KNOW THYSELF, DIGITALLY. Technology Review has been running a superior topic package under the heading "The Measured Life." It surveys digital methods for self-tracking health and associated behaviors, follows obsessive human trackers, and explores what this trend might bode. This material is presented in the several forms of today's story-telling: blogs, a long feature, videos, photo gallery. Most of it is written by TR biomedicine editor Emily Singer, and she also includes her experiences with self-tracking.
The feature describes a self-monitoring researcher who carries a shoulder bag sprouting wires from devices stuck all over his body. They measure blood oxygen, blood pressure, heart rate, and temperature and include an EKG and accelerometer strapped to his chest. In the bag is an experimental device for collating and analyzing data generated by all those sensors. Singer says,
The devices are a taste of the not-so-distant future, when the monitoring tools now typical of a hospital's intensive-care unit will be transformed into wearable gadgets that are unobtrusive and effortless to use.
They don't seem to have gotten to the unobtrusive part yet.
The start page contains links to the writings, video, photo gallery, and a list of resource sites. A blog post I found particularly engaging--besides the one in which Singer discovers that her cat is a major sleep-disturber--is one in which she discusses apps that didn't work for her. They may be available in future, but she pointed out the current absence of tools for integrating and analyzing data from multiple devices. Singer observes:
For the most part, individual self-tracking is limited to simple experiments that examine the effect of one variable on a single output. But if self-tracking tools are supposed to be able to help us understand and change our behavior in the real world, they need to be more sophisticated.
SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY, FORMERLY KNOWN AS GENETIC ENGINEERING/BIOTECHNOLOGY. Also from Tech Review, this time the Editor's Blog, Katherine Bourzac reports on a new DARPA program that will invest in, and develop, synthetic biology projects. The hed is semi-alarming: "DARPA Wants Artificial Life Forms."
The announced goal is pretty ambitious, even for DARPA, which gave us (sometimes to our rue) the Internet. The agency, whose acronym is short for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and whose domain name includes the sobering extension .mil, says it is getting into synthetic biology "in a big way." Its simple desire is to use synthetic biology to revolutionize materials science.
Synthetic biology, in case you're wondering, is an updated version of what used to be called genetic engineering and sometimes biotechnology, wherein cells are constructed to make something useful. Useful to people, that is, not necessarily to the cells. Synthetic biologists have just been meeting at Stanford, the first get-together since 2008.
Erika Check Hayden was at the meeting, and at her blog on the network Last Word on Nothing quotes a synthetic biologist describing his field thus: "The hallmark of synthetic biology is a lack of respect for species barriers."
The claim in Bourzac's post is that synthetic biologists have made great strides. That appears to depend on what you count as great, or even a stride. Hayden is more cautious, noting that the field has not accomplished much for some years--although she also notes that the data-to-hype ratio has improved since 2008, and describes some successes.
Ian Sample was at the meeting too and reports at the Guardian blog Notes&Theories on a partial success at Harvard, where the goal is to get yeast to produce lysergic acid, a very profitable precursor of LSD and drugs with more obvious therapeutic applications.
I suspect that the term "synthetic biology" was adopted at least in part for cosmetic reasons, as a way of jettisoning the historically worrisome connotations of "genetic engineering". A concern dating from the earliest genetic engineering days circa 1973 is what havoc might ensue if an artificial organism hopped the fence at the lab and went walkabout.
The genetic engineers took precautions, and so far as is known, nothing hugely dangerous has happened, although some crop plants produced by genetic engineering, notably corn, have wandered a bit. These escaped from fields outdoors, not labs where conditions are more controllable.
But Sample reported renewed concerns consequent on researchers' inclination to share synthetic biology materials freely. He also reported on one gripping (if theoretical) solution: make organisms with genetic material that is neither RNA nor DNA. These creatures would be
isolated from the natural environment by virtue of what amounts to a genetic firewall. How well it might work is so far unknown.
That idea surely blows arsenic bacteria out of the water.
Nearly 40 years ago, worries among the genetic engineers themselves led to US government oversight and an official government-sponsored committee of scientists and others who made rules about how genetic engineering lab work should be done and what safety measures should be taken. Is that history about to repeat itself? Or will the fact that, despite the original panic, nothing much ever happened in the past mean a far more relaxed attitude toward regulation today? To say nothing of the political roadblocks attendant on attempts to regulate DARPA-funded research.
Yet today's tools for genetic tinkering are so much better than in 1973. Does that mean the potential for mischief as well as benefit is likely greater too? And, perhaps, an enhanced chance for the kind of bio-calamity a previous generation of scientists so feared?
