@ Happykittybunny,

In a word - no. But you're also right - it's not like teenagers modding their cars. It's more like baking a soufflé.

It takes a lot of skill and training to get the genes you want into a target organism. Even with the right combination of kits, plasmids, host organisms, target genes, protocols, reagents, and ability, it's not as easy as you think.

You can only insert so much extra DNA into a given bacteria, and even if it takes, there's no guarantee that you'll get any (let alone good) expression. After that, you have to make sure that your modifications don't prevent the organism from being overgrown by the ones that didn't take the insertion. But suppose you do get expression and you have an easily isolated colony - now you need some way to isolate & purify your content.

Hacking a virus is even harder. Now you don't just have to be able to modify the DNA (or RNA as the case may be. Oh, and you have to know which you're dealing with), but you also have to have a method to culture it. The cell culture you need to keep viruses reproducing is much harder to maintain than the agar for growing bacteria or fungi. The slightest contamination will ruin everything. Do you honestly think that the majority of biohackers have dedicated, aseptic workspaces? Do you really think that they've even practiced aseptic technique?

The simple truth is that if you don't know what you're doing, you're more than likely going to end up with a useless, inert, or dead end product. The odds of a biohacker producing the next great plague are, honestly, pretty slim.

But if you want to be afraid, think about the emergence of multiple-drug-resistant strains of bacteria. These didn't come about as a result of biohackers, they came from selective pressure exerted on the bacterial populace since the introduction, and subsequent overuse, of antibiotics.

Oh, and one last note... It's not like antibiotic resistance is entirely new either. We've already demonstrated penicillin resistance in strains of S. aureus that have been in frozen store since before the drug was introduced to the public. Our use of the compounds have only forced the bacteria to adapt that much more quickly.

@EYESPY GUY #12,

I think that Masamune Shirow would have something to say about that... Dominion: Tank Police, to be precise.

@Landowner -

I completely agree with you on that one. Circumcision is barbaric, no matter which gender it's being done to. The problem is, we're so used to having males get cut that few people even think about it.

I was pretty excited about this... until I tried to use it. Yes, the flash is obnoxious, and the pricing scheme is strange, but I can live with those. What's bothering me about it is how difficult it is to actually download a track once you've bought it.

I don't know if their servers can't handle the load or what, but I've been trying to download my tracks for a couple of hours with no success. Each track will get from somewhere between 30-40% finished and then lock up. And that's assuming that I can even open the download page! Half of the time when I try to open one of the links to dg.freshdigital.co.uk (basically all of the download/help pages), it opens a blank window and then sits there doing nothing.

I want to use this service. I really do. But if they can't get these issues resolved, I won't be. After all, it's sort of important that you be able to at least get the media you've paid for.

I like my version better... Last year I went into the lab and painted Christmas scenes onto agar with six or seven different types of mold spores and let them grow for a few days. Such vibrant colors...

Wait a minute. If the device is only writing a single pattern to the disk, it should be fairly easy for anyone who knows that pattern to recover the over-written data. There's a reason that the DoD uses a minimum 3-pass write of random bits.

With that in mind, does this device use a different pattern each time, or does it only have one 'pattern' stored in its ROM?

Anyway, it's still a neat idea.