Biopunk barfbag

I remember when the internet was the new craze in town and I resented much of the fuss since suddenly my little dark corner of the planet was hip and cool. Much of my life has been spent rooting for the underdog and avoiding the trendy. I'm elated to see the dot bomb come and people who used to believe their own press releases eat some humble pie and reenter reality.

So, when I read Genome Liberation an old familiar feeling welled up within me that had me reaching for the nearest barfbag. Biopunks my ass. I used to work in 'bioinformatics' before it became trendy by surving the economy after all the dot bombs went sneakers up and it sounds like the 'cyberpunks' are trying to refashion themselves as 'biopunks'. Some guy at ORAs Biocon last month had this idea that sounds like a rehashed internet startup idea made for bioinformatics:

Basically, you could make a Web site that just streams human genetic code at you," he says. "You can get your hands on all sorts of genomes now -- they're just giant text files of alphabet characters. You could pick your favorite chromosome, download it from the government and get one of those stock ticker programs to stream the genome instead of business information.

Wow, how incredibly stupid and useless that would be. I'll bet he'll get a couple million to waste on trying to make a go of it before filing for bankruptcy. Information doesn't want to be free biopunk boy, it wants to be filtered, analysed and made into something meaningful for your brain. A stream of raw data is useless and I could create a perl script that could spew random sequences for absolutely no cost and have about the same value.

I have no ethical or moral quibbles with genomic and other genetic research but I do have a serious problem with humans thinking that we're smart enough after 40 years of reasearch to build ourselves that which took millenia to evolve. The US ranks NUMBER ONE in lowest eighth-grade math scores out of a group of 20 industrialised nations and genomic research requires a decent education in biology, math and others. Just because we can sequence the DNA doesn't mean that we have any clue what to do with it. We don't need some 'biopunk' poseur, we need educated people who can do something useful with the data and hopefully make breakthroughs that will be handled in a humane and ethical way. If recent events are any measure though I an not optimistic that such things are possible and we will all pay dearly for buying bombs when we should have been building schools and laboratories.

Furthermore, since our government spends nearly ten times the amount on defense as it does on education or research, most universities where genomic/bioinformatics are a high priority have taken on corporate sponsorship due to lack of funding in the last 20 years or more. Whether this means that the information will be free or not remains to be seen but the genome sequence itself is not worth much, it is the analysis and subsequent knowledge and products that emerge from it that will be very highly guarded, patented and sold to the highest bidder.

A future like GATTACA is not so farfetched.