SynBio and International Development

[Edward Perello]

Has anyone looked into this in a big way? What with the whole democratising production of everything seems like it would be awesome.

[Cathal Garvey]

It's something I think a lot about. Not just in the "development" sense,
but in the general capitalism vs. peer-production sense.
May trail of thought:

Capitalism generally requires monopolisation of the production, whether
that means of food, mass-manufactured items, or medicines.

Generations of capital-centric improvements in agriculture, manufacture
and medicine have left their more traditional counterparts or
equivalents either undernourished, discredited or outright illegalised.

As part of a broader trend towards modernisation of peer-production
(i.e., replicating printers, peer-communications, etc.), synbio will
likely make it more feasible to resume local agriculture with fewer
expensive (and centralised) inputs: GM crops, etc.

This trend towards a more easily accomplished decentralisation of
production goes against the needs of functional capitalism.

For this seeming dichotomy to be resolved without dissolution of
capitalism, it's likely that intellectual property rights over biology
will see significant expansion in coming years, to allow an artificial
monopoly to take over from a "real" monopoly.

However, nigh-fascist expansion of IP rights over other
things-that-can-no-longer-be-monopolised, like music and movies, haven't
made a dent at all in the collapse of the fragile little capitalisms
that previously held sway in those fields, and these ongoing collapses
haven't negatively impacted the onrush of creativity and development in
these fields, either.

So, it's possible that by investing bucketloads of money in the
technologies that will make "offgrid" synbio possible, the big baddies
of old agri/med-tech might be accelerating their demise, but not before
their lobbying efforts create a pretty disgusting IP dystopia for us to
endure for a few decades.

How all this plays out globally vis: international development is fairly
clear in my mind: those countries that buck the West's attempts to
impose imaginary monopolies on developing technologies will flourish,
while those that "behave" will languish or worsen. The WTO and other
agents of "Free Trade" will side with WIPO on the false notion that
"Free Trade" requires enforcement of intellectual property, and this
will lead to nasty embargoes and nasty tensions against those nations
that buck the IP delusion. It'll take a large player like Brazil or
India to create a market outside the Western IP madness for these more
forward-thinking nations to trade within, but that'll be the beginning
of the end of biopatents.

On 16/02/13 19:47, Edward Perello wrote:
> Has anyone looked into this in a big way? What with the whole
> democratising production of everything seems like it would be awesome.
>

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[Edward Perello]

I think that you have more or less hit the overall issue spot on here - I agree with this almost entirely. There will certainly be a wider problem occurring out of the decentralisation and democratisation of synbio tools from the perspective of big industry, and I have thought about this a great deal as well. It does seem inevitable (I've thought of it as homebrew Avastin sometimes - the doctor just gives you a few sequences to load in your auto-bioreactor).

However, I would disagree with the notion that a "large player like Brazil or India [will] create a market outside the Western IP madness for these more forward-thinking nations to trade within". 

Yes - it would be the end of biopatents if the system just crumbles as a result of that behaviour. But who is to say that those countries would not simply adopt the same measures that Western ones are currently pushing? From the perspective of a capitalist-industrialist country with a ruling elite (whom typically have ties to a central nexus of corporate industry), it would not make sense for them to move against such powerful interests. Indeed, this has been a problem for the environmental movement in Brazil, where politicians have sat by idly or proactively impeded anti-deforestation groups and legislation. 

Its great to see countries ignoring the EU and pushing into biotech. Burkina Faso etc are doing their thing with GMOs and production is going up - but this is big industry again. Its not the little guys who are doing well out of this (yet). And in those industries patents continue to rule. At least for the moment. 

And even if we are able to get decentralised synbio tech to the masses at affordable prices, could it work in a system dominated by industrial capitalism?

Perhaps a good example to consider is the response of some governments to HIV medication patents. Thailand for instance famously defied(and defies) patent laws to give people access to medication. If they didnt the sad truth is that they would die. Can the same be said for biomaterials (say biocorrugated roofing) in shanty towns, GM foodstuffs for subsistence farmers, or anything else? Can patent laws conceivably be relaxed for those things?

I fear that because of these entrenched special interests, decentralised synbio technology would get pushed underground and its full potential would never be realised. This might make a black market for the technology. That is essentially your dystopia Cathal - and it sounds horrible. We still have this with the War on Drugs etc - a dystopia that sees us slam mostly poor people in prison. 

Perhaps we ought to stop talking about the security risks of synthetic biology and instead start focusing on what is going to happen if we don't start educating the public about it in a way that makes sense. Nonetheless, we still have the war on drugs, climate change denial, the Iranian nuclear menace and so much more to deal with for the time being!

--
Edward J. Perello

Co-founder & Director, Desktop Genetics Ltd.
(UK) +44 777 577 0533 

LinkedIn profile

www.desktopgenetics.com

[Cathal Garvey]

Absolutely correct. Long before there's a "War on Genomic Piracy",
there'll be a "War on Genomics".

Just on the last note, it's worth picking apart the "Iranian Nuclear
Menace" statement.
This is a complete divergence from the point of the thread, but for a
good cause. When discussing international development, it is totally
normal for us to do so as spectators of our corrupt news feeds. If we
take our own propaganda as fact, we won't be able to have a very
productive discussion about international synbio futurism!

Every country with nuclear weapons is a menace. Every one can, by
political, military or personal whim (or by accident), wipe one or many
dense civilian-populated areas off the map in a spectacular and
fear-inducing display of power.

The Iranian state is by no means a nice, beneficent power, but their
"Sharia Rock-Throwers" image is an unfair depiction of a country that
has provided free contraception to all of their citizens and pushed
women's rights and education extremely quickly. They are improving. With
help, someday they might regain a form of public rule (if not a Western
Hollywood Democracy) and reclaim their history of Persian Enlightenment.

But right now, they want nuclear power, and nuclear weapons. Of course
they do: they have no strong allies, and two hypermilitarised nations
constantly pushing an extermination agenda against them (often provoked
by Iranian Government propaganda, of course). There is only one
time-proven way to stop America and Israel from colonising a country;
get nuclear weapons.

So, who's the menace in this scenario? Iran, despite rapid improvements
across the board, continues to be run by a Military-Religious complex,
persecutes (or stones) men and women who differ or behave outside Sharia
norms, and ranks in the top ten for internet censorship. For all that,
they are improving, and would continue to do so with international
diplomatic pressure and encouragement. Instead, their military junta is
being directly strengthened by death threats from foreign nuclear
powers, and this is encouraging them to develop nukes of their own; of
course.

So, our immediate problem isn't Iran itself, it's the system that
supports regimes like Iran's, and turns them into North Koreas through
one-sided "diplomacy", sanctions that weakens the populace and not the
juntas, and threats of violence that turn them nuclear. The approach has
a goal, and an outcome, and they aren't even remotely related.

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[John Griessen]

On 02/16/2013 04:14 PM, Cathal Garvey wrote:
> "Free Trade" requires enforcement of intellectual property, and this
> will lead to nasty embargoes and nasty tensions against those nations
> that buck the IP delusion. It'll take a large player like Brazil or
> India to create a market outside the Western IP madness for these more
> forward-thinking nations to trade within, but that'll be the beginning
> of the end of biopatents.

That seems like good logic to me. I've only recently understood how "free trade"
stops tariff protection, but allows collapse of mature technology worker
job markets since the workers can't or won't go where the jobs now are.

Brazil had a protectionist tariff set up on tech goods to foster growth
of their own tech jobs and companies. It seemed to do that. Now they have a
strong currency, mostly from exporting raw commodities like ores and lumber
like in colonial days, and that works against their
home population of engineers/scientists as it's cheaper to buy from China
than develop your own products.

There seem to be no absolutes in economics,
nothing measurable except comparisons of mixtures of unknowns -- sort of like
analytic chemistry without standards to measure against. So the best we can
do is make comparisons and usually circular arguments...

IP may be politically locked to international currency trading as much as
to "free trade", and it will probably be locked officially for along time,
but the whole economic situation of Brazil-Russia-India-China could just be
a speculative bubble driven by the weak dollar after the financial crisis of '08.
If the USD-holding passive investors of the world stop getting returns
financing BRIC countries, BRIC, (or at least Brazil-India-SE-Asia)
strong currencies could fall, stopping their importing -- hopefully those Brazilian
techies have hung on, not left, and will go on promoting tech of their own
to export, which circles us around to Cathal's argument they could be factor in bio-patents.

I was talking with a Brazilian engineer when we were both out of work in '02
about the Amazon and he said it was like the US west in 1875 -- a case of adultery
in a bar might be settled on the spot with a gun and the body dragged away and
no cops, no trial, just shrugs and going on with life. Now there's an Amazon
"free trade zone", but still lots of guns. Maybe some "cowboy biotech" of
a capitalist flavor will come out of Manaus. It's unsafe for environmentalists still:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/14/brazil-amazon-rangers-farmers-burning

Just some thoughts. Economics is no exact science -- it's so much nicer to do good physical experiment,
like a spectrophotometer.

[Pieter]

I'd like to add to the discussion that with the rise of SynBio Western countries gain the ability to produce valuable biochemicals/products, by modifying domestic organisms. This means developing countries, which often posses a rich biodiversity and are much dependent on agricultural export, potentially loose a big source of income. Take caffeine, now that it can be produced in transgenic plants there is no need to import huge quantities of coffee beans and extraction anymore.

[Nathan McCorkle]

On Sat, Feb 16, 2013 at 3:42 PM, Edward Perello
<edw...@desktopgenetics.com> wrote:
> However, I would disagree with the notion that a "large player like Brazil
> or India [will] create a market outside the Western IP madness for these
> more forward-thinking nations to trade within".

From my experience India is pretty self-reliant, at least on the
surface their culture beams with 'Made In India' pride akin to what I
used to see in the 1990s here in the States. Pakistan uses pirated GMO
cotton landraces.

Seems like international development is well under way, but most of
the countries are about 75 years behind the west. Heck the GM Power
Glide automatic transmission didn't even sufrace til 1950... how can
we expect high-tech progress when these folks are still shifting their
cars manually!

I watched a great BBC documentary on Saudi Arabia recently, it shed a
lot of light on their general situation for me. More than 150 years
ago my family saw the first rock oil (as opposed to whale oil) trickle
in the Pittsburgh Pennsylvania region on the U.S.. It would be more
than 30 YEARS later before the first oil well in Asia was drilled at
Digboi. Pittsburgh exploded, died, and has been resurrecting itself in
the form of a high-tech center. Saudi Arabia didn't find oil until
1938, and at that time according to wikipedia the Royal family's "sole
source of income, was undertaking raids in the Najd". From the
outside-looking-in this seems quite uncivilized and animalistic. The
prince in the BBC documentary sort-of acknowledged this, saying
something like what do you expect when you try and force 2000+ years
of (often bloody) cultural evolution on the Saudi people who were
literally nomadic camel herders at that time. They were driving
camels, while the western world was driving locomotive, cars, and
flying airplanes.

Inside the Saudi Kingdom (BBC Documentary)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=au9Aqd_-2hc




Anyway, my point is advanced knowledge is what seems to separate us
from the animals, and warlords have been keeping knowledge capped to
enslave people for a long time. How would a human know their
enslavement was bad, unless they /knew/ about it. The same theme lots
of sci-fi clone revolutions play on, some outsider allows a clone to
see the way civilized humans live, and the clone get's pissed off at
their master and starts a rebellion.

I think more open-access knowledge will spur synBio/high-tech
development. Most people love mechanization and automation, but there
are exceptions such as when it could mean job loss "a robot took my
job!", or when withholding technology allows some party to remain in
greater power. I practice the last case by keeping automobiles that
have a manual transmission, many acquaintances have asked to borrow my
vehicle, but then relinquished after finding they couldn't operate the
gears. We could term world-scale players who do this as The Dark
Overlords of Science (TDOS or TDOoS), the folks who burned down the
library of Alexandria, the Mongols in 1258 who burned down the library
at Baghdad, and the current day knowledge pay-wall enforcers.



--
-Nathan

[Cathal Garvey]

> how can
> we expect high-tech progress when these folks are still shifting their
> cars manually!

Manual shift cars were the norm in Ireland until about 5 years ago, I'd
wager. I'd still say only about 50% of cars on the road, maybe less, are
automatics. Many people don't like automatic transmission; personally, I
generally detest it. The only car I've ever driven that had A) Effective
automatic transmission and B) a good reason not to be manual is the
Toyota Prius.

Personally, I don't like them because they can reduce efficiency
(although I'll grant you they make up for enough terrible drivers that
on balance perhaps they save fuel..), and because of the slight lag in
response between my pushing the pedal and the car taking of from a stop.
That can actually be a hazard!

Anyways, griping over. What I'd really like to say on that score is that
"development" doesn't follow a homogenous path; the popular example is
that mobile communications access has now leapfrogged access to clean
water around the world, and people are choosing high tech over baseline
low-tech fairly consistently. As odd as it looks, the future citizen is
as likely to live in a mud hut and own an Android and work online as she
is to be a farm labourer or workhouse slave (following the European
"development" path).

> The same theme lots
> of sci-fi clone revolutions play on, some outsider allows a clone to
> see the way civilized humans live, and the clone get's pissed off at
> their master and starts a rebellion.

And then there's "A Brave New World", where a 'primitive' human from a
"reservation" is brought into modern society and is disgusted by the
inhumane way in which they live and treat one another, and can't take it
at all. The wealthy always imagine their life is the perfect life, and
the poor will envy them: "On a mange brioche", to borrow the common
misattribution to Marie Antoinette.

The reality is pretty different; while it's true that people
instinctively desire items that designate status, status is designated
differently by culture, social class, or social group. Even within
pretty homogenous cultures, some groups will assign massive status to
ownership of a McGuffin, and others will consider it nonsensical or
wasteful; iPhones are an obvious example of such disputed
status-McGuffins, as are Prada clothing items, Swiss watches and
solid-gold pens.

So, we assume that "international development" means "accessing and
owning the things that we already have as westerners", and are surprised
when people elsewhere choose differently to us based on vast cultural
differences.

> Most people love mechanization and automation, but there
> are exceptions such as when it could mean job loss "a robot took my
> job!", or when withholding technology allows some party to remain in
> greater power.

I read a great essay by someone who was dissecting our relationship to
robot labour. It can be bullet-pointed nicely:
* We generally fantasise about futures where robots do all our hard
work, freeing us from menial labour to pursue more uniquely human
endeavours like art and science.
* We already live in a future where robots do much or most of our menial
labour, and continue to do so, but we have not been freed from having to
continue labouring at other things.
* This is because we don't collectively *own* the robots and their
labour, so instead of benefitting from their work like in the sci-fi
movies or the Jetsons, we have to find jobs the robots haven't replaced yet.
* The people benefitting from the robots are, as usual, the wealthy
people who could afford to buy the robots in the first place to replace
the workers.
* Rather than have a big robot-ownership marxist revolution to balance
the scales, suitable taxation of the wealthy, whether due to their vast
power to influence global finance or simply their ownership of all the
job-stealing robots, could provide virtual collective-robot-ownership,
and help create a world where we all benefit from automation.

In the context of international development, it will be interesting to
see if any countries follow a different path to us, and focus on humans
over robots. Not by excluding robots, because that's wasteful of a
powerful technology, but by preventing robots from becoming agents of
unchecked capitalism and destroying domestic labour markets without
providing recompense to the displaced workers.

It's commonly held that Ludd (from whose name we derive "Luddite") was
against mechanisation and technology. In fact, he was against the
centralised ownership of mechanisation by factory owners, which turned
the weaving industry from a worker-owned cottage industry into a
factory-centric capitalist industry, making weavers into wage-slaves.
Robots are just the same; who's going to be the "robot luddite" of 211X?

[Edward Perello]

Cathal,

I love your analysis here. Exceptional, and I would absolutely agree with you. I advise you to watch the Second Renaissance from the Animatrix if you have not done so already. There are a lot of cool ideas in there which lead me to believe that there is a need to pre-emptively develop laws regarding the interactions between AI and humans. 

However.. that is another topic. I wanted to share with you my just-submitted abstract for the SB6 conference. Open to discussion!

For many in the Western world we have grown accustomed to ordering oligonucleotides and complex custom genes relatively simply and cheaply from gene foundries. But even in the UK, where the nearest foundry lies across the Channel, turnaround times are unnecessarily long and Brits generally pay pound for dollar on their constructs due to high transaction costs and import tariffs.

Reconsidering Gene Foundry Models in Emerging Markets

 For those in emerging markets, the problem is compounded. Thai biotech organisations currently pay Malaysian foundries 60 cents/base pair for oligonucleotides (>1 week delivery) and pay 3x what we do for PCR reagent kits and enzymes (also taking several weeks). Gene synthesis costs more than a dollar/base pair and the costs and timeframes for sequencing are similarly unacceptable. It seems the dominance of gene foundry models in the West cannot easily be translated onto the rest of the world. In emerging markets, it is thus much harder to make DNA a commodity in the same way that it is becoming one in our own.

Nonetheless, we all generally agree that synthetic biology has a vast potential to positively impact international development and provide emerging economies with access to key resources that they currently lack. But where it is needed the most, there are barriers far too high for significant technological momentum to be generated.

Indeed, it is not the technological limitations surrounding gene synthesis that matter the most here, but the combined social, economic, and even political bottlenecks that have been built around this technology.

 I therefore suggest that emerging markets, with their smaller synbio budgets and limited accessibility stand to benefit greatly from a decentralized synthesis model, wherein gene-manufacturing capabilities are widespread. This will be a bold but necessary step in making synthetic biology accessible to the entire world and not just to well-funded groups in the West.

[Edward Perello]

Also, with closer attention being paid to the future Luddite, it seems that small scale gene synthesis robots could go down two branches. On the one hand there is the possibility that skilled gene-makers (artisans) would not like the influx of machines capable of doing their jobs. For the Luddites, who only knew how to make textiles, this was a problem. 

The difference today is that molecular biologists/bioprocess engineers etc get one of these machines (because it will typcailly be them that buy one), all that happens is their productivity would increase. 

This example suggests that robots could be used to enhance productivity per worker in a knowledge-economy. In effect the skilled worker simply shepherds additional machines, and can get on with other aspects of his day more effectively.