BIOENGINEERING
Home-built Honeybees - Hold The Venom
Eric Engelhard is bioengineering a honeybee. In his garage. He's part of a new generation of bioinformatics brainiacs - people improvising with computers and molecular biology - who are making it possible to move genomics out of the lab and into your spare room.
To hack a genome at home, you need a roll-your-own supercomputer cluster: a collection of standard PCs running blazingly fast on the power of many inexpensive CPUs. In cheap-but-kick-ass Linux tradition, Engelhard uses a cluster of salvaged "reject boxes" to putter around with insect genomes. He wants to design a venomless honeybee. "The idea is to deconstruct an insect for whatever use you like," he says. "You could even create a receptor on the honeybee's antennae that finds bombs." Engelhard bounces ideas and problems off the Bioclusters email list (bioinformatics.org).
The path to garage-grown intellectual breakthroughs can be long and strange. James R. Graham, a staff scientist at Wyeth Genetics Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was inspired while making electronic music on a half-dozen computers in his bedroom. Graham was toying with fast Fourier transforms, algorithms used to break sound into its constituent waveforms. "Suddenly, I thought I could use this approach to look at DNA patterns, too," Graham says. So he accessed a map of the human genome at the National Center for Biotechnology Information's Web site (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov). He then deconstructed the music algorithm to create Diction, a tool that converts the genome into a series of waveforms and locates crucial regions that are actively producing proteins.
Is there any danger that these mavericks will get into bioterrorism? Unlikely, says Princeton biologist Lee Silver, author of Remaking Eden. Most dangerous biological agents like anthrax don't require genetic engineering to be deadly. Plus, he says, you'd need a prohibitively expensive "wet" lab to make your nasties. Silver thinks that the positive side of at-home work outweighs the negative. "For the past 30 years, you couldn't do original biology at home," he says. "But this is making a cottage industry out of human genomics - and I think somebody working in their bedroom will come up with something great." Ladies and gentlemen, start your clusters.
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