Meeting notice: The 00.04.18 meeting will be held at 7:30 p.m. at 
the Royal East (782 Main St., Cambridge), a block down from the 
corner of Main St. and Mass Ave.  If you're new and can't 
recognize us, ask the manager.  He'll probably know where we are. 

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Suggested topic: More on the Ecological Immune System. 

An EIS would control "weeds": replicating entities that threaten to alter 
the preferred composition of a given ecology.  This is a large set that 
includes GMOs, naturally evolved invading exotics, local species that would 
work fine somewhere else, only just not right here, and humans bent on 
environmental despoilation, like poachers or developers making a preemptive 
strike against endangered species.  A satisfactory EIS would be versatile 
enough to work regardless of trophic level; it would defend members of any 
kingdom against weeds belonging to any other kingdom.    

The technology would have two functions: hunting -- sensing -- and killing.  
Hunting implies pervasive, detailed, and continuous surveillance from 
autonomous sensor platforms of many types and ranges.   These would fly, 
swim, or be fixed in place as needed.  They would be capable of triggering 
closer looks by other, more sensitive, sensors, where 'closer looks' means 
altitudes of a few centimeters, sample acquisition, and/or concentrations 
of a few parts per billion.  

In a few years we should be able to instrument large numbers of plants and 
animals for this purpose,  which will open up the option of monitoring them 
as well as their ambient environments.  As time goes on the sizes of the 
hosts that we can recruit in this way will fall and our ability to build 
genetically engineered 'sentinel species' -- such as trees whose leaves 
will watch for airborne viruses, pollen, and sphores of interest -- will 
grow.  At first glance this range of tools appears adequate to the 
function; for instance, viruses could be monitored by analyzing the DNA or 
RNA injected into arrays of simulated membrane receptors scattered through 
the environment. 

This brings us to the next phase. In general, weeds are killed off by 
spoofing their sensors, which means persuading them to eat poisons instead 
of prey, seek shelter in traps instead of viable habitats, and/or choose 
sterile mates; or by introducing a chemical, genetic, or biological agent 
that recognizes and attacks the weed specifically.   These tools should be 
able to do the job, at least in theory.   

For instance imagine elephants start dying from a virus.  For our purposes 
it does not matter if this virus is indigenous, a natural exotic, an 
artifact accidently released to the wild, or a deliberate introduction.  
Whichever, it would be the job of the EIS to bring it under control. This 
might be done here by bringing arrays of decoy receptors into the proximity 
of the threatened elephants.  Perhaps the animals could be draped with 
fibers, each carrying billions of receptors.  (Since there are so far as we 
know no good viruses, only bad and neutral ones, we can build our defenses 
without worrying about the ecological effect of false positives.)  Many 
variants of this approach can be imagined; one or more seem likely to be 
effective.

The objection can be made that investment required to build the EIS would 
be considerable.  Further, there is not much prospect that this investment 
will be made, given our failure to resume the manufacture of smallpox 
vaccine and our passivity at watching invasive exotics rampage through 
every ecology in the planet.  Further, GMOs would probably be necessary for 
both hunting and killing, and the politics of deliberately releasing GMOs 
into the wild for any purpose at all are problematical.  

It seems likely that it will take something unpleasant to end the debate 
and spur the society in the right direction.  Fortunately, such an event 
looks inevitable.  When it arrives the demand for action will be intense 
and funding will be abundant.  It might be smart to prepare a proposal for 
some aspect of this effort and then wait until the right headlines announce 
that the moment has come

Fred Hapgood 




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Announcement Archive: 
http://www.pobox.com/~fhapgood/nsgpage.html.

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