USAID

Here's a great idea: Start a new research funding program that focuses on solving the dire problems of hunger, lack of clean water, disease, poverty, etc. If researchers in academia and industry focused on these problems -- and actually had funding to work on them -- we might actually make some progress. This is exactly what USAID wants to do. See here. It is only $100M (compared to DARPA's $5B for example), but it is a wonderful beginning and could have huge impact!

Green explosives, again

Rob Carlson and Daniel Grushkin weigh in on synthetic biology for manufacturing explosives. I still can't believe that someone would think of making explosives by tweaking the metabolic pathways of bacteria or yeast. The idea satisfies a lot of constraints: Synthetic biology, check. Potentially useful for the military, check. Not a bioweapon, sort of check. Anyway, it will be interesting to see where this thread goes.

Diagnosis and Moderation

I have been thinking about my favorite potential application of synthetic biology lately: diagnosis. I am inspired by the immune system, which can diagnose almost any disease you have already had within hours and develop an entirely new diagnoser for a novel disease within days.

Diagnosis is incredibly important. And it must be done very inexpensively and quickly. For now PCR and ELISA type assays are just too expensive and so we are more or less in the dark about the dynamics of infectious diseases. Here is a challenge: build a diagnostic kit that is easy for anyone to use that costs 10 cents and that can tell you which variety of TB your patient has: TB, MDR TB, XDR TB, or the frightening TDR TB. At this price, you can screen everyone in a community and apply the correct treatment to the people who need it, slowing the spread and development of drug resistant strains. What's the cheapest way to deploy ultrasensitive detectors? Put all the computation into a self-replicating machine: a cell. I think that's the way to go.

In looking into who is on the front lines of research into diagnosis and who might fund my crazy ideas, I realized that military doctors and researchers are doing a fair amount of this work. The ARO and ONR fund work here in addition to the NIH and in particular NAID. Most of this work is not on synthetic biology, it is on ultra-sensitive or ultra cheap ELISAs for example. On the other hand, some of the work on recreating 1918 flu, which is arguably synthetic, was funded by the army and the NIH. In any case, I really can't complain about anyone wanting to fund bio-defense related research especially on diagnostics. Such work really could save the world. I'll still go to NAID and the Gates foundation first, however.

As Rob Carlson has pointed out to me in the many recent conversations he and I have been having about military funding of biotechnology, and as he described in his book, the issues are subtle. A peacenik like me is going to be suspicious about any military involvement in anything, but I certainly don't want to stand in the way of important work that must be done to protect ourselves from one of our greatest threats: emerging infections diseases.

Detecting and responding?

Just a bit of cognitive dissonance for you. The US signed the BWC which, among other things,

... bans the development, production, stockpiling, acquisition and retention of microbial or other biological agents or toxins, in types and in quantities that have no justification for prophylactic, protective or other peaceful purposes.

On the other hand, the Office of Navel Research in their Synthetic Biology Program that

Living organisms may be modified using synthetic biology to manufacture materials, create stealthy and distributed ‘sentinels’ that detect and respond to threats...

I guess responding to threats is "protective" - but that sure sounds close to the edge to me.

Ignorance, not righteousness

Some guy named Howard posted on The last word on nothing that he was "dismayed by academics who criticize the military without understanding how they think. It's ignorance, not righteousness". Here's my response.

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Erika's article only states that I spent a few hours working on a problem without questioning it. The fact some academic researchers are happy to solve whatever problems you throw at them without really questioning, and the sense that I was becoming one of them, is what disturbed me.

Issue #1: People seem to be saying: "If we are going to make bombs, we might as well make them greener." Or: "If we are going to make bombs, we might as well make them hard to put back together after they explode."

Not a small number of academics make this argument. It only works, though, if you agree with the "If we are going to make bombs" part -- which I don't. I emphatically believe that we spend way too much time and effort on weapons in this country and have decided I want no part of it. I don't want to make them. I don't want to enable others to make them by answering the question "Could you do X?".

Issue #2: The way one answers the question "could you make X" is by building a prototype. Here are some questions for you, Howard: Could you build a virus that selectively infects Irish people? Could you make a probiotic that secretes ricin when it senses its host is lactose intolerant? Of course you could ask these questions differently so you don't sound like you want weapons. Can you make a bacterium that "enables on-demand production of new and high-value materials, devices and capabilities" and then create a $30M program to get academics to explore it. The academics will come rushing in because that sounds so cool. And they will say things like "my research is out in the open" and "the US doesn't work on bio-weapons" and "nothing I work on could ever be useful".

Then, as the quarterly meetings with military researchers go on for the next 5-10 years, ideas are thrown around, and newer capabilities, newer questions, and newer possibilities for how bad guys can do bad things are generated. DOD thinkers think about DOD things. Its what they do. Two generations of graduate students grow up thinking about defense capabilities for synthetic biology. Academics make prototypes of all of these ideas (DARPA wants results and demos -- a good chunk of that $30M will go to gene synthesis) as proof of principle, and the whole effort becomes that much more sophisticated. Eventually we get deployable capabilities that go into production because somebody realizes they've got something that can create "strategic surprise" .

Think that sounds crazy? This process is how the question "can you make a remote control drone that 'delivers payloads' to 'waypoints'" gave rise to remote control airplanes flying around college campuses, communicating via wireless, and landing with pinpoint precision in central campus. Lots of fun! But those graduate students went on to work for defense contractors, research led to development, and now we get nasty predator drones pissing off everybody. Wait until you see the basketball-sized UAVs that can fly inside buildings (almost sure to show up in the next war). We will even sell these things to other countries. Its big business.

But, yes Howard, I am ignorant. I don't understand how military people think. And I can't think like them. I do very clearly understand what the product of military research is, though. New capabilities to make war. Why would I want to be a part of that?

Infrastructure and Security

The Senate just passed a $662B defense spending bill, and the bill is on to the House. The spending is intended to make us "more secure". Probably a good $80B of that will be on defense research again. Meanwhile, some estimate that a $30B investment per year on basic infrastructure worldwide could cut hunger in half by 2015. Which is worse? A world in which a billion children live without basic services (like clean water) or a world in which the US is not making green weapons?

Paranoid Hippie?

A recent article appearing in Nature News describes the debate over funding from DARPA for synthetic biology (a follow up article appeared at The Last Word on Nothing). I am even quoted in it in a way that reasonably accurately describes my position. This is pretty new to me. The last time I was quoted in the scientific press, all they took from me was "Man, ants are cool".

In the article, my position on DARPA funding for synthetic biology is shown in contrast to how others in my community feel. In paritcular, Andy Ellington is quoted in the Nature News article as saying

       the idea that scientists should not work with
       defence funding relies on a "1960s paranoid
       view of the military".

My friends are now calling me a hippie - which is fine (I like hippies), although I think I actually have a realistic and not paranoid view of the military.

US R&D Funding in 2011,
from R&D Magazine. 

To wit, beyond the complex and difficult to predict risks of combining the military with synthetic biology, my biggest objection to military R&D funding is that its main purpose seems to be to perpetuate the military industrial complex. We feed it with new ideas, which creates new problems, requiring more new ideas, and so on. In 2011 the US spent about $145B on R&D with $80B going to defense research and $3B of that going to DARPA. This money gets spent developing new weapons. A lot of defense R&D money goes to defense contractors, but a fairly large chunk goes to academic researchers. Academics brought you all sorts of the ideas you will find in, for example, the predator drone: autonomous flight, teleoperation, composites, etc. Now we are working on robotic dogs, and autonomous trucks. What are we going to with those in Afghanistan?

What happens to the weapon systems the US develops? Two things. First, our military tries them out in various wars. The US has been involved in a war somewhere in the world every single year since WWII, and each one is a technological tour de force (even though we don't ever seem to win). Second, US defense contractors sell the weapons to other countries for them to try out in their wars. War is big business, and it keeps a lot of people in the US employed; it makes a lot of people rich. More efficiency and better technology in war is our gift to the world.

In the meantime, our own infrastructure is decaying. Roads, levees, the railway system, public education, even the Internet are falling apart. And the planet is heating up, the oceans are dying, people are starving to death, and we are sitting ducks when it comes to emerging infectious diseases and monocrop failures. How much research do we do on fixing those problems? Not a heck of a lot. The department of energy is currently arguing over the budget for the Advanced Research Projects Agency - Energy (ARPA-E), which is currently $180M and likely falling. Our world is falling apart, and we are trying to figure out environmentally friendly ways to make explosives.

So my question is this: As a country, how do we want to spend our expendable income? How about solving some of our planet's most vexing problems? Imagine the impact of getting us and the rest of the world off of fossil fuels? I would feel a lot better about the future if we were all working on that. Even better, selling whatever that technology turns out to be to other countries might have a bigger impact on "defense" than anything else we do.

So am I a paranoid hippie? Or is the US completely off-balance in how it spends its money? I am making the choice not to be a part of the military industrial complex. It probably won't change anything, but I'll feel better about my life's work. And if we could invent an environmental industrial complex, or a global-health industrial complex, I would be first in line.