That's a terrifying read. See DefCon talk:
DEF CON 25 - John Sotos - Genetic Diseases to Guide Digital Hacks of the Human Genome (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKQDSgBHPfY)
That was absolutely horrific.
The worst part was this person calling for a "Apollo-level funded" arms race on developing the most horrific bioweapons possible.
If you really care about his problem you should call for a ban on related research and keep yourself silent. The further we delay the development of such technology, the better.
Some people argue it's inevitable; Well it's not.
For almost 100 years, despite their huge potential in war, chemical and biological weapons have seen almost zero development because of the strict enforcement of the Geneva convention. Let's keep it that way.
> For almost 100 years, despite their huge potential in war, chemical and biological weapons have seen almost zero development because of the strict enforcement of the Geneva convention.
So, according to Wikipedia America continued its biological and chemical weapons programs despite signing the Genevea Protocol until Richard Nixon supposedly ended bioweapons in 1969. Additionally, the Federation of American Scientists, founded by members of the Manhattan Project, allege that the US in continuing to illegally develop and research biological weapons in the present day. Of course, the US has continued to practice torture and a variety of human rights abuses in violation of both the US constitution and international law for the past three presidential administrations. The claim that bioweapons are not being actively developed is silly.
I don't think we can confidently say that chemical and biological weapons have seen almost zero development in the last 100 years. We can say as far as we know that's the case, but we also don't have a very compelling reason for knowing.
The development of these types of weapons is going to be highly secretive, and not just because of the Geneva convention. Absolutely nothing has gone on in the world in the last 100 years that might tempt the deployment of advanced chemical or biological weapons on any sort of scale. Naturally we haven't seen them used.
I also don't see how burying our head in the sand is going to help on this one. At least compared to nuclear weapons, projects on these weapons could be useful for defensive purposes. Everybody is working more or less within the same confines and rules, and I wouldn't be surprised if relatively similar developments were the result. Even if they aren't, the characterization of these weapons can be used to inform and guide the response plans to try to minimize damage in the case of an attack.
I have no doubt that biological weapons have been developed to some degree, somewhere, in a well-funded government lab, in complete secrecy. But that is not a problem. This secrecy is what saves us from a race to the bottom. Some government will develop a limited capability of biological warfare. They probably already have. With no information about what their adversaries are doing, they will simply stop. As far as they know, they have developed a state-of-the art biological weapon system, and they are probably correct.
One of the reasons that the nuclear arms race happened, was the "openness" of the competition. You can't hide a nuclear explosion. Your adversary knows how sophisticated you are, and they now have to push 1 step further.
Biological warfare doesn't have to be like this. Be sure that some Darpa or DoD funded secret project is working on countermeasures, but there's another interesting thing:
You can stop biological attacks by quarantine. It's very simple, very effective, and doesn't require developing Armageddon-tier weapons in the process. Another issue that's purposefully isn't discussed in the video is how effective the delivery of these weapons are. Simply put, not very. Viruses, the main attack vector, change in every iteration. There's no guarantee you can infect that many people with an intact version of your weapon. Sooner than later, you genocidal weapon will stop being so selective, because it's evolving for it's own benefit, not yours.
And finally, if you really are concerned about this issue, as you should, the right way to fight against it is to find a way to stop the infection and proliferation, to find ways to stop these attacks without accelerating weapons development.
There are ways to fight these weapons without building them, and you can definitely do better than starting a public campaign that asks people to develop horrific bioweapons just so we can find a way to stop them later on, maybe.
I don't think it's fair to say that development programs will just stop after a reasonable advancement on the last known state of the art.
If you (a nation) are working on this, it's fair to assume your peers are as well. If you have improved on the state of the art, it's safe to assume your peers are in a similar position or will soon be.
By making advancements, all you are doing is proving that other nations with a similar level of technical sophistication can do the same. Even if you make strong assumptions that you are indeed the best, you can't assume other nations will never reach where you are now. Maybe you have 5 years on them, because you are clearly superior? Or maybe you take a more conservative stance and assume you're behind - just in case.
Furthermore, I don't think quarantine would be an effective response to an intentional biological attack. Even just quarantining say, New York City, would be a nearly impossible task. And since this is an attack, why wouldn't all major cities be targeted? There would be no way to contain it physically.
Even if you think pure quarantine is the way to go, there is a lot of useful information that can only be gained by doing the weaponization research. What sort of incubation times could show up? How virulent, etc. Knowing these sorts of things would really improve the quarantine situation. There also isn't really a good way to know without doing the research. It doesn't mean it has to be packaged into a weapon, but the hard part is all done.
Do you see any satellites with hundreds of nuclear warheads? Cloned farm animals? Nuclear-fueled cruise missiles? How about new chemical weapons deployed in battlefield? Or maybe altered embryos implanted in women? These things don't happen because we banned them. There was conscious effort to make it very difficult to achieve. Sure, it will always be possible, but it will require a capital of billions. If you make the government pay the upfront costs then literally anyone and everyone will be able to make their own debilitating, worse-than-death bioweapon, just like they write viruses today or even worse, how they wrote viruses 10-15 years ago. The point is to make it hard or impossible. It's not going to happen anyway. Stop believing the self-fulfilling prophecies of the form "it's going to happen anyway so we need to rush and make it happen now". The assumption is wrong. You don't know what kind of technology will be available in 15-20 years. If you delay it enough, better ways of tackling the problem will become available.
This article fails to mention any privacy risks to the volunteers.
GWAS have proven to be, at best, of little value. In fact, due to the unfortunate way that many researchers chase p-values, these analyses often result in misdirection.
What happens? Genome privacy is exchanged for weak science.
> This article fails to mention any privacy risks to the volunteers.
What privacy risk, exactly? Who has been harmed? 23andMe has been in operation since ~2007 and between them and Ancestry.com and the UKBB and the Japanese BB and others, there must be somewhere on the order of 10 million+ genomes cumulatively. UKBB alone has been the basis for what must be at least hundreds of papers at this point by thousands of researchers or groups. Even further: there are literally thousands of genomes available publicly online from groups like PGP for a decade now, which you can go and download right now, including mine. Is all this not enough? When should we expect to finally see these risks materialize?
> GWAS have proven to be, at best, of little value. In fact, due to the unfortunate way that many researchers chase p-values, these analyses often result in misdirection.
That is completely wrong. GWASes have an excellent replication record, and were founded on the basis of stringent p-values precisely because of how earlier candidate-gene studies were garbage due to researchers chasing p-values.
People will eventually be identified individually, as inevitably as the people in the AOL search leak years ago. Then they -- and their blood relatives -- will be associated with negative health traits.
And then, companies will discriminate -- in hiring, in insurance... anywhere they can. Because it will be financially advantageous to individual companies even though it is detrimental to society as a whole. Because companies are amoral organisms and it is folly to expect them to behave otherwise.
It's always important to put this in perspective with the human History.
There is no place on earth that lived in peace for ever. Not even for a very long time actually.
Any country goes back to times were it's at war on it's own territory, or were it's under a dictatorship.
It will be true again for France, the US, Canada, Spain, any country.
We will go back there, it's an absolute certainty.
Maybe not (hopefully not), in our lifetime.
But ignoring this is not only wearing blinders, it's a recipe for making it worse.
Things like AI, facebook, the NSA intercepting anything, image recognition, cameras in every streets, tracking devices in every pockets and... DNA databases are going to be weaponized against the population.
Even if you don't believe in this (which is always strange to me, but for the sake of the argument, I'll have to acceptit), at least consider that it will make any neutral entity in power more likely to become malevolent by giving it the opportunity to access abusable huge power.
Hence, if we want to survive and evolve as a specie, we need to deal with those tools carefully, as they are very potent, and this means what they can do for us is as great as what it can do against us.
This is a super interesting discussion. Both sides make good points. I wonder if in the future cost and technology of sequencing will evolve so much that somebody will start harvesting as much data as possible from places like metro, train stations, malls and so on. This would make it inevitable that your DNA ends up in these databases and you just have to accept it. Just like currently one kind of has to accept that thanks to facial recognition getting even better and cameras everywhere one can be tracked even without any electronic devices.
You don't have to accept it. You can protest. You can explain. You can vote. You can paie for service respecting you. You can educate. Maybe there are others things to do.
There is always a choice. Most people saying there is none are just choosing one cost against another and say it's not a choice. Not blaming, i do the same.
But we could avoid the disasters, living by thinking about the society ou simple everyday actions produce.
However it's not only very hard to do, but most people are not interested in doing so. Or even to consider the question of society, or how to live ones live.
Living on auto pilot is one of humanity's biggest problem. It helped us a lot when we were in survival mode, but now that our own construct is the only real danger to our existence, it really is an hindrance.
If something is possible and you can't prevent it from happening then accepting it seems like the best option. You're arguing that you can prevent it from happening by regulation and education. I don't think it works if you apply a security mindset. Mallories don't care about rules. 3 letter agencies would be just one of examples.
Yes, you can lower the probability of exploitation happening, but you have to keep in mind that it is possible. Kind of like leaving your car open - it's quite unlikely that somebody will go and pull the handle checking if it's closed, but it's possible and you're probably better off taking that into account.
(now that I realized you are also parent of my original reply I'm a bit confused, I mean your two replies are kinda responding to each other)
See the history of credit reporting in the US for a counterpoint (Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Fair Credit Reporting Act, etc.).
I expect that companies won't be able to help themselves and that they will eventually spasm in abuse of ever-more-accessible personal data so egregious and evil that people will take notice.
If you can’t prevent it is a higher standard than most make it out to be. For most it’s “can’t prevent it without discomforting myself,” which is no standard at all.
I guess the value of the data depends on who measures its worth. Replicated p-values lead to multiple publications, which are valuable to academics. But these results can still cause misdirection. What is a low p-value worth if it doesn't lead anywhere?
> These data can be used to identify their source. This will become easier as more data becomes available.
Yes, so? (The face paper you link isn't a good example of this anyway, since it's so questionable and re-identification already works much better than that based on stuff like haplotypes.) That's not a real risk, not compared to, you know unlocking the secrets of human genetics. And it has little to do with the research databases: DNA is inherently as far away as it is possible to get from being anonymous, once it started becoming cheap, the loss of genetic privacy was inevitable no matter how it was handled. And it's not that big a deal. We will be much better off for it.
> Replicated p-values lead to multiple publications, which are valuable to academics.
This is very different from what you were just claiming.
Unfortunately, GWAS data is unlikely to unlock the secrets of human genetics. We have been in the "post-GWAS era" of genetics for at least a few years now.
> And it's not that big a deal. We will be much better off for it.
I hope you are right! However, I have doubts. Also, just because sensitive information can be compromised doesn't mean that it should be offered freely.
> GWAS have proven to be, at best, of little value. In fact, due to the unfortunate way that many researchers chase p-values, these analyses often result in misdirection.
I would certainly challenge that, its just that some people considered GWAS as the solution for everything which it clearly isn't, especially because rare mutations where underestimated (and cannot be discriminated in GWAS) and because GWAS was never able to detect the causing variant, just associated/linked genomic loci. And last but not least, the regulatory genome is turning out more and more complex (with interacting variants leading to complexities of O(x^n)) and we do not know yet how it will all be understood, its just that GWAS is one of the better tools we have.
Not be the case for everybody, but I'm 100% fine with having my genomic data public, especially in the context of research. That's not to say there aren't potential societal contexts where it would be totally awful (e.g. 1930s Germany) but I can't imagine any risk to myself.
But thats not the point. The question is whether you can make data public that, while it belongs to you, also belongs (partially) to other people (your siblings, parents, unborn children ...) who might not want to have their genetic data public. Sure, there is may be no risk to you and a data repository like the one described contains an enourmous value for society in the form of biomedical data but that does not mean you have to give it to everyone without knowing their intention. Especially if they end up knowing something about you that you don't.
Openly sharing your genetic information makes both you AND your relatives more vulnerable, with vulnerability decreasing as relatedness decreases. It also reveals potentially sensitive information about family traits.
That's one (rather selfish) way of thinking about it. Another way of thinking about it is that you (and everybody else) is better off if more genomic data is available for research. It's worth remembering that genomicists like George Church and Craig Venter have made their genomes publically available for all to access.
I think i have the right to do anything i want with my genome, including making it public. It's my genome ffs, it's me. If i don't have this right with my genome then I don't have any rights at all.
Except it really isn't entirely your own genome. You share most of it with your relatives, and to lesser extents, the rest of us and all other beings. Since it's a shared resource, they should have a say.
Can you follow the argument if we flip it around? Your right to do anything you want should include not making it public. Others publishing "theirs" would mean publishing yours, whether you want it or not.
Over 99.9% of the genome is identical to every human being. And that genome is made public (the reference genome) and updated regularly as we understand more about the DNA.
Even identical twins don't have the same DNA. So it's not like I make public another person's DNA.
Sorry but no, just because something is yours it does not mean you can do with it whatever you want (I understand that this is a totally non-libertarian view). If you find uranium on your plot of land, you also cannot sell it to whoever you want. And the human genome is similarly seen as something protected, just look at how CRISPR experiments on human embryos are highly controversial.
Well, I feel sorry for your descendants who won't get hired when it's discovered that they might have inherited BRCA1 and Huntington's Disease from you.
I lead the software team in the Neale lab that develops Hail, the software that enabled this analysis: https://hail.is. If you're excited about about applying CS and engineering to enable scientific discovery of massive, fast-growing biological data, get in touch. We just got a bump in funding and we're hiring a number of roles: distributed system database internals, compilers, machine learning, scientific data viz, deployment and operations, and web applications. See our Who's Hiring post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288145
This is off topic outside the Who Is Hiring threads. Discussions here are supposed to gratify intellectual curiosity. It sounds like you're in a position to say a lot of interesting things about this topic! but a job ad isn't interesting.
