Tag Archives: Biotech

"Open science": Humanity's best hope?

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Photo: dno1967/Flickr CC

If we are to believe transhumanists, people who bill themselves as champions of superlongevity and artificial human enhancement, 2045 should be a very good year.

But we won’t get there by counting on the biopharmaceutical complex, said open and citizen science proponent, Joseph Jackson:

“Technologists extrapolate these trends from certain domains and completely overestimate the progress we’ll make,’’ said Jackson, a Harvard University graduate who is developing a low-cost device to help scientists study DNA outside major laboratories. “Twenty years will tick by, and we’ll still be waiting.’’

via Biotech movement hopes to spur rise of citizen scientists – The Boston Globe.

Synthetic life starts with this cell

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Craig Venter & Co. announced this breakthrough today:

Daniel Gibson and colleagues have put both methods together, to create what they call a “synthetic cell,” although only its genome is synthetic. In this case, the synthetic genome was a copy of an existing genome, though with added DNA sequences that “watermark” the genome to distinguish it from a natural one. In the future, the scientists would like to design more novel genomes that would make bacteria capable of performing specific tasks that could help solve energy, environmental or other problems.

via Science AAAS.

Not likely: Engineers "Doing Well by Doing Good"

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CC Ed Schipul

(Do-gooders? Rice University Bioengineering Lab. Photo: CC Ed Schipul)

The engineering professional association IEEE reports that engineers are fairing well.

Good for them.

But to say they are “doing well by doing good” is laughable, generally speaking.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers cites technologists working on “solar energy and search engines, cellphones and fuel cells, DNA sequencing and Hollywood blockbusters,” as fairly pathetic examples of do-gooding.

The IEEE goes on in this bit (below) to admit that aerospace and defense, and consumer electronics, are actually the industries keeping engineers in good stead.

IEEE Spectrum: Engineers Are Doing Well by Doing Good
This rise in starting salaries would be even higher were companies not able to get young talent from such places as India, China, and Romania. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that over the next decade, EE ­employment will grow much more slowly than other ­engineering areas, because of the job outflux to other ­countries.

Vaccine will combat weaponized plague

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Another mandatory prick is on the way

(First, it was smallpox. Photo: Steven Stehling)

from Mark:

Plague is a terrorist threat, the University of Central Florida says.

According to the university: In 2005, plague killed 56 people in the Congo, “and another 124 were infected before the epidemic was stopped.”

The disease is more likely to kill you, than if you were infected with smallpox. Mortality rates for untreated plague are well over 50 percent. For smallpox, the mortality rate is about 30 percent.

UCF has new vaccine for plague, however, which can be taken orally: making it more useful in the case of a terrorist plague attack, something scientists, writing for the Lancet last year, is something for which we should be prepared.

UCF professor develops vaccine to protect against black plague bioterror attack
A University of Central Florida researcher may have found a defense against the Black Plague, a disease that wiped out a third of Europe’s population in the Middle Ages and which government agencies perceive as a terrorist threat today.

UCF Professor Henry Daniell and his team have developed a vaccine that early research shows is highly effective against the plague. Findings of his National Institutes of Health and USDA funded research appear in the August edition of Infection and Immunity. The vaccine, which is taken orally or by injection, was given to rats at UCF and the efficacy was evaluated by measuring immunity (antibody) developed in their blood.

All untreated rats died within three days while all orally immunized animals survived this challenge with no traces of the plague in their bodies. The rats were exposed to a heavy dose of Yersinia Pestis bacteria, which causes the plague, at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Maryland. It is one of a few labs in the world authorized to store and work with the highly dangerous agent.

Live long and prosper? We might do neither

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Biotech body snatchers. A genetically “inferior” underclass. Increased terrorist attacks. Futurists will “make it so.“

(Marketing buzzword alert: “Futuring,” a verb, is the act of exploring of the future, according to those who do it. Photo: Futurist Thornton A. May flashes the three-finger “Sustainability Symbol.” More about this strange hand signal shortly. Credit: Dragonpreneur, under a Creative Commons license.)

from Mark:

A new book by a futurist and adviser to three U.S. presidents portrays a horrific near future scenario filled with body snatchers, a booming “neuromarket” for false memory implants, and a self-aware internet that rebels against humanity.

The author of “The Extreme Future,” James Canton, Ph.D. (below), was a student of Alvin Toffler, according to Publisher’s Weekly. He will be speaking at the U.S. Army War College this fall, at a conference aimed not at predicting, but shaping, the future.

“The goal of futuring (exploring the future) is not to predict the future but to improve it,” reads a quote from futurist Edward Cornish, on the U.S. Army War College’s website.

For more about how futurists plan our futures, see these blurbs and broadcasts by Alan Watt.

Bloggers from the military and intel communities are talking about the book. Here is an excerpt from one dot-mil blog:

(Dr.) Canton…includes “Top Ten” lists detailing everything from Energy Trends to Robo-Futures.

In THE EXTREME FUTURE, Dr. James Canton predicts that:

• The high cost of oil will force the West to invent new alternatives to oil and lead to depressed OPEC economies, leading to more terrorism against the West

• Radical life extension will create a two-class global society of those who live over 150 years and of those who cannot afford to

• The Internet will develop an awareness of itself and its own personality and rebel against human controls

• Human cloning will become the ultimate in identity theft

• A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India is more likely then not

• Copy-cat products from Asia—from drugs to auto parts—will perform better then the original branded products they’re based on

• Radical life extension will reshape entire markets and society

• The new global Innovation Economy will deliver widespread prosperity and wealth

Operation: Crimson Sky II

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Bush administration to introduce a devastating livestock virus to the U.S. mainland

Plum Island, the US Department of Agriculture boasted in 1995, “was the only place in the United States where (foot-and-mouth disease) can be studied.”

The USDA called the 840-acre Plum Island, home to its disease research center, “Alcatraz for Animal Disease,” due to the 1.5 miles of choppy water between it and densely populated areas in two states.

Now Homeland Security, which took over Plum Island from the USDA post-9/11, wants to bring foot-and-mouth to the mainland.

The risk of an accidental release of the livestock illness–which would devastate the U.S. food supply–is substantial.

And US military forces are apparently unprepared to contain one, the AP reports (paraphrased by me):

Dangerous Animal Virus on US Mainland

“It was a mess,” said a Kansas senator, speaking of a 2002 contain exercise, Crimson Sky, in which the National Guard ran out of bullets.

Even so, the Kansas senator, Pat Roberts, wants the lab in his state. “It will mean jobs” and spur research and development, he says in the AP piece.

Homeland Security’s National Bio and Agro-Defense Facility will go to Kansas, or Georgia, or North Carolina, or Mississippi. That decision will come as early as next year.

Just designing the place will cost $45 million. It is expect to open in 2015.

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Cigarette lights up B.U. biolab

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Cigarette to blame for fire at site of future biolab – BostonHerald.com
Boston Police and Fire departments responded quickly and in strong numbers to the construction site of the unfinished and highly controversial Boston University National Emerging Infectious Diseases Lab after a report of a fire on the building’s fifth floor at 620 Albany St.

Links: National Emerging Infectious Diseases Laboratories