Biopunk Post 2: Electric Boogaloo

In my last Biopunk post I covered the risks aspect of bio-hacking loosely, and I was not very concerned about the possible positive repercussions of bio-hacking. So I will cover that in this post. What good is bio-hacking anyway?

Well, first you have to look at the problems that they are attempting to confront. People are flawed organisms. We have diseases, and eventually we all die. This isn’t a novel concept, but it is important to the mission of bio-hackers. They want to help eliminate diseases that we have no cure for, and as a result help us avoid an early death. Aging is effectively the decay of DNA, so stopping aging would require the ability to stop the decay. I don’t want to be immortal, but I would like to live longer than a century or two. Perhaps a slowing of the decay could be presented through bio-hacking.

That’s not the most important or relevant aspect of bio-hacking though. They are much more likely to find a method that would help cure a disease. If we understand where the genetic material is that controls certain diseases we could fix them. This would be introduced slowly and carefully, and perhaps could prevent the problems that are locked within our genetic code. Tackling issues like cancer is a bit different. Right now there is no absolute cure for cancer, only treatments that have been successfully implemented. Radiation therapy and chemotherapy are two common methods. They are taxing on the body and mind. People lose their hair. Often they have to have surgery removing large sections of tissue. It’s a gruesome affair that plays havoc on the body. If a person were able to receive a series of injections or treatments that would attack cancer at the genetic level, these sad realities could be avoided.

We are currently wary of having average people able to play around with genetics. It’s indeed scary. I don’t want somebody introducing an organism by accident that destroys or partially destroys an ecosystem. If properly looked after though, having more people involved could make treatments and cures for diseases much more elegant and successful than the methods of the past. 

Future Guessing!

Since we read a book about what the future was supposed to be like, I figured that I would try my hand at it for this post. I’ll make a few guesses about what will happen with technology over the next forty to fifty years. In all likelihood this will turn out quite wrong. I will be happy in being wrong here only so long as I am not wrong about one thing. We will make progress.

Awful pun to enhance the post.

Genetics:

We all know much more about genetics than our grandparents do. If you take a high school biology course you should have some introduction into the structure of DNA. Maybe you even learned about some processes that DNA is involved in. Through more extensive analysis over the years we have been able to determine that certain problems are found on individual chromosomes. The more accurately we pinpoint genetic problems the more likely we’ll be able to solve them. Imagine being able to eliminate problems from the vain such as color-blindness or baldness to the more severe problems of spinal muscular atrophy or muscular dystrophy. Plastic surgery could become gene therapy.

Space:

I love space, and I desperately hope that within my lifetime commercial and affordable space flights will be available to us. I would love to go to Mars, and then a couple of years later return. I don’t think we’ll get much further than that in my lifetime though. We have only just reached an area beyond our solar system with Voyager 1. In a few short years the power will be completely shut off and it will be dead weight in space. For those of you wondering it reached beyond the solar system this year and has been headed in that direction since 1977. A manned flight that far out would not be a good idea with current technologies. Our bodies are made to stay here on Earth or in roughly 1 g of gravitational pull. Our senses get thrown off when we go into space. Muscles atrophy, and the body generally behaves chaotically. We would need spaceships that give us 1 g to keep us from these problems. I believe this will be the next step after commercial flights in space. Making vehicles more suitable for transport while increasing safety is the natural progression.

This is a SpaceX Merlin Engine. 

Cities:

Methods of transport will change. People won’t use as many full size cars, and eventually cars will become a much smaller percent of the commuting population. People will choose trains, bicycles, and small electric vehicles much more. This will hopefully bring down the current massive amounts of pollution that are occurring in all of the world’s major cities. Having a system of transport underground is a good way to reduce the throes of winter that affect people from walking to work. We may end up building layers on top of each other, causing a landscape that would be rather more expensive. Maintaining the structures would be a difficult task, so I think if this were to happen it would be on a smaller scale. Areas between buildings may get the covering treatment before streets do.

Science has a long way to go in the next century, and it has a good chance of causing our species to make some great leaps. I could be totally off on this whole thing though. Perhaps we don’t send people into space. Perhaps our cities get worse. Perhaps we prevent genetic research for fear that we are tampering with the work of God. Surely that would be much more depressing than a few accidental deaths on the way to a much improved society. Obviously nobody wants to glorify the mishaps, but avoiding progress altogether would be a much greater shame. Hopefully fifty years from now I will read this with a satisfied grin as I sip orange juice on a spaceship. 

Bio-hacking in the Home

I don’t know exactly how safe the idea of Bio-hacking is. By the looks of it, neither does the press. It would be nice to have a formal study done by regular qualified scientists to make sure that nothing from the bio-hacking community would warrant a ban.

I rather like the idea of bio-hacking. People are able to purchase equipment that is no longer going to be of use to the original lab for pennies on the dollar, and they make a few discoveries. It’s brilliant actually. I think that putting a much larger work force to the task of genetics could provide a lot of insight into the field. We may still need regulations though. Most formal professions have an official code of ethics, and it would be a good idea to have bio-hackers adhere to a set of statements preventing any damage from their work.

If there was a significant chance that a bio-hacker could accidentally produce a “super-bug” that would be resistant to the current medical treatment methods I would not want the process to continue. It is a risk that nobody needs to take. There is clearly a desire from many people to continue in this field, but they don’t wish to obtain formal degrees. Maybe too much of the information is tangential, and they feel alienated from their passion in a classroom environment. It doesn't matter, because they are already practicing this sort of thing. If it turns out to be safe it could provide a great middle class job that could be beneficial to biology in much the same way that moderately trained people were beneficial to the computer industry in the last century. Sure, many of the designers and people in charge were formally trained, but a lot of them weren't  They were able to provide for the industry without ever gaining a college degree. It remains to be seen if any enormous leaps in technology will be made because of the bio-hackers, but it is certainly worth keeping an eye on. They could make medical tests much cheaper, and advance our understanding of human genetics greatly over the next century.