From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Mon Aug 19 2002 - 03:43:50 MDT
On Sun, Aug 18, 2002 at 11:43:58AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> Thats because we don't have a catalog for all subspecies yet and machines
> such as that pointed out above aren't in common use yet. But a well
> equipped molecular biology lab setup with a PCR machine and the right
> sets of primers should be able to identify any known pathogen within
> a day.
It will still be many years before we have a catalogue sizeable enough.
It will happen, but it will take time.
> Obviously one shouldn't be finding the IL-4 gene in a mousepox genome.
> If one does thats a for sure signature you are dealing with a highly
> engineered bioweapon. Since we are aware of this now, it would be
> good to develop an IL-4 antibody so we can suppress this effect in vivo.
> (Actually IL-4 antibodies probably already exist, we just need a humanized
> version cleared for clinical use).
Yes, there are commercial antibodies already.
But IL-4 isn't exactly what you want to suppress in a sick patient; I
guess part of the trick of making a nasty bioweapon is to use proteins
that hurt the host, but inhibiting them also hurts the host.
> > And there are plenty of conotoxins, few of which have been sequenced...
>
> More than a few it looks like from scanning the nucleotide database.
Yes, but the sheer variety is staggering. They seem to be coevolving new
toxins very quickly.
> > Again, this takes a while, especially if it is not obvious
> > how to synthetise it (how quickly can biochemists devise a workable
> > synthesis pathway with no problematic residues?
>
> We have retrosynthesis programs now to figure this out, I'm thinking
> of getting one to wrestle with the Fine Motion Controller.
How good are the retrosynthesis programs today?
> > and if it is protein based, don't you have to solve the folding problem
> > to see if it sticks to the toxin?).
>
> I'm assuming you have the crystal structure of the toxin and for
> small peptides de novo folding works pretty well at this point.
> Bule gene and/or Folding@Home will push our capabilities here
> even further.
Isn't having the crystal structure a bit optimistic? What if the toxin is
one of those membrane-spanners where the active form is very different
from the crystaline form?
> > I think a project like this could be done, and it might be very useful
> > for a huge crisis. But I think you are overly optimistic about how fast
> > it could produce a stopgap measure even if the infrastructure was in
> > place.
>
> It depends on how much you have in place. I think a schedule would go
> something like 1 day to isolate, 1 day to sequence, 1 day to identify
> the bad actors, N days to discover/design prototype antitoxins,
> X days to produce them, Y days to test, Z days to produce the
> best candidates and get them to affected medical centers.
>
> The trick is to get N, X, Y & Z as close to 1 as possible. I think
> if you designed it on the basis of a high amount of parallelism
> this could be done. You have to keep in mind that we have robots
> now that manipulate 1500 or more samples simultaneously. There
> are production lines out there now that are doing this 24/7.
Like Harvey, I think your proposal is very constructive. I'm just
sceptical of how well it could work in real life. There are a lot of
human delays inherent in any such project - discovering that there is an
attack might take a while, getting the signal out to mobilize the
emergency response and organising the shift in activity in hundreds or
thousands of independent research facilities. Even with perfect tech
there are serious logistic problems here (central decision-making nodes
must avoid being swamped with information, error checking is necessary
etc). I think much of this could be solved, but it would require a
serious political effort that managed to get support from the involved
research institutions.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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