News on China's scientific and technological development.

manqiangrexue

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
SamuraiBlue said:
This is actually a very dangerous technology since it is simple technology which can be done in a high school lab providing terrorist with possible bio-based WMD that can be made in their kitchen.
If you think pressure cooker time bombs are scary now we may face an aerosol canister tied up on to a toy drone delivering the bio-weapon fumigating from above.
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Explain how terrorists will use this technology. And don't say they will create genetically modified T-cells that attack normal human tissue and go around injecting people with them.

I know you kept it vague to avoid being wrong, but it didn't work. I've never ever seen a "high school lab" or a "kitchen" that can conduct transgenic research. I got my PhD in human genetics from the lab of a distinguished professor in a top 20 American university who publishes in Nature and we have to order our transgenic mice for tens of thousands of dollars per line.
 
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taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
Blackstone said:
It's a first for China, but I'm not comfortable with human DNA manipulation, yet. I'm not against medicine based on genetic engineering, but I'd rather they slow down a bit and do more research on animals before using them on people.

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for a dying cancer patient and his/her loved ones, everything and anything worth a try. I am against genetic engineering on human to make someone taller, prettier etc, but about life and death of a loved one I vote for the tech.
 
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taxiya

Brigadier
Registered Member
SamuraiBlue said:
This is actually a very dangerous technology since it is simple technology which can be done in a high school lab providing terrorist with possible bio-based WMD that can be made in their kitchen.
If you think pressure cooker time bombs are scary now we may face an aerosol canister tied up on to a toy drone delivering the bio-weapon fumigating from above.
Click to expand...
If it is so simple tech that someone can do in his kitchen, why is it a first? why it is only in 2016 to be done? Why no other country has done it already? (First in US planned in 2017).

So, you surely did not mean it being simple. So, why don't you say straight what you wanted to say? That is to stretch it to connect to terrorist's kitchen. I call your post a "well" packaged propaganda piece.
 
vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
Blackstone said:
It's a first for China, but I'm not comfortable with human DNA manipulation, yet. I'm not against medicine based on genetic engineering, but I'd rather they slow down a bit and do more research on animals before using them on people.

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SamuraiBlue said:
This is actually a very dangerous technology since it is simple technology which can be done in a high school lab providing terrorist with possible bio-based WMD that can be made in their kitchen.
If you think pressure cooker time bombs are scary now we may face an aerosol canister tied up on to a toy drone delivering the bio-weapon fumigating from above.
Click to expand...

t2contra said:
@vesicles ,

Care to comment?
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Just came across these posts...

CRISPR-Cas9 is a new genome editing technology that allows modification of endogenous genes more efficiently than previous methods. Note that I said "more efficiently than previous methods". Genome editing is not new. In fact, people have been doing it since we understood the structures of DNA. Many times, the genes being edited are human DNA. In fact, we have little choice but to use human genes in our experiments because using genes of other species lack "physiological relevance" and will get our grants canned...

We actually use several different techniques in the lab to do exactly that, including using lentiviral vectors (part of HIV virus) combined with sometimes heavily modified human DNA. The idea is to use the part of the HIV virus as a vehicle to infect host cells with our desired genes. Yep, we do it in the lab all the time. And we just recently started using CRISPR-Cas9 method. It is incredible. Maybe too effective (won't bore you with details)... Of course, directly modifying human genes in live patients has not been done before. that is why this is a huge news. I don't think anyone knows how it will ends at this point. That's why the procedures done in China has simply been to test safety.

Is it safe? No it is not. Even using the well-established lentiviral system, we must be very careful. Even though the manufacturers say that it is safe because most parts of the HIV virus have been taken out. We still don't know if it'll start replicating the modified human DNA (often highly oncogenic) carried by the lentiviral vector if it gets on the handlers. We typically use designated tissue culture hoods for handling viral stuff and multi-layered steps to make sure none of the stuff gets out.

Once in a while, I come across with labs that simply don't care. they use the same equipment to handle everything, viral and non-viral, and don't bother isolating their viral stuff from the rest of the lab. Since most of the DNAs we handle have fluorescent tags, we often joke that if we start seeing people glowing green, we are in trouble. So far, we haven't seen anybody glowing green. So still good, I guess...

All these technologies would be highly complicated. This is not something that someone in a garage can whip up in a couple days. You need years of training to be able to handle these things. You need to be highly trained to be able to at least understand the mechanism behind the technology before even applying it. And these technologies are not cheap either. You typically have to burn > $1000 per day just to maintain an active lab, let alone figuring out something effective enough to actually hurt people. To accomplish any project involving these technologies will need millions of dollars of funding because everything about these technologies, including equipment, material and manpower, is expensive. And none of the material can be easily purchased on an open market. So I would not worry about some terrorists would be able to do any of this.
 
Equation

Equation

Lieutenant General
vesicles said:
We actually use several different techniques in the lab to do exactly that, including using lentiviral vectors (part of HIV virus) combined with sometimes heavily modified human DNA. The idea is to use the part of the HIV virus as a vehicle to infect host cells with our desired genes. Yep, we do it in the lab all the time. And we just recently started using CRISPR-Cas9 method. It is incredible. Maybe too effective (won't bore you with details)... Of course, directly modifying human genes in live patients has not been done before. that is why this is a huge news. I don't think anyone knows how it will ends at this point. That's why the procedures done in China has simply been to test safety.
QUOTE]

Thank you Vesicles for your knowledgeable scientific explanations. With that said, can any other virus other than part of the HIV virus can be use as a vehicle to infect the host cells that can fight cancer?
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vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
Equation said:
Thank you Vesicles for your knowledgeable scientific explanations. With that said, can any other virus other than part of the HIV virus can be use as a vehicle to infect the host cells that can fight cancer?
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Yep. Many viruses can be used. retrovirus would be another one widely used.
 
vesicles

vesicles

Colonel
To give an idea of how expensive some of the key materials can be, some of the reagents cost about $1000 per 10 microliter. Keep in mind that a drop of water is about 5 times larger than that (50 microliter). And many of these reagents are simply used to verify stuff... This is not a something a high school lab or any ill-equipped college lab can afford...
 
Blackstone

Blackstone

Brigadier
Supercomputing in 2017 will be an interesting year. Japan is working on a 30petaflops faster machine and US is working on one more than twice as fast (200-250 petaflops). The race is on.

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Japan is reportedly planning to build a 130-petaflops supercomputer costing $173 million (£131 million) that is due for completion next year.

Satoshi Sekiguchi, a director-general at Japan's ‎National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, where the computer will be built, told
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: "As far as we know, there is nothing out there that is as fast."

According to the Top 500 site listing the
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, the current number-crunching champ is China's 93-petaflops Sunway TaihuLight, followed by its Tianhe-2, coming in at 34 petaflops. Japan's most powerful system at the moment is a 13.5 petaflops machine. Overall, Japan has the fourth-largest number of supercomputers in the Top 500 listing, after the US, China, and Germany.

The UK comes in sixth; the most powerful system in the country is housed at the Met Office, and has a max performance of 6.8 petaflops.

Like 498 out of the top 500 systems, Japan's 27 supercomputers in the Top 500 list
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, and it is highly likely the new system will do so as well. It is not yet known who will construct the system for the Japanese government—bidding for the project is open until December 8.

Japan's new machine will be used in the field of Artificial Intelligence, which explains its rather boring name: "AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure," or ABCI. Sekiguchi told Reuters that the system will also be used to "tap medical records to develop new services and applications."

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Apparently the plan is to allow Japan's corporations to book time on the supercomputer for a fee, thus freeing them from the need to use the services of US companies like Google and Microsoft.

The investment in the massive system is part of a wider move to boost Japan's standing in the world of technology. In recent years, it has been rather overshadowed by developments in South Korea and China.

Even though Japan hopes to leap to the top of the supercomputer league table with the new ABCI, China is doubtless constructing more powerful machines that may yet deprive Japan of that honour.
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manqiangrexue

manqiangrexue

Brigadier
Blackstone said:
Supercomputing in 2017 will be an interesting year. Japan is working on a 30petaflops faster machine and US is working on one more than twice as fast (200-250 petaflops). The race is on.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!
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Interesting article! However, the first paragraph says that the system is due for completion next year while the 5th paragraph says that bidding to build such a system has not yet concluded (will conclude 12/08). That sounds a little weird. Anyway, Sierra and Summit (America's 2 supercomputers) are due in 2018. We'll see if China has made any progress by then. I'm personally hoping that their exascale computer could be online within 2 years.They've already started construction.
 
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