From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Wed Aug 21 2002 - 13:01:30 MDT
On Wed, Aug 21, 2002 at 10:51:04AM -0700, Robert J. Bradbury wrote:
>
> > Yes, but the sheer variety is staggering. They seem to be coevolving new
> > toxins very quickly.
>
> I saw a reference that seemed to suggest that conotoxins were evolving
> through an antibody like diversity generation mechanism. Clever or nasty
> depending on how you look at it.
Yes, they are wonderous little creatures. Great patterns on their shells
too. If I ever become a James Bond villain you know what I will have in
my aquarium... :-)
> > How good are the retrosynthesis programs today?
>
> I think the academic versions can do up to 500 atoms and people are
> working on a commercial version to go to 1000 atoms. Thats large
> enough for most drug molecules.
Impressive. When I read about organic synthesis (a brief period in
highschool) most books seemed to agree that it was a black art based on
heuristics, clever tricks, experience and trial-and-error. Nice to see
that software is making the black art blacker :-)
> > 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?
>
> Thats why one has to use both crystal structures and molecular modeling.
> The advantage we have over terrorists is that we have *much* greater
> capacity to do the both the hardware and software molecular analysis.
> They would have to be either very clever or very lucky to come up
> with something very different from what is already known that we
> couldn't crack quickly.
Yes. But getting (say) the structure of an ion channel protein would
still be tricky. At least for the next few years (Hmm, that seems to be
the basic mantra in my comments).
> > 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.
>
> True. But we have lived in an era where people practiced "emergency drills"
> before.
But on this kind of scale? Drills would be needed to create a feeling for
how to do this, and they would be enormously expensive.
Perhaps the best approach would be to make this system scalable: you have
level 1, 2 and 3 emergencies. At level 1, local or easily
obtainable resources are mainly used. Level 2 would involve all normally
available resources, and Level 3 would be nationwide disaster with
emergency powers etc. By setting up the organisations necessary for the
smaller levels (and testing them) one can get the info necessary for the
higher levels.
> > 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).
>
> Design it so it can naturally be run in a distributed fashion (use the
> "cell" concept against the enemy).
>
> > 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.
>
> Granted.
Unfortunately there is a bit of a contradiction here between the
distributed fashion it likely ought to be done in, and the way political
efforts so far have created organisations. In the current climate i
guess this whole response would be a sub-department of the department of
homeland defense, hierarchical and involved in the usual bureaucratic
feuds, which would make applying it (even in a drill) tricky.
Maybe the right approach would be to first approach the groups that might
be truly relevant, get them to agree to informally study it and start to
implement the right interfaces. Then gradually implement it, and only
getting top-level politicians involved when necessary. Circumventing
traditional politics might be the best approach.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 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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