Living in a Fool's Paradise: Spritely Foundations of the Modern World

A security researcher was able to locate and map more than 10,000 industrial control systems hooked up to the public internet, including water and sewage plants, and found that many could be open to easy hack attacks, due to lax security practices.

...Leverett used the SHODAN search engine developed by John Matherly, which allows users to find internet-connected devices using simple search terms. He then matched that data to information from vulnerability databases to find known security holes and exploits that could be used to hijack the systems or crash them. He used Timemap to chart the information on Google maps, along with red markers noting brand devices that are known to have security holes in them. He described his methodology in a paper (.pdf) about the project.

Leverett found 10,358 devices connected through a search of two years worth of data in the SHODAN database _Wired

Of course, in China and Russia, teams of hackers are paid well to find ways of exploiting security weaknesses in government and industrial infrastructure. The US NSA is on that like buzzing insects on excreta.

Your life depends upon the smooth working of industrial, commercial, governmental, and municipal infrastructure. If something mucks that up, you will suffer the consequences.

Leverett’s tool shows how easy it is for a dedicated attacker or just a recreational hacker to find vulnerable targets online to sabotage.

...“Vendors say they don’t need to do security testing because the systems are never connected to the internet; it’s a very dangerous claim,” Leverett said last week at the S4 conference, which focuses on the security of Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition systems (SCADA) that are used for everything from controlling critical functions at power plants and water treatment facilities to operating the assembly lines at food processing and automobile assembly plants.

“Vendors expect systems to be on segregated networks — they comfort themselves with this. They say in their documentation to not put it on an open network. On the other side, asset owners swear that they are not connected,” Leverett said. But how do they know? _Wired

Here is more about the network threat to vital utilities.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. It is likely that you do not really want to know about the many vulnerabilities that underlie your existence. Perhaps it is best to trust the media, trust your professors, trust the things people tell you. What possible good could come from trying to look too deeply into such things as the nuts and bolts which make modern high tech civilisations possible?

And they tell us that the world can run on big wind castles in the sky and high-rise buildings covered with solar glass and solar paint. All we need in order for it all to work -- to turn the innate unreliability and intermittency of wind and solar into a rock solid foundation for civilisation -- is "the smart grid" and its ultraconnectivity. What could go wrong?

Shodan search engine

Sudden US Collapse Syndrome: When Complexity Fails

To understand complexity, it is helpful to examine how natural scientists use the concept. Think of the spontaneous organization of termites, which allows them to construct complex hills and nests, or the fractal geometry of water molecules as they form intricate snowflakes. Human intelligence itself is a complex system, a product of the interaction of billions of neurons in the central nervous system. _NiallFerguson_LATimes_via_ImpactLab

The government of the United States has lasted a relatively long time, compared to other governments. It was based upon a resilient foundation -- the US Constitution. But power-hungry politicians and judges have clawed away at the limitations imposed upon them by the constitution to the point that the great document is a shadow of its former self.

The clumsy and cracking megalith calling itself the US government is just a well-placed hammer blow or two away from outright fracture and dismemberment. The massive bureaucracy is too top-heavy, too complex, too labyrinthine, too lazy, incompetent and self-serving.

Most great empires have a nominal central authority -- either a hereditary emperor or an elected president -- but in practice the power of any individual ruler is a function of the network of economic, social and political relations over which he or she presides. As such, empires exhibit many of the characteristics of other complex adaptive systems -- including the tendency to move from stability to instability quite suddenly.

The most recent and familiar example of precipitous decline is the collapse of the Soviet Union. With the benefit of hindsight, historians have traced all kinds of rot within the Soviet system back to the Brezhnev era and beyond. Perhaps, as the historian and political scientist Stephen Kotkin has argued, it was only the high oil prices of the 1970s that "averted Armageddon." But this did not seem to be the case at the time. The Soviet nuclear arsenal was larger than the U.S. stockpile. And governments in what was then called the Third World, from Vietnam to Nicaragua, had been tilting in the Soviets' favor for most of the previous 20 years.

Yet, less than five years after Mikhail Gorbachev took power, the Soviet imperium in central and Eastern Europe had fallen apart, followed by the Soviet Union itself in 1991. If ever an empire fell off a cliff, rather than gently declining, it was the one founded by Lenin.

If empires are complex systems that sooner or later succumb to sudden and catastrophic malfunctions, what are the implications for the United States today? First, debating the stages of decline may be a waste of time -- it is a precipitous and unexpected fall that should most concern policymakers and citizens. Second, most imperial falls are associated with fiscal crises. Alarm bells should therefore be ringing very loudly indeed as the United States contemplates a deficit for 2010 of more than $1.5 trillion -- about 11% of GDP, the biggest since World War II. _Ferguson

Obama's unprecedented deficits will only grow larger in the near to mid-term future. Built-in entitlements alone assure a massive snowballing of debt. With the addition of the huge new entitlements Obama and Pelosi are pushing through Congress, the death knells could begin to toll much sooner than anyone expects.

Worse yet, Obama and Pelosi have done everything possible to shut down the development of reliable new energy sources for the US -- guaranteeing the continued stagnation of US industry and commerce. Massive new debt plus the choking off of new economic activity. A recipe for disaster in the making.

One day, a seemingly random piece of bad news -- perhaps a negative report by a rating agency -- will make the headlines during an otherwise quiet news cycle. Suddenly, it will be not just a few policy wonks who worry about the sustainability of U.S. fiscal policy but the public at large, not to mention investors abroad. It is this shift that is crucial: A complex adaptive system is in big trouble when its component parts lose faith in its viability. _Ferguson

The American voters elected the current clown troupe that governs the US. Americans love clowns, perhaps a bit too much.

It will be difficult to reverse the dysfunctional trend, because each new generation of American children -- future voters -- is now being taught according to the curriculum of William Ayers, friend of Obama, "former radical", and just one of a host of professors in American academia who hate the US and would like to bring it down. This all happened while most Americans were looking the other way.

Americans were once self-governed. They took responsibility for their own governance. But over time a massive corps of professional politicians and bureaucrats moved to Washington DC to take over the task from average Americans. Then, the army of bureaucrats became massive, unionised, and strong enough to perpetuate the rule of sympathetic elected legislators and executives. These legislators and executives put sympathetic judges in place to complete the self-perpetuating triumvirate of monolithic government. It's all a bit tipsy now, but the monolith has become the default position the moment the American public takes its eye off the ball, and stops participating in its own governance.

That monolith is chipped, cracked, peeling, and subject to catastrophic separation if not re-sculpted to a smaller and more workable size. But that won't happen because too many Americans are dependent upon the monolith being the way it is.

What is true for the US government is also true for other governments around the world, which lack the built-in resilience which the US Constitution has provided up until now. Catastrophic failure. Debt, demographic implosion, dysgenics . . . the dynamite is ready to blow...just light a fuse.

An Alternative to Conventional Politics: C A S

The US is in a deep economic morass, and the smarter people have come to understand that more conventional politics will only make things worse. The federal government's problems and sovereign debt is bad enough, but the problems at the state level are even worse -- and more problematic to Joe and Jane Voter.

The federal bailout and stimulus were supposed to help, but there are limits to what politics can accomplish. Public sector employees are increasingly unionised, heavily supporting Democratic Party candidates and causes. Mr. Obama attempted to reward the states and cities under particularly strong union control, but has little to show for the $trillion spent.

Public sector unions are causing some serious -- probably intractable -- problems for many states. For example, public sector unions are killing California. Illinois' public employee unions are not doing that state much good either. Thanks to public employee unions, across the nation state and local pension plans are on a path for failure.   There are perhaps $2 trillion in underfunded pension promises at the state and local level.

State and local governments are never going to come up with that $2 trillion. The federal government doesn't have that kind of money either -- outside of IOUs. And even if the federal government bailed out the state and local pension funds, such a bailout would only encourage politicians and bureaucrats to play out the same scenario over and over again -- until no more bailouts were forthcoming.

So what is the big alternative to conventional politics? If the problems of modern politics have grown too complex for public planners to deal with, maybe they are working with the wrong paradigm. Eric S. Raymond suggests that complex adaptive systems (CAS) theory offers answers that conventional politics is fresh out of.

The answer is, I think implied by three words: Adapt, decentralize, and harden. Levels of environmental complexity that defeat planning are readily handled by complex adaptive systems. A CAS doesn’t try to plan against the future; instead, the agents in it try lots of adaptive strategies and the successful ones propagate. This is true whether the CAS we’re speaking of is a human immune system, a free market, or an ecology.


Since we can no longer count on being able to plan, we must adapt. When planning doesn’t work, centralization of authority is at best useless and usually harmful. And we must harden: that is, we need to build robustness and the capacity to self-heal and self-defend at every level of the system. I think the rising popular sense of this accounts for the prepper phenomenon. Unlike old-school survivalists, the preppers aren’t gearing up for apocalypse; they’re hedging against the sort of relatively transient failures in the power grid, food distribution, and even civil order that we can expect during the lag time between planning failures and CAS responses.


CAS hardening of the financial system is, comparatively speaking, much easier. Almost trivial, actually. About all it requires is that we re-stigmatize the carrying of debt at more than a very small proportion of assets. By anybody. With that pressure, there would tend to be enough reserve at all levels of the financial system that it would avoid cascade failures in response to unpredictable shocks.


Cycling back to terrorism, the elite planner’s response to threats like underwear bombs is to build elaborate but increasingly brittle security systems in which airline passengers are involved only as victims. The CAS response would be to arm the passengers, concentrate on fielding bomb-sniffers so cheap that hundreds of thousands of civilians can carry one, and pay bounties on dead terrorists.


Yes, this circles back to my previous post about the militia obligation. I’m now arguing for this obligation to be seen as, actually, larger than arming for defense (although that’s a core, inescapable part of it). I’m arguing that we need to rediscover CAS behavior in politics an economics — not because financiers or bureaucrats are dangerous or evil, but because even with the best will in the world they can’t cope. The time when they could out-think and out-plan the challenges of the day operating as an elite has passed. _ESR

This is actually an intriguing sketch -- although it needs a great deal of fleshing out. Al Fin political scientists have long argued that the US government is too large and too centralised to deal with the most important needs of its citizens -- protection from violence, fraud, and coercion. In fact it is the federal government itself that often represents the greatest threat to the US citizen of violence, fraud, or coercion.

De-centralising government, and focusing a citizens attention more toward local problems and obligations would be a helpful preliminary step toward better governance.   Empowering each citizen to defend himself, his home, and his locality, is another important preliminary step -- but one that will involve a significant change in psychology from mainstream acquired helplessness, psychological neoteny, and dependence upon authority.

Just as the USSR collapsed from its inability to command an increasingly complex society from the top down, so will the USA collapse if the current agenda of Obama - Pelosi reforms toward hypercentralisation of government are allowed to run their course.

Most university educated persons of our age have been academically lobotomised into a mindset of dependency upon a central authority.  That is the only way an absurd, counterfactual quasi-religion such as carbon hysteria could come so close to taking over much of the economy and politics of the developed world.  That is the only way that citizens of advanced western countries -- in the midst of one of the greatest demographic collapses in history -- could see their nations as suffering from overpopulation, and turn to anti-natalism as a remedy.   That is the only way that indigenous citizens of advanced nations could allow themselves to be held hostage to the unreasonable and hostile demands of illegitimate newcomers.  And it is the only way that productive citizens could allow themselves to be sucked dry -- to the point of being virtually incapable of supporting a family -- in order to support non-productive residents who are often illegal aliens, sometimes criminals, and almost never held responsible for their own actions.

Something radical will happen to change the current trends, regardless of how you vote in the next few elections.  There is no need for peak oil doom, no need for global warming doom, no need for eco-doom in any form.  All that is needed is for present trends of mis-governance to continue a little while longer.  Then, threads will fray and supports will snap apart.

You can prepare for that, if you understand what is going to happen, roughly speaking.  But there is no predicting how long the chaos of transition will last.  That makes a difference, in terms of preparation.

Al Fin historians and sociologists have been expecting this unraveling for a long time.  The election of Barack Obama is not the cause of it.  His election, along with the elections of large numbers of like-minded politicians at all levels of government, simply facilitated the excesses which accelerate the process.  Perhaps it is for the best, since it would have happened sooner or later.

But now, we need to face the facts that politics as usual -- regardless of which politician is elected or which party is in power -- will no longer be able to hold things together.  The forces of dissolution are too strong.

More on this topic in a later post.

The "Good Enough" Revolution Comes to Government?

The "good enough" revolution is about making things cheaper, easier to use, more reliable -- but not necessarily perfect. Examples of the "good enough revolution":

After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder—like the Single Use Digital Camera—had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage at a time when Sony, Panasonic, and Canon were launching camcorders capable of recording in 1080 hi-def. It had a minuscule viewing screen, no color-adjustment features, and only the most rudimentary controls. It didn't even have an optical zoom. But it was small (slightly bigger than a pack of smokes), inexpensive ($150, compared with $800 for a midpriced Sony), and so simple to operate—from recording to uploading—that pretty much anyone could figure it out in roughly 6.7 seconds.

...By reducing the size of audio files, MP3s allowed us to get music into our computers—and, more important, onto the Internet—at a manageable size. This in turn let us listen to, manage, and manipulate tracks on our PCs, carry thousands of songs in our pockets, purchase songs from our living rooms, and share tracks with friends and even strangers. And as it turned out, those benefits actually mattered a lot more to music lovers than the single measure of quality we had previously applied to recorded music—fidelity. It wasn't long before record labels were wringing their hands over declining CD sales.

...the MQ-1 Predator isn't much of a plane. Its top speed is a mere 135 miles per hour. It has an altitude ceiling of 25,000 feet. It carries only two 100-pound Hellfire missiles. It has a propeller.
_Wired

Yet the MQ-1 Predator is selling off the shelves. Because it is good enough to do the job. And then there are the cheap software legal services, and the mini-clinic storefront satellite offices, and so on.... Good enough is good enough.

You can think of it this way: 20 percent of the effort, features, or investment often delivers 80 percent of the value to consumers. That means you can drastically simplify a product or service in order to make it more accessible and still keep 80 percent of what users want—making it Good Enough—which is exactly what Kaiser [mini clinic] did.

....The phenomenon certainly won't stop with hospitals, lawyers, and military campaigns. As more and more industries move their business online, they too will find success in Good Enough tools that focus on maximizing accessibility. It's a reflection of our new value system. We've changed. To benefit from the MP3 effect, companies will have to change as well. _Wired

So when will this "good enough revolution" come to government? Since government sets the rules that the entire society functions under, it is critical for government to be responsive, reliable, and easy to understand and work with.

Unfortunately the trend in government is in the opposite direction, to larger size, more complexity, less reliability, and greater incomprehensibility. Governments are slow to react to new realities, and get stuck on outmoded and counter-productive solutions that only make things worse.

Simplicity, compactness, reliability, and responsiveness are traits that government should strive for. A good government would. But what we have is not good government, it is a growing monstrosity of destruction.

So what will it take to bring the "good enough revolution" to government?

More: Brian Wang thinks the good enough revolution may enable a future of abundance.

The Demise of Civilisation: Inevitable? Eventually

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Every civilisation meets its end eventually. The recent article in New Scientist "Why the Demise of Civilisation May be Inevitable" was meant to answer the question in a more immediate timeframe than "eventually."

Doomsday scenarios typically feature a knockout blow: a massive asteroid, all-out nuclear war or a catastrophic pandemic (see "The end of civilisation"). Yet there is another chilling possibility: what if the very nature of civilisation means that ours, like all the others, is destined to collapse sooner or later?

A few researchers have been making such claims for years. Disturbingly, recent insights from fields such as complexity theory suggest that they are right. It appears that once a society develops beyond a certain level of complexity it becomes increasingly fragile. Eventually, it reaches a point at which even a relatively minor disturbance can bring everything crashing down.

Some say we have already reached this point, and that it is time to start thinking about how we might manage collapse. Others insist it is not yet too late, and that we can - we must - act now to keep disaster at bay. ___NewScientist

Well, every civilisation that has had its day, has also had its night--its end. Sumeria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Inca, Maya, Aztec, and so on. What might be the Achilles' heel for our civilisation? And no, the answer is not Peak Oil, Global Warming, Armageddon, or any of the other religious and quasi-religious dime a dozen doomsdays that are floating around. The answer is much more interesting--and more real.

To keep growing, societies must keep solving problems as they arise. Yet each problem solved means more complexity. Success generates a larger population, more kinds of specialists, more resources to manage, more information to juggle - and, ultimately, less bang for your buck.

Eventually, says Tainter, the point is reached when all the energy and resources available to a society are required just to maintain its existing level of complexity. Then when the climate changes or barbarians invade, overstretched institutions break down and civil order collapses. What emerges is a less complex society, which is organised on a smaller scale or has been taken over by another group.

Tainter sees diminishing returns as the underlying reason for the collapse of all ancient civilisations, from the early Chinese dynasties to the Greek city state of Mycenae. These civilisations relied on the solar energy that could be harvested from food, fodder and wood, and from wind. When this had been stretched to its limit, things fell apart. ___NS

So modern western civilisation has gotten bigger in every way than any previous civilisation, and more complex. We have computers and nuclear reactors and skies full of people at 30,000 feet traveling above 500 miles per hour. We furnish our homes and refrigerators with products from every part of the globe. We have one manned space station, with plans for more--and more ambitious plans to go to Mars and beyond.

Have we bitten off more than our monkey brains can chew?

"To run a hierarchy, managers cannot be less complex than the system they are managing," Bar-Yam says. As complexity increases, societies add ever more layers of management but, ultimately in a hierarchy, one individual has to try and get their head around the whole thing, and this starts to become impossible. At that point, hierarchies give way to networks in which decision-making is distributed. We are at this point.

This shift to decentralised networks has led to a widespread belief that modern society is more resilient than the old hierarchical systems. "I don't foresee a collapse in society because of increased complexity," says futurologist and industry consultant Ray Hammond. "Our strength is in our highly distributed decision making." This, he says, makes modern western societies more resilient than those like the old Soviet Union, in which decision making was centralised. ___NS

So we are a networked civilisation, and that makes us more resilient? Some "experts" disagree. They say that when interconnection reaches a certain level--particularly in financial networks--that a loss of one part can bring everything down.

Scientists in other fields are also warning that complex systems are prone to collapse. Similar ideas have emerged from the study of natural cycles in ecosystems, based on the work of ecologist Buzz Holling, now at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Some ecosystems become steadily more complex over time: as a patch of new forest grows and matures, specialist species may replace more generalist species, biomass builds up and the trees, beetles and bacteria form an increasingly rigid and ever more tightly coupled system.

"It becomes an extremely efficient system for remaining constant in the face of the normal range of conditions," says Homer-Dixon. But unusual conditions - an insect outbreak, fire or drought - can trigger dramatic changes as the impact cascades through the system. The end result may be the collapse of the old ecosystem and its replacement by a newer, simpler one.

Globalisation is resulting in the same tight coupling and fine-tuning of our systems to a narrow range of conditions, he says. Redundancy is being systematically eliminated as companies maximise profits. Some products are produced by only one factory worldwide. Financially, it makes sense, as mass production maximises efficiency. Unfortunately, it also minimises resilience. "We need to be more selective about increasing the connectivity and speed of our critical systems," says Homer-Dixon. "Sometimes the costs outweigh the benefits."

Tainter is not convinced that even new technology will save civilisation in the long run. "I sometimes think of this as a 'faith-based' approach to the future," he says. Even a society reinvigorated by cheap new energy sources will eventually face the problem of diminishing returns once more. Innovation itself might be subject to diminishing returns, or perhaps absolute limits.

Studies of the way cities grow by Luis Bettencourt of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, support this idea. His team's work suggests that an ever-faster rate of innovation is required to keep cities growing and prevent stagnation or collapse, and in the long run this cannot be sustainable.

The stakes are high. Historically, collapse always led to a fall in population. "Today's population levels depend on fossil fuels and industrial agriculture," says Tainter. "Take those away and there would be a reduction in the Earth's population that is too gruesome to think about."

If industrialised civilisation does fall, the urban masses - half the world's population - will be most vulnerable. Much of our hard-won knowledge could be lost, too. "The people with the least to lose are subsistence farmers," Bar-Yam observes, and for some who survive, conditions might actually improve. Perhaps the meek really will inherit the Earth.

Complexity of systems is a fairly young field of study. Most of the people quoted in the article do not actually know what they are talking about, not really. They are speaking in abstract terms about theoretical problems that may or may not occur. Academics and think tank scholars--like journalists and politicians--are of limited use in dealing with real world problems. If they were competent and effective in the real world, most of them would probably be doing something else. Still, a wise person looks for ideas in a wide array of places.

It is fairly obvious that our complex electronic global financial systems are vulnerable to disruption. In fact, in the next large scale war, one of the first casualties of large nations will be their financial and communications networks. Satellites will be lost, landlines and seafloor cables will be cut, and computer centers will be sabotaged. Yes, there are backups and redundant systems and databases. But access will be a problem for large numbers. For monkey-brained humans, large scale panic sets in fairly easily.

An abrupt cutoff of fuel for ground, rail, and air transportation could likewise lead to large scale hardship and civil disturbances. A loss of electrical power would leave tens or hundreds of millions in complete turmoil. Most cities have only a few days worth of food inside their borders. Rather than confronting these important vulnerabilities, most leaders tend to obscure them and steer public discussion away to other topics.

It was fairly easy for two handfuls of young religious fanatics to shut down the North American air system for several days in September of 2001. It would be just as easy today.

Modern laboratory tools for biology and chemistry provide many ways to turn an open, trusting society into a shut-down, quivering, fearful society. Soon nanotechnological tools will make even more devastatingly deadly--and invisible--weapons readily available. It is easy to send modern western media-centered societies into paralytic states of fear.

We do not need to think about what Apophis may do in 2036 to understand that our societies are vulnerable. But our civilisation? Not so much. We may have to give up some of our openness in the public sphere for a while. We may have to put up with far more intrusive security measures, temporarily, than the worst schemes ever considered by Bush and Cheney. But the civilisation would survive.

The greatest threat to our civilisation is also the greatest promise--the possibility that something better will be devised. That better civilisation will have its vulnerabilities, yes. But the participants in the next level should have some important upgrades to their monkey-brains which will allow them to consider more contingencies, and devise better ways to deal with them.

Even our best thinkers can be quite slipshod at times. We have computers to help us with that, but some problems of pompous overreach cannot be compensated or corrected by computers. We can use human-level AI, certainly. But we need to become smarter, more than our machines. If we put our fate trustingly into the hands of machines that we can never understand, have we not just traded up to an even more dangerous vulnerability?

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Mind The Enchantment

The human mind is subject to various forms of enchantment. Not a magical enchantment, but more like a trance, sometimes pleasant, sometimes not.

Because our minds are "self organised", they are subject to falling into distinctly different states, at particular "bifurcations."An illustration of this phenomenan is the "bistability" of particular images. Following the series of images above, can you say exactly where the transition occurs? What if you saw only that one image?

But the deeper you dive into the mechanisms of consciousness, the larger the number of possible mind states, so that bistability becomes tristability and so on. Just the single topic of synaptic plasticity quickly acquires a complexity to confound most scientists.

Hypnosis takes advantage of the inherent ambiguity of consciousness, and "adjusts the weighting" of various competing states of mind. Since mind is inherently a self-organizing, ongoing trance-like process, it is often likened to "riding the wave," or staying on the "bucking bronco." From the moment of waking to the release of sleep, that "blinking cursor" of consciousness compels us to provide answers and solutions, even to unknown or nonexistent problems.

For anyone who is curious about some of the underlying neurophilosophy of consciousness, I suggests looking over this article by Edelman and Tononi--two prolific and respected students of consciousness. Or look over this overview of Models of Consciousness from Scholarpedia.

Understanding human consciousness is difficult enough. But a lot of people wish to create intelligence in machines. This dream goes back hundreds, if not thousands, of years. But since the computer age beginning in the 1940s, multiple generations of ingenious scientists of mind and computation have dashed their skulls against the wall of computational complexity (not to mention a lack of understanding of the complexity of human cognition or intentionality).

Each person experiences a consciousness of an enchanted mind. Not a mind of equations and computations. Rather a mind of metaphor and narrative. An entranced mind where real world expediencies intrude on waking dreams. Complex trances of strange attractors and slippery bistable conscious surfaces.

There would be no point in trying to emulate all of that in a machine. Not unless that is the only way we can find to create a conscious machine. Perhaps it is better to settle for machines that only seem conscious or intelligent, as viewed by a simple Turing test. After all, we are only looking for help in making better decisions and devising a better world for smarter, healthier, longer-lived people.

We may be entranced, but why burden our machines with all of that? It is our trance that we wish to enjoy far into the future, not the trance of a machine.

Complexity: When Computer Models Simply Will Not Do

Biological systems are too complex to be well-modeled by computers, currently. Medical personnel are on the front lines, saving lives. Society requires a far higher level of certainty of results from medical research than can be achieved by today's computer models.

Most biological models make use of lab animals such as mice or rats. But increasingly, acellular models are used. A fascinating type of biochip that allows placing various cellular components on a silicon dioxide surface--connecting them by microfluidic channels--promises to provide increasingly ingenious acellular models for biomedical research.

Now, in a major breakthrough, a group of researchers at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, led by Roy Bar-Ziv, in collaboration with Margherita Morpurgo from the University of Padova in Italy, have designed a molecule affectionately called the “daisy” that is able to bind genes onto chips in miniature patterned arrays.

Bar-Ziv and co-workers have been able to use the daisy to pattern tiny regions of double-stranded DNA onto silicon dioxide surfaces. Indeed, these immobilized genes are able to conduct their business on patterned silicon substrates without the need for living cells. These biochips can act as protein microtraps, selectively trapping specific proteins from crude cell extracts with high spatial resolution. Moreover, the gene sequences immobilized on the biochips can be used for the on-chip production of proteins by transcription/translation processes such as those occurring within cells.

Bar-Ziv and his colleagues have also demonstrated the integration of these systems with microfluidics. Integration with flow systems is of interest for the fabrication of miniature assembly lines on chips, wherein proteins can be synthesized on the chips and transported to their final destinations through microfluidic channels.

In a remarkable demonstration of the utility of the daisy approach, the researchers have patterned two different genes as alternating stripes on a biochip. The protein synthesized on one stripe diffuses to the second stripe where it regulates the synthesis of a second protein. More complex artificial gene circuits can be envisioned by extending this protocol, and thus the biochips may be able to carry out complex cascaded information-processing functions, mimicking those in living organisms.

Source.


While computer modeling may be sufficient for political organisations such as the IPCC and Greenpeace to predict an apocalyptic future for the earth, for down-to-earth bio-researchers who absolutely must provide reliable results, computers are simply not good enough. But bio-engineers, bio-physicists, and molecular biologists working with nanotechnologists are growing increasingly clever in designing useful models that do not use lab animals.

It will be many years before biomedical research no longer needs to sacrifice large numbers of lab animals for the saving of human life. But it is encouraging to see the creation of "artificial cells" on silicon, and it is fascinating to contemplate the possibilities they offer.