http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126881.400-rise-of-the-garage-genome-hackers.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

this thing has got to be huge. on the one hand, you've got this culture forming of people who tinker with the building blocks of life in their garages to light up pollution or help rice grow. but then you've got people who would (intentionally or not) synthesize the Black Death or some other biobadness. beyond those fairly straightforward possibilities, it gets a little weird. Sterling-esque bugs which eat grass and shit tasty nutritious Human Food could revolutionize things by itself. then you've got the idea that these little artificial bugs start getting out of the lab and into the gene swarm that is life on Planet Earth. only the gods know what would happen then. given that we survive all that, there's the possibility of macroengineering dragons and gryphons, for example, or just a race of strong, swift, beautiful intelligent people who think they're better than everyone else because they are. the more i think about it, the more i suspect this should be filed under "signs of the apocalypse".

Katherine Aull's laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, lacks a few mod cons. "Down here I have a thermocycler I bought on eBay for 59 bucks," she says, pulling out a large, box-shaped device she uses to copy short strands of DNA. "The rest is just home brew," she adds, pointing to a centrifuge made out of a power drill and plastic food container, and a styrofoam incubator warmed with a heating pad normally used in terrariums. In fact, Aull's lab is a closet less than 1 square metre in size in the shared apartment she lives in. Yet amid the piles of clothes she recently concocted vials of an entirely new genetically modified organism. Despite her success, Aull was edged out of first place in the competition by Vijaykumar Meli, a graduate student at the National Centre for Plant Genome Research in New Delhi, India, who designed bacteria that could help rice plants process nitrogen more efficiently, reducing fertiliser use.

The competition is part of a do-it-yourself movement that hopes to spark a revolution in biotechnology. It is based on the emerging field of synthetic biology, which uses genes and other cell components as the building blocks for new organisms or devices. The movement is trying to open up this field to anyone with a passion for tweaking DNA in their spare time - from biologists to software engineers to people who just like it as a hobby. The hope is that encouraging a wider mix of people to take part could lead to advances that would not happen otherwise, just as tinkering by the Homebrew Computer Club hackers of the 1970s spawned the first personal computers.

"Biology is becoming less of a science and more of a technology," says Mackenzie Cowell, co-founder of the group DIYbio, which aims to be an "Institution for the Amateur", providing scientists with resources akin to those found in academia or industry. "There will be more opportunity for people who didn't spend up to seven years getting a PhD in the field," he says.

http://c-realmpodcast.podomatic.com/entry/474108

this episode of the C-Realm features a lengthy interview with Dennis M. Bushnell, chief scientist at NASA's Langley Research Center. he talks about quite a bit: how climate change models have heretofore been entirely too conservative, how there are many alternative energy sources which haven't been considered (he mentions algae and a different kind of geothermal), and what he sees as an ongoing transformation of society by tele-work, tele-eduction, and tele-everything. but perhaps the most interesting part was his discussion about the consideration of the Lifeboat Foundation's other concerns for the immediate future:

The purpose of the Lifeboat Foundation is to try to anticipate the potential existential risks to humans going forward as we prosecute what is essentially something that we've never done and seen before which is a simultaneous IT, Bio, Nano, Quantum Energetics, double-exponential tech revolution. All of these tech revolutions are frontiers of the small but feed off one another synergistically and they're all changing things in massive ways. Currently, we have, since 1959, seen computer speeds increase 10 million times. We are currently at about a petaflop. The human brain speed is 20 petaflops. We will be at human brain speed by 2012. So the machines will be as smart as human brains.

Beyond that, as we leave silicon and go on to Bio, Optical, Quantum, Nano, and Molecular computing, we are looking at an additional speed increase beyond human brain speed of somewhere between 10 to the seventh and 10 to the 11th power by 2030 to 2040. That's some massive, massive, machine capability. So the speed will be there to produce an intelligence beyond human. Well, what about the software? The software comes from either the current self computing algorithms and (AGI) or are from biomimetics.

Then there is 'emergence'. As far as we can tell, there is no general intelligence wiring in the human brain. Each piece of our intelligence evolved in the usual billion year evolutionary context over which we developed as today's humans to handle specific problems within that evolutionary context, almost all of which was in the hunter-gatherer realm. Any general intelligence that we have is wholly emergent - i.e. make something complex enough and it wakes up.

So between emergence, biomimetics, and self computing, people are betting that by 2025 to 2030, we will begin to approach or exceed human level machine intelligence. If this happens it may become an existential threat - one of the existential threats that are being looked at by the Lifeboat people. Because once the machines get smarter than us, they can do things that could take us down even inadvertently. You don't even have to postulate an evil machine to do this. And so how do you work this going forward to make sure that in the brain stem of the machines, in the lizard part of the brain, that they understand, and it's built into them from the initial stages, not to harm humans in any way shape or form? So we have to define what "harm" is...

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s999733.htm

its the biotech GPL.

Scientists anywhere in the world, including developing nations, should have free access to the scientific tools of modern biology and genetics, says an Australian geneticist.

[...]

"The open source revolution in information technology has proven itself rock solid as one of the greatest innovations in the history of creativity. If you decentralise the group of tool creators and make sure people are bound to a public good ethos, it works and makes money for people," he said.

"With Linux and all the open source innovations, you're not seeing the death of Microsoft, you're seeing Microsoft work harder to be a better company so that it can stay afloat."

The scientific tools under BIOS would be licensed under a similar agreement as the general public licence of the Linux computing community, Jefferson said.

"That licence will say you will agree to share improvements in the core technology. You can make your own applications as proprietary as you want; you can patent your invention. But the tools to do that must be a public good."

He said the current domination of biotechnology innovation by "large monolithic corporations with high capital" was not serving the public at large, including developing nations, and had led to a "legitimate unease by the public about biotech".

"I don't think that multinationals are necessarily evil, but I do think they have to be complemented by alternative technologies," he said.

"Biotechnology, the way it is right now, is needed in the developing world like a screen door on a submarine," said Jefferson. "What it really needs is what good science can do in biology, in biotechnology. And that means a different agenda and a different group of innovators.