Open scientific research is a foundation of our age, but do you think that we may be coming to a time where it may become an existential threat to humanity?
Openly published research makes science advance at a wonderful rate. In my experience scientists and researchers support open research in a nearly dogmatic fashion. Personally I am generally for it. However here is my concern.
I believe that humanity is in a terrible race. One of the competitors is the advancement of science, which of course can sometimes be used in a dangerous ways. The other competitor is our society moving towards murder and war becoming obsolete. The science is obvious and needs no examples. Societies move towards the sanctity of life is shown here.
"Violence has been in decline over long stretches of time", says Harvard professor Steven Pinker, "and we may be living in the most peaceful time in our species' existence."
Now to get to my point. In the past scientific advancement has created some really scary things. Atomic weapons, bio and chemical warefare, etc. However, those weapons took a lot of people and capital to produce, and had relatively un-scalable effects. Now with open research on advancements like CRISPR, we are nearing a time where in the near future a smart high school biology student with a few thousand dollars and an internet connection will be able to create self-replicating custom viruses that could kill millions. The asymmetric threat has never been greater.
Do you agree with my assessment and concerns?
If so, do you believe that there should be limits on publication of research in certain areas?
Edit: I should have said CRISPR and gene drives. Here is a TED talk on how gene drives can change and entire species, forever.
I have never seen medical research where the research was the primary bottleneck to random civilian development. I have rarely seen any research where the research itself was the primary bottleneck.
People can make some pretty destructive shit without needing to read and understand research papers. The thing that stops people, almost every time, (is actually 2 related things). 1) You aren't going to understand research papers without a SIGNIFICANT background in the topic. You just aren't. 2) You aren't going to have the physical ability, let alone equipment, to create anything dangerous. Civvies fuck up phone bombs all the time, you think they're going to be able to manipulate DNA? Not even the slightest chance.
This is fear-mongering of the worst order, and against the incredible benefits of open research (which is one of the last real bastions against corporate dominance) it is quite frankly irresponsible.
So much progress comes from serendipity. Someone will publish something that triggers a connection in another researcher's head. Remove this, and you remove a lot of life saving progress. You are not going wipe out black budget research by eliminating research for everyone else.
It’s not the researchers I’m concerned with here, it’s the open publication of the results in the bio arena specifically. It’s some Islamsist, white supremicist, or general misanthrope downloading the genetic sequence for the 1918 influenza virus, and playing with it, maybe targeting people with specific traits, and releasing it into the wild.
Or again, some ethno-supremicist sterilizing a portion of humans with a gene drive attack using open research they found in a journal or online.
Edit: the basic question is, would you allow everyone to have the plans to a nuke, if they cost $10,000 to build and could be built by one high school grad in their garage?
Edit2: I think a somewhat decent parallel are gun laws. Strict gun laws don’t eliminate the possibility of gun deaths, but research shows that they certainly reduce them. Wouldn’t reducing the exposure of the biological equivalent of guns be something worth studying?
You could try censor that information but you would inevitably fail unless you had reign upon the whole internet.
I would say the same could be said of gun laws, or any laws about anything.
You cant compare tangible objects like 'guns' to something intangible like 'information'.
Well here is why I did that. In my future scenario, genetic code for smallpox and 1918 flu are available for download. And the ability to produce them are relatively easy through automated CRISPR techniques. To me, that is close to a gun.
I believe you missed my point, gun control is physically restricting who has access to guns. Information control is censorship. Two different concepts.
Fair enough. I might argue that the two concepts are not that different, but I certainly see your point.
Edit: spelling
On gene drives specifically, I disagree that it's as much of a danger as some people think, mainly for reasons like those mentioned in the TED talk:
You are correct, I probably should not have included gene drives in this whole spiel.
Most of the information required for causing danger with biotechnology is already available without open publication being widespread. I used to run a small biohack lab, and all the equipment was easy to acquire from eBay or other sources. Where you get in trouble is chemical materials and even basic bio building blocks because they either strongly regulated who can buy them or you can access them only if you are working in an established research institute. And they could be costly. So one thing is to read about a specific process easily and an entirely different level to implement them. And the reproducibility is very low in most cases even if you have access to everything. It will undoubtedly get better and easier over time, but my point is that we have good enough systems in place to prevent severe, human extinction level damages even if we publish everything for free online.
I agree with you that there are more barriers to this sort of work than knowledge. (I mean, even if someone managed to create a deadly virus, they'd have to have a professional set up to avoid contamination or getting ill themselves, right...? This isn't backyard shed science.)
Totally offtopic, but a small biohack lab sounds really cool! I've read a few articles about them, and I'd love to one day find a place to experiment with lab techniques I didn't get to explore when doing my undergrad.
Depending on where you live there is one probably around you. Hackerspaces, fablabs usually host it nowadays.
Yes, I think it's a real toss-up whether some humans will actually escape earth before it goes through the next (possibly civilization ending) world crisis. It's definitely been on our worry list since the last century.
I think this is more an issue with psychology. When a company does experiments or uses certain techniques to manipulate human behavior, such as trying to break behavior patterns through abuse and reward, they're not particularly concerned with the ethics involved.