Artificial Life, Oil Spills and Transparency

Yesterday, a major barrier was crossed with the creation of the first artificial lifeform.  Craig Venter and his team created a cell from scratch.  Well not exactly from scratch: they created the DNA and inserted into an emptied cell.  This is very similar to programming a computer – the hardware is the same but the software tells it what to do.  When I explained this to my kids this morning, they surprisingly immediately grasped some of the potential consequences as my older son blurted out “they will create a super soldier” and my daughter added “or a cat rhinoceros.” Not sure where that latter combo came from but clearly my older son has been watching his share of scifi!

As often, I enjoyed reading the Economist’s thoughtful coverage.  I particularly liked the suggestion that the best way to deal with the risks of this new capability are through transparency.  Instead of attempting to ban further research or applications, many of which could be hugely beneficial, the Economist brings up the idea of making the technology open and transparent.  The argument is that if you try to ban certain types of research, it will be conducted in secret and then if something goes badly wrong, nobody will know what do about it.  By opening up and being transparent it is possible to empower the equivalent of “white hat” hackers for artificial life.

Now we are in the midst of an environmental disaster that shows why and how transparency could really help.  I am of course talking about the under water oil leak in the gulf.  BP and everyone else working on this should have been forced from day 1 to publish all their findings, all their video, etc on a web site (Google storage?).  This would have allowed independent scientists to quickly provide their estimates of oil flow.  It would have made it easy to discover which dispersion agent was being used.  And it is conceivable that someone, somewhere will come up with an innovative solution.  Yes, that may not be super likely, but it is impossible if people don’t know what’s going on.