(As a side note, the DIY movement is certainly not focused only on synthetic biology -- that's just what's grabbing headlines. One project that you might appreciate is Jason Morrison's BioWeatherMap (http://bioweathermap.org/), an open-source effort to catalogue "local microbiospheres" -- in other words, what microorganisms are present in different areas -- and track the movement of different strains of bacteria, fungi, &c throughout the world. One of my hopes for the future is that projects like this will make it easier for us to be aware of the invisible aspects of our environment. Imagine a world where you could view not only the weather forecast, smog report, and pollen report for San Francisco, but also a bacteria and virus report! Now tie it in to GPS and add a sampling system to, say, your cellphone. This presupposes some pretty major advances in miniaturization, sampling and sequencing, &c, but I think the results would be really awesome.)
Anyway: My own work is certainly affected by the principles I outlined above, most obviously scurvy-gurt. (Let's first stipulate that scurvy-gurt will work at all. I don't know if it will.) If someone doesn't want to have scurvy-gurt in their system, preferring instead to get their vitamin C from citrus fruit and whatnot, I should respect that. There are a couple of ways I can do that. The simplest is to make the enzyme-producing bacterium dependent on some particular nutrient not normally found in the human body (but safe for humans to eat) in order to survive. There's already a dentist in Florida who's developed a synthetic-bacteria treatment for tooth decay which uses this principle: he's modified the mouth bacteria which produce enamel-damaging acids so that they no longer produce those acids, then tweaked them further so that they outcompete their acid-producing cousins. However, he's also made them dependent on an additional nutrient, which he puts in a mouthwash which patients who use this technique must then use in order to keep their new bacteria alive. If the patients don't use the mouthwash, the no-acid bacteria die, and their mouths will eventually be colonized by decay-generating bacteria again. It's actually a cute money-making technique for him, in the spirit of "give away the razors but sell the blades" -- he could give away the bacterial treatment for free, then sell the mouthwash in order to make a buck. And, in fact, that's probably what's motivated his decision. :P OTOH, it has the additional side effect of doing exactly what you want -- making sure that the bacteria don't escape the habitat they're placed in.
We could do something similar with scurvy-gurt, though that presents an ethical dilemma for me. I think it would be nothing short of reprehensible to offer a cure to a crippling and often fatal disease but effectively force people to buy a supplement for the rest of their lives. Really, that's back to square one, since in order to distribute this supplement, we'd need the same kind of supply chain we already don't have for distributing vitamin C tablets.
Well. I say that, though the real-world situation is slightly more complicated than I've just depicted it. The WHO report on scurvy that I read (which I can link for you if you want to read it) points out that scurvy is a major problem in refugee camps, despite the fact that aid packages include cereals supplemented with vitamin C. Why? In a word, culture. In the parts of the world that are having problems with scurvy, it's common to boil grains for much of the day -- and vitamin C breaks down after about half an hour of boiling. I'd really like to be able to develop a "fire-and-forget" solution -- and I won't lie, there's a part of me that thinks it's terribly racist for a person to say "I never want any GMOs to come anywhere near me, ever," when a synthetic-biology solution to a brutal, fatal disease could be saving the lives of brown people in remote countries, with the consequence that one day everyone in the world would have this synthetic organism living in their intestines cranking out an extra enzyme.
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Date: 2009-01-27 09:49 am (UTC)Anyway: My own work is certainly affected by the principles I outlined above, most obviously scurvy-gurt. (Let's first stipulate that scurvy-gurt will work at all. I don't know if it will.) If someone doesn't want to have scurvy-gurt in their system, preferring instead to get their vitamin C from citrus fruit and whatnot, I should respect that. There are a couple of ways I can do that. The simplest is to make the enzyme-producing bacterium dependent on some particular nutrient not normally found in the human body (but safe for humans to eat) in order to survive. There's already a dentist in Florida who's developed a synthetic-bacteria treatment for tooth decay which uses this principle: he's modified the mouth bacteria which produce enamel-damaging acids so that they no longer produce those acids, then tweaked them further so that they outcompete their acid-producing cousins. However, he's also made them dependent on an additional nutrient, which he puts in a mouthwash which patients who use this technique must then use in order to keep their new bacteria alive. If the patients don't use the mouthwash, the no-acid bacteria die, and their mouths will eventually be colonized by decay-generating bacteria again. It's actually a cute money-making technique for him, in the spirit of "give away the razors but sell the blades" -- he could give away the bacterial treatment for free, then sell the mouthwash in order to make a buck. And, in fact, that's probably what's motivated his decision. :P OTOH, it has the additional side effect of doing exactly what you want -- making sure that the bacteria don't escape the habitat they're placed in.
We could do something similar with scurvy-gurt, though that presents an ethical dilemma for me. I think it would be nothing short of reprehensible to offer a cure to a crippling and often fatal disease but effectively force people to buy a supplement for the rest of their lives. Really, that's back to square one, since in order to distribute this supplement, we'd need the same kind of supply chain we already don't have for distributing vitamin C tablets.
Well. I say that, though the real-world situation is slightly more complicated than I've just depicted it. The WHO report on scurvy that I read (which I can link for you if you want to read it) points out that scurvy is a major problem in refugee camps, despite the fact that aid packages include cereals supplemented with vitamin C. Why? In a word, culture. In the parts of the world that are having problems with scurvy, it's common to boil grains for much of the day -- and vitamin C breaks down after about half an hour of boiling. I'd really like to be able to develop a "fire-and-forget" solution -- and I won't lie, there's a part of me that thinks it's terribly racist for a person to say "I never want any GMOs to come anywhere near me, ever," when a synthetic-biology solution to a brutal, fatal disease could be saving the lives of brown people in remote countries, with the consequence that one day everyone in the world would have this synthetic organism living in their intestines cranking out an extra enzyme.
Continued again...