In a message dated 99-11-14 18:20:30 EST, bradbury@ilr.genebee.msu.su (Robert J. Bradbury) wrote:
> Greg wrote:
>
> > The best
> > suggestion we could come up with was to try to emulate the process that
> > occurred with genetic technology in the 1970s, where a regime of
> > self-regulation developed and was slowly adopted into regulatory law.
>
> Actually Greg, I'm not sure this is the case. My recollection of the
> mid-late-'70s was there was a lot of debate over whether or not these
> things should be regulated and whether or not there were any dangers.
> After looking at it for a while the scientists came up with the relative
> scale of dangers and implemented with the P1-P4 scaling system that is
> in practice today (P1 is relatively non contained, P3 is for bugs
> such as HIV and has positive pressure labs and throw away materials
> and clothing, while P4 is for Ebola and leans strongly towards
> remote-manipulation). [I've worked in a P3 lab.]
>
> Now, I suspect the "regulatory" penalties for violating these are
> not particularly severe, but common sense and fear of loss of
> reputation keep scientists following them.
>
> I imagine that a clever group could review the biotech containment
> levels and adapt them to nanotechnology fairly easily.
Actually, we looked into the history of the P1-4 containment regime pretty closely before our meeting - both how the original Asilomar Conference came to be and its aftermath. The P 1-4 regime is a matter of regulatory law in that it is now known as the "NIH Guidelines" and have been adopted by the US military and the equivalent agencies of a number of other countries. However, you're right that reputation tends to be the strongest factor in spreading and maintaining the bio-containment guidelines' force and effect.
We're hoping that a similar process can be recapitulated with nanowork.
> > In short, the group suggested prescriptions of release of freely
> autonomous
> > replicators into the environment and some technical safeguards against
> > mutation.
>
> In my mind, you have to divide the problem into wet biotech & hard
nanotech.
> We do now release into the environment autonomous replicators that we
> have patched in various ways. The interesting thing is that these
> have precious little in the way of ECC or failsafe mechanisms.
> What is going to be interesting is that our ability to create highly
> complex organisms from the ground up is going to advance by leaps
> and bounds in the near future. It is doubtful whether we can predict
> all of the consequences of the release of such organisms and so we
> need to be thinking hard about preventing self-replication, adding ECC
> and failsafes. [I've got some ideas about this but I can't discuss
> them.]
I suggest you talk with Ralph Merkle about this - he's thought about it a lot in terms of "hard" nano and some of the approaches he's thought of seem to be applicable to biostuff, as well.
> > The group was not optimistic that these measures could completely and
> > reliably prevent a nanotech disaster. The best hope was that one could
be
> > forestalled until defensive technologies caught up with and surpassed
> > offensive ones (which the technologists believed would precede effective
> > countermeasures - thus creating a "zone of danger" of indeterminate
length)
>
> Designing self-contained highly "intelligent", reliable nanotech offensive
> weapons that can tolerate macroscale defenses *will NOT* be easy.
BTW -- when will you be back in the States?
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"Civilization is protest against nature;
progress requires us to take control of evolution."
Thomas Huxley