path: root/transcripts/fbi-diybio-2011/2011-07-13.txt

2011-07-13

Jason Bobe; still waiting on him to say anything about the Woodrow Wilson "CODE" meeting results. It seems far too private and doesn't represent the online diybio community (which is the primary community). Making individual ethics/guidelines for each individual space is fine, and makes sense- any legal entity undergoing incorporation does that. But that's not the same thing as a universal statement of all of the diybio mailing list members.

Pat Oryan; WMD coordinator and administrator.

You is up in Washington; Head is head now?

Steven Warhol(?) supervisory special agent, branch C.
    - Radical islamic extremists; 9/11; terrorists; "freedom exploitation".

    10 years ago you couldn't do diybio because the technology wasn't there (what??)

    you are the scientific experts
    equipment for bioterrorism is still too expensive
    psychological profiling of bioterrorists
    
    Tell us when someone is asking for the wrong things. Tell us when something seems wrong.

(1) Unemployment going up; 30% of, say, biology undergrads unemploed. Given this, how can the tiny numbers of amateur biohackers compare?
(2) DNA screening by group of companies; but in reality, anyone who can't pay to get something synthesized will just manufacture the DNA themselves. The DNA screening is primarily for regulatory bodies that don't trust all of their employed undergrads to not slip in a possibly pathogenic strand.
(3) FBI responsibilities and capabilities not well understood or defined

(4) literature requests from foreign countries are suspecious; especially those asking for additional details on your approach or setup ((what about open access?))

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Ed You

This year: genspace opening, 10th anniversary of 9/11, 5th anniversary of WMD directorate.

50 ppl in the audience today.
Alex Garza - PCSBI (president's commission for the study of bioethical issues) and Department of Homeland Security
Paula Seczlinzky - Sloan Foundation; biosecurity and INTERPOL
AAAS person (Jessia Tucker?)

The FBI does primarily tips-based work.

Jim Runkel, FBI - Austin, Texas

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Ed You, past & perspective

States of affairs in the diybio communities
FBIo
What are the agreed responsibilities of the FBI?
igem/fbi sponsorship
Rob's book is cited often in policy forums
"The Ethics of Synthetic Biology and Emerging Technologies"
no US iGEM team has ever won; Slovenia has won three times.

past conferences:
    Building Bridges around Building Genomes
    Building Bridges around Biotech (Boston)
    next one in DC

NSABB ethics directory
"universal ethics on dual-use and risk management"
difficult for policy to keep up
blackhat biology in the UK? ask AAAS person
profiling by nationality
literature requests from other countries

Sloan "options for governance" funding (bleh)
DNA screening
"dual-use", inadvertent dual-use

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Todd & Jason, hijacking diybio

As a primarily internet-based community, why do you think that these meetings w/ groups is representative of the opinions of diybio? While groups are certainly welcome to have a mandatory code of conduct, isn't that different?

Might be a "preamble" only that hackerspaces adopt? Jason is vague. Next says it's a code of ethics for diybio. If this is mandatory and not made up over the internet, or collaborated on except in private closed-door geographically-spare meetings, then diybio.org will split. Mac/Jason never really turned into a formal non-profit org, so it's too late for this in terms of the social structure.

general principles: open access, transparency, environmental release, tinkering, safety, education, peaceful purpose, group-level biosafety officers.

Rob brought up that diybio is really just an internet group, so this code of ethics work is kind of looking at it at the wrong direction and misleading law enforcement.

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Alex Garza
PCSBI (President's Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues)
Department of Homeland Security

commission member list goes here
    yes, ms. ali is mohammed ali's wife

biological defense
list o pcsbi's public meetings

"current research licensing and sharing" and whether or not it is sufficient to promote innovation in America

18-month report by the President's Office
todd says woodrow wilson is releasing a scorecard on syntheticbiologyproject.org in a few weeks, which will rate how the president is doing with these activities and whether or not that 18-month report is being pursued.

"Justice and Fairness" - access to drugs, patents, information, and how the US government is going to ensure this; to many people, nature is a resource to be owned and exploited for financial gain, which can be fine but we still need these medications, how can we get them if someone has an intellectual, financial and practical monopoly on them?

- ignore the patents
- offshore medical tourism
- rescuing orphan drugs

"select agents"
"biological agents" (a different definition in the US code)

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investigations w/ groups

All of this is far more oriented towards being "public outreach".
genspace doesn't seem to be diybio?
There needs to be someplace for employed biologists to work on personal pet projects.

FBI likes to keep track of large chem producers and suppliers.
WMD training last year - 200 agents; mac & daniel attended

Dan doesn't like lepht (hooray). But only because she is doing implants in the first place.
Nature Medicine, editorial by Ellen & Dan.

genspace "rejection pool" - rejected a number of individuals
    Someone working on taking samples from his acne and making acne phage cultures to see how to best kill them. (??)

FBI case - lentiviral work in an apartment (via Ed You). DA passed on prosecuting on it.

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Brett Bowman, san diego diybio
scientific literacy
crazy stats go here
possible lab space w/ joseph jackson, hackerspace, sensors, sensory

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Ryan Ogle, genoblasts ncbtmb
morgellons
PoliColi, increased heat-resistant polymerase in ecoli
jcvi/phil goetz workshop got low response from diybio community, prolly going to be used for antibody research for $300/mo instead
towson university
NIH equipment Donation Program, Rockville "diybio goes to rockville" ask ryan, get help from 501c3 (for status umbrella)
dr. burkett
node hackerspace
sylvan "remedial biotech"

llc + another 501c3 as financial umbrella, extended non-profit status; write contract w/ 501c3 that you pick.

end of page 2
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Nathan McCorkle (aka Charlie Manion??? might as well be)
RIT

- Is Jason Morrison still doing SmartLab?
- open source spectrometer, nanodrop, small sequencing w/ iphone app for dna barcoding
- $20k wishlist for 4-layer pcb, batch 0f 10. $500 in parts each. Told him to not make the pcb in the Bay Area and instead do China. $20k also included living expenses for something.
- bufalo fbi field office 80mi away
- off-the-wall recombinant dna technology is not at all different from 'synthetic biology'
- What happened to the diybio laser/microfluidics work? Did I forget to post stuff? [see follow-up stuff not written]

veeco simulat0r, channel width, channel geometry and smoothness (or lack thereof)

CDROM microfluidics
CDROM interometer
CDROM imprint lithography for microposts

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BioBridge @ Noisebridge 

Rolfe (comp sci)
Rikke

60 paying $40 or $80/mo
150 active members
600 others

What happened to the previous diybio stuff at Noisebridge? Why is it allowed now?

Tastebridge
BioBoard - arduino for liquid culture monitoring
turbidity
infrared absorption
dissolved oxygen sensor via ruthinium UV fluorescent dye
Mark from Denmark (who?) made a rails-based visualizer that graphs some of the data from BioBoard
picosystems (closed-loop aquariums)
liquid-culture mushroom mycelium

----------------------------------------------------
Jacob Shiach

nitrogen peroxide
explosives
nitrogen
maneur

setting up 501c3 status under a parent org
forrest is doing rails for an oil startup
spirulina biofuels, possible genetic engineering in the near future

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Mackenzie Cowell
bosslab.org

MSDS (material safety data sheets) are purely for company liability purposes and are not actually instructional.

Documentation process at bosslab, mandatory:
    1) do stuff
    2) take photo
    3) write notes
    4) take picture of notes
    -- camera's wifi card transmits the photos to the bosslab computerz --
    5) write small blog post

mac didn't have to break legs to get people to use this system?

mac's new company: Cofactor Bio, August 15th
SnipParty
dna sequencing kit for small fragments
transgenic plants guy at bosslab
lab mitosis/splitting by copying materials between labs when he moves to san francisco

end of page 3
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LA Biohackers, Inc.
Cory Tobin
Rommie Littrel

http://biohackers.la/
previously socal-diybio

Nullspace was a sweatshop back in the day.
minipreps of gfp plasmid
cory pcr'd out the gfp gene from jellyfish tissue
cloned it into plmp3 plasmid

Haber Project -> directed evolution of a nitrogenase from 65 Celsius to 25 Celsius goal.

biohackers.org in 2001? (rob)

Project Hindenburg -> streptomyces thermoautotrophicus
    hydrogen + oxygen growth chamber at 50 psi, explosive and very volatile
    "We don't want to keep it in doors."
    genome sequencing -> $10k worth of work
    hooked up with Beijing Genome Institute to get the sequencing work; 15 megabases at 10x coverage
    socal-diybio does the incubation + purification

Project Headcrab -> emotiv epoc, using emokit. Cody Brocious is in NYC.. so while you're here...

Project Jellyfish -> amplification -> restriction -> this is just the gfp gene project mentioned above

Project Skynet ->
    Reverse engineering an in vivo neural network on a chip
    Ted Berger? Todd's neural visualization based on edge segmentation and membrane detection
    Train rat brain cultures to control a flight simulator

    imaging the circuit, reconstruct
    Can we image the circuit, and reconstruct in silico?
    will the in silico reconstruction perform the same as the biological version?

Project Amazon -> using crossbow/bowtie, gpu-compute instances; $15k academic research credit. Housekeeping genes that might not be housekeeping genes might be discoverable.

Android-based gel box documentation system

iorodeo.com gel box python openscad generator, on bitbucket somewhere

nathan mccorkle - meth tree? what

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eri gentry, biocurious, sunnyvale, 488 people, singularityu/biocurious/cofactorbio crap

end of page 4

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tabletop ttx scenarios
uspto.gov seed money, see Ed You
local law enforcement - joint terrorist task force called immediately for first responders
FBI only has jurisdiction if something goes wrong or is clearly criminal? local/state laws of course apply in cases of regulatory non-compliance
local hazmat teams (meet with them through your fbi contact point)

sciencecheerleader.com is actually NFL cheerleaders going around doing cheers about science and geeky things

Regulatory/civil v. criminal - so if the DA just doesn't like what you are doing, you're screwed?

iDon't just walk up to the local precinct and say "yo dude i've got this lab thing going on". Call the local WMD coordinator. WMD coordinator reach out to local first responders at state/local level, have an established relationship and meet at least once per year.

brucella melitensis
salmonella enterica
ecoli O517:H7
shigella dysenteriae
vibrio chlorea
chicken egg incubation + virus work

Austinites have been calling the FBI to ask them what they are doing about Japan's radiation problems. (hah)
genspace has no a/c

"IT IS CRITICAL THAT YOU DO NOT LABEL THIS PETRI DISH AS ANTRHAX." - Cory

7:45 departure (group 1)
11:45 departure (group 2)

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rob carlson

dna synthesis
    cost of oligos vs. cost of genes
    if cost of oligos & cost of genes converge too quickly, no business will be incentivized
    cost of genes is bounded by cost of oligos

    DNA synthesis at IDT is not priced based on material costs but instead based on business overhead
    BlueHeron spin-off that was doing subnanomolar DNA synthesis (before BlueHeron was bought out, or at the same time)

    chang? student of george church at harvard medical; then went on to duke university; microfluidics dna synthesis with subnanomolar dna synthesis with cost projections in the paper.
    possibly this: http://nar.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/8/2514.long