The introduction above is full of errors. First, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists (BAS) piece falsely claims that the Watanabe paper describes taking "genes from the deadly human 1918 Spanish Flu and insert[ing] them into the H5N1 avian flu to make a new virus." Rather the paper, with the title "Circulating Avian Influenza Viruses Closely Related to the 1918 Virus Have Pandemic Potential", describes assembling a new virus from genes similar (displaying homology) to the 1918 virus. This may be scary in itself, but it is nothing like what either the BAS or the slashdot piece describe. Second, the slashdot post asserts that "in 2009, a group of Chinese scientists created a viral strain of flu virus that escaped the lab and created a pandemic, killing thousands of people." To my knowledge, this is A) completely wrong, and B) appears to be based on a misunderstanding of the BAS text. The Dando and Novossiolova piece in BAS uses the following verbiage "a team of Chinese scientists [created] a hybrid viral strain between the H5N1 avian influenza virus and the H1N1 human flu virus that triggered a pandemic in 2009 and claimed several thousand lives." The naturally occurring H1N1(2009) strain killed people; the laboratory hybrid did not. Again, creating that hybrid might be scary, but the slashdot post gets the facts completely wrong.

For those who are interested, the official position of the US Government on garage labs can be found in The National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats (PDF), signed by the President. Paraphrasing, the report says 'Garage biology is good and necessary for the future physical and economic security of the United States.' Also, in a shameless plug, here is a link to the book mentioned in the article, Biology is Technology.

Region blocking or other barriers to access are the equivalent of infinite price. I can't tell whether Mr. Newell is mincing words or just doesn't get this. Barriers to access tend to incentivize the very behavior they are supposed to stop, namely black markets, and are therefore often counterproductive. This is true for games, for books, for drugs (legal and otherwise). See Adrian Johns' "Piracy" (http://www.amazon.com/Piracy-Intellectual-Property-Gutenberg-Gates/dp/0226401197/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322280844&sr=8-1).

This story should be filed under sciencefiction.slashdot.org.

Four quick comments:

(1) I don't think that we really know how to engineer biology yet. Progress at the moment is taking the form of adapting (stealing?) past lessons from other engineering disciplines, from when they got started back in the "good old days," and seeing if they are worth a damn in biology. Ideas like (i) standardization, (ii) abstraction, and (iii) decoupling. We've got a lot of work to do. Help. Check out the Registry of Standard Biological Parts as one place to get started.

(2) I'm really freaked out by the idea that we might see a "microsoft equivalent" developing in biological engineering. Imagine if our wheat in the year 2050 is running the equivalent of Windows95. That seems like a "bad idea." Please see comment (4) below.

(3) I'm also concerned by the possible, future mis-application of biological technology. But, I think that the only way to deal with this problem is to (i) expect that it will, at some point in time, happen, and (ii) make sure that there are many, many, many more people who understand what is going on and who can work together to fix the problems. Mitigation of future biological risk feels like solving problems related to the security of an open distributed network. Imagine if I told you that nobody was going to write computer viruses and not to worry about network security. The same thing is going to become true in biology, we just have to make sure that the numbers of folks who are disposed to cause harm are very small relative to the numbers of folks who are empowered and want to be constructive. See this PDF for more thoughts on this topic (apologies if it seems a bit abstract).

(4) We (some folks at MIT and all over) are starting a not-for-profit called the BioBricks Foundation (BBF) to help promote the development of open biotechnology. Here's the current plan (very early). Please help if you want (or by a T-shirt when they are ready)! I'm donating all stock/income that I might receive from working with Codon to the BBF.

Thanks/take it easy!

Drew

It should take on the order of seconds to calculate. You probably need to uncomment the little endian define. The checksum is simply the sum of a range of bytes in the file. For small changes, it is quite feasible to update it manually. Just calculate the difference in byte values that you've changed and update the 4 byte checksum (little-endian) located at 0x421c. Thus, if you change an 'A' to a 'B', just increment the existing checksum at 0x421c by one.