABB) -- are worried about amateur biohackers working in their garages.
To be sure, I also think the piece was peculiar, especially for singling out amateurs -- of all things. If you've hung around the DIYbio mailing list for very long, you know that it is almost cliché at this point.
If you read the much longer essay in the New Yorker this week by Michael Specter, folks on the NSABB fret about all sorts things beyond amateur biologists, such as "...an incredibly smug kid at Harvard....or a lone crazy employee with access to these sequences...We have seen many times that accidental releases of dangerous microbes are not rare..." (quoting Osterholm in the article).
Jason
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