Meeting notice: The 05-18-99 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. 


Suggested topic:

The practice of synthetic chemistry, and particularly 
biochemistry, has always imposed high entry costs of talent 
and education.  As we move towards finer and firmer control 
of the molecular domain, those costs should fall. At some 
point, perhaps halfway between now and the onset of NT (10 
years?, 15?), people no more talented or knowledgeable than 
the average programmer (say) should be able to perform 
chemical and biochemical operations in their home (or 
remotely, in a net-accessible lab) that would be quite out 
of reach for them today.  The effect would be to create a 
population of biochem experimenters, hobbyists, and casual 
gene hackers that is ten to a hundred times larger than the 
present day biochem community.

The current pace of biotech is a function of the number of 
those working in it and the inhibitions imposed by 
regulatory structures and organizational oversight. (Imagine 
the pace of software development if every new piece of code 
had to be examined, tested, and approved by an FDA-like 
Federal Software Agency.) A 10 or 20 or 30 fold increase in 
the number of researchers over the globe as a whole would 
probably destroy this system, accelerating development by 
more than a linear increase in the number of workers. 

The consequences of this acceleration may merit our 
interest. The production of poisons, explosives, 
pharmaceuticals, and recreational substances would fall 
definitively into the hands of end-users.  Cosmetics might 
in time come to adopt a gene model: naturally red lips, 
naturally secreted perfumes, etc.  Gardeners, hobbyists, 
farmers, and breeders of plants and animals would start 
experimenting aggressively with a wide range of gene 
transfers. It seems impossible to doubt that some of these 
experiments would escape to the wild; eventually a great 
many of them would. The time might come when most of the 
plants and animals we see around us will be artificial in 
this sense. 

Politics would of course be affected: activists would not 
need to demonstrate against (for instance) Monsanto's new 
line of terminator seeds; they would just fix the genes 
directly or, even better, write a library  of terminatorless 
seed genomes and then put them all under 'copyleft', 
threatening the company's business model.  Finally, yet 
another form of intellectual property would become 
worthless, though in this case the size of the sectors 
involved -- chemicals, pharmaceuticals -- suggests that the 
inevitable industry temper tantrum might clock in at an F-4, 
or even an F-5. 

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MEMS rolls on Dept:

Allen Majorovic recently posted the following interesting 
URL to sci.nanotech:

http://www.isi.edu/efab/


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Announcement Archive:
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