Re: [Biofuel] Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home
http://www.precaution.org/lib/09/prn_biohackers_unstitch_life.081227.htm From: The Times (London, U.K.) December 27, 2008 Biohackers attempt to unstitch the fabric of life [Rachel's introduction: As we enter the new year, an astonishing new social phenomenon has emerged: amateur genetic engineers are working at home to improve various forms of life via genetic engineering. They call themselves biohackers and they acknowledge the danger of unleashing a genetically altered Frankenstein's monster on the public, but they argue that it was DIYers [do it yourselfers] who brought about America's other great technological revolution: that of the personal computer.] By Chris Ayres in New York At a loss for things to do this woozy post-Christmas weekend? Well, if you have access to a garage or basement -- or even just some extra room on your dining table -- you could always take up a hobby that is exploding in popularity across the Atlantic: genetic engineering. Or, to use the more fashionable term, biohacking. Anecdotal evidence suggests that thousands of Americans now spend their free time consulting the internet, jerry-rigging laboratory equipment, and tinkering with the very foundations of life on Earth as we know it. Meredith Patterson is trying to rewire the DNA of yoghurt bacteria in her living room so that they will glow green to signal the presence of melamine People can really work on projects for the good of humanity while learning about something they want to learn about in the process, says Meredith Patterson, 31, a computer programmer by day turned biohacker by night. In her San Francisco dining room Ms Patterson is currently attempting to rewire the DNA of yoghurt bacteria so that they will glow green to signal the presence of melamine, the chemical that infamously turned Chinese-made baby milk formula into poison. Ms Patterson says that she picked up the basics of genetic engineering from scientific papers and Google. All she needed for her project was a jar of yoghurt, some jellyfish DNA -- purchased online for less than $100 (65 pounds sterling) from a biological supply company -- and a few pieces of lab equipment (including a DNA analyser), which she constructed herself for less than $25. Eventually, say experts, such equipment could be sold in kits: a kind of My Little Genetically-Altered Lifeform playset for adults. While acknowledging the potential risk of unleashing a genetically altered Frankenstein's monster on the public, biohackers argue that it was DIYers [do it yourselfers] who brought about America's other great technological revolution: that of the personal computer. Indeed, Apple and Google were created in hobbyists' garages, and have since gone on to change millions of lives for the better while contributing billions of dollars to the global economy. Regardless, the growth in popularity of biohacking seems unstoppable. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, an organisation named DIYbio is busy setting up a community lab where people can use specialist equipment such as a freezer capable of storing bacteria at minus 62C. The group's co-founder, Mackenzie Cowell, 24, who studied biology at university, predicts that some biohackers are likely to make breakthroughs in everything from vaccines to super-efficient fuels. Others will simply fool around, he says: for example, using squid genes to make tattoos glow in the dark. All of which he believes will ultimately benefit humanity. We should try to make science more sexy and more fun and more like a game, he says. Alas, not everyone agrees. Jim Thomas, of ETC Group, a biotechnology watchdog group, says that synthetic organisms could ultimately escape and cause outbreaks of incurable diseases or unpredictable environmental damage. Once you move to people working in their garage or other informal locations, there's no safety processes in place, he says, adding that terrorists could be inspired by amateur genetic tinkering to launch a devastating bioattack on America. Mrs Patterson shrugs at such arguments, however. A terrorist doesn't need to go to the DIYbio community, she says. They can just enrol in their local college. Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd. ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
[Biofuel] Munich Re Highlights Climate Change Impact
http://www.precaution.org/lib/09/prn_munich_re_on_2008.081231.htm From: Financial Times (London, U.K.) December 30, 2008 Munich Re Highlights Climate Change Impact [Rachel's introduction: The re-insurance company Munich Re reports that weather-related catastrophes helped push losses to $200 billion in 2008, compared with $82 billion in 2007.] By James Wilson in Frankfurt and Andrea Felsted in London Financial damage and loss of life caused by natural disasters made 2008 one of the most devastating years on record and showed the impact of climate change, one of the world's biggest reinsurers said yesterday. Munich Re said weather-related catastrophes helped push losses to $200bn compared with $82bn in 2007. Insured losses of $45bn were 50 per cent more than in the previous year. This made 2008 the third most expensive year to the industry for catastrophe damage, continuing a long-term trend, the group said. Climate change has already started and is very probably contributing to increasingly frequent weather extremes and ensuing natural catastrophes, said Torsten Jeworrek, a member of Munich Re's executive board. Insurance companies are concerned by the impact of climate change on risk modelling and hence on financial performance. Munich Re said the next UN climate summit, scheduled for late next year in Copenhagen, needed to quite clearly fix the route to halve output of greenhouse gases by 2050. More than 220,000 people are estimated to have been killed by natural catastrophes during the year, including 135,000 in Burma during cyclone Nargis, where deforestation allowed a storm surge to reach further inland, said Munich Re. Hurricane Ike was the year's most expensive event for insurers, with $15bn of insured losses. The year was the fourth-worst hurricane season since reliable data have been compiled, while the US tornado season was unusually severe, Munich Re said. It was also the planet's 10th-warmest recorded year. All have occurred in the past 12 years. The loss statistics for 2008 fit the pattern that the calculations of climate models lead us to expect, said Peter Hoppe, the reinsurer's head of geo-risks research. Atmospheric warming meant the weather machine runs in top gear. But the number of loss-producing events fell compared with 2007, Munich Re said. The year's death toll included 70,000 in the earthquake that hit China's Sichuan province in May. Munich's figures echo those of Swiss Re, which put insured losses from natural catastrophes at $43bn, of which Ike accounted for $20bn. But Swiss Re estimates that there was another $7bn of insured losses from man-made disasters, taking total insured losses to over $50bn. Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008 ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home
Hi Chip Keith Addison wrote: Hi Peter Hi Keith ; I have made the point previously many times on-list that genetic engineering is not the answer to anything and in fact it will kill millions of people. This is one way. Could be. I don't altogether agree with you though, I don't think genetic engineering should be written off. Certainly there's nothing good about the current offerings of GE crops, and plenty that's bad, and left in the hands of the current players it probably will kill millions of people, and indeed it already is. But the picture might be rather different if some real science were applied rather than just Monsanto's bottom-line, along with some sense and the precautionary principle. We don't need the crops anyway, we already have better crops, and there are better ways of developing them than GE. But it doesn't only apply to crops.f Hey Keith: I can't disagree with you here. However, I just simply do not thing that our tools are anywhere near where they need to be, before we even begin the engage in this admittedly -really cool- technology. I think you're referring mainly to GE crops? I'm not convinced that GE/GM has any useful role to play in crop development, though I wouldn't altogether rule it out. I'm sceptical that the current industry players are capable of producing anything useful, or even benign even if it's useless. Well, sod the industry, but there's more to the technology than the industry. And the technology is still in its infancy. To develop in some sort of sane fashion, it might need this kind of open-source approach. Not to say we should just trust these folks (experts or not), but they sound rather more promising than do the likes of Monsanto. M$ vs Linux? Yes I know, that's not biology, but still. I'm not really defending it, but it might be a mistake to condemn it too hastily. Anyway, it's not just crops, as I said, there are other applications where releasing the unknown on an unsuspecting biosphere might not be such an issue. There's a herd of goats in Canada that produce spider silk in their milk. The goats themselves seem quite happy, it's containable (unlike seeds), it seems to work, spider silk is useful stuff, there doesn't seem to be a plot to patent life or commandeer the commons. Two areas where I wouldn't want to rule out the potential of GE are reclaiming the valuable materials we've been dumping in landfills all these years, and cleaning up the toxic legacy of the 20th Century, with millions of tons of pesticides dumped on the biosphere every year, along with about 100,000 chemicals nature's never encountered before. GE could turn out to be what it'll take. Hopefully some real science would be applied for a change. The DIYbio story has raised quite a fuss, but I wonder how many of the objectors put the same energy into objecting to Monsanto, and if not, why not. All best Keith Cautionary Principal doesn't get close. I think we need modeling technologies many orders of magnitude beyond where we are now before we can reliably predicted with any confidence at all, where gm experiements will be in as many generations as it takes to have some clue that the last state is in fact, better than the beginning state. For instance, *if* we had climate modeling that could predict weather with good confidence years in advance, then we might be able to consider what adding frog dna to vegetables might do in 10, 20, or 50 generations of the product itself, not to mention the stuff done to the dna of the critters that eat it, pass it into the waste stream, and so on. And we ain't there, not even nearly there, with all the computing power we can muster, we can barely touch next week. I think the term is 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions'. pop culture likes to oversimply this as 'the butterfly effect' and completely miss the point. But you know what I mean. This, if it were possible to de-couple the technology from the takings of the commons of life itself, known as the bio-patent business, would be challenge enough to keep the best and brightest working hard for a while yet, , , working on models, not real living stuff that gets released into the biosphere. And since it isn't being decoupled from the enclosing of the commons of life, into corporation ownership of life itself, I find it particularly reprehensible. but that's just me. So many times with technology we find that the last condition is worse than the first. Extrapolating this out to its logical conclusion, we find that all technology advances are bad. :-) A little too sweeping Peter (useful things, brooms). Could this be the reason that almost all religious leaders (and by that I mean Jesus, Mohammad, Bhuddha, etc) shun technology. Do they? Jesus was a carpenter, what did he use to cut wood, his teeth? He said nice things about chickens, but chickens are not as Mother Nature made them, they're a
Re: [Biofuel] Amateurs are trying genetic engineering at home
Hi Peter snip Many thanks to moderator Keith, we are WAY off the thread. You're welcome. :-) Definitely off-thread yes, not just the topic itself, but also the a-priori mode of reasoning, which may be a valid basis for discussion of Christian theology but not for an assessment of technology, IMHO. All best Keith BR Peter G. Thailand www.gac-seeds.com ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Jatropha and ethanol
Hello David Dear list experts, I note a good deal of information in the list about using Jatropha (J. curcas) for biodiesel, and, mindful of repeated admonitions, I've looked for information about the questions I have in the archives, but I've not yet seen answers directly to my questions. My own background is in biogas, and I have only recently started learning about biodiesel and ethanol, so I'm an admixture of knowing and novice. May I ask a few questions? But of course. (And Kieth, no doubt there are many gems in the archives which of which you know, yet which I missed. Please feel free to educate me regarding their nature and location.) I keep finding surprises there. There are 74,000 messages, 498.4 Mb of it, and that's in a compressed format, it's at least 500 books' worth. I've been contacted about a project in south Asia which would involve planting 600 ha to Jatropha, to produce 3,500 tonnes of biodiesel annually. (Based on what I've seen about Jatropha, that may be optimistic for yield, but I'm just presenting the information as given to me.) Obviously then that also means either the use of a good deal of methanol (as presently planned), or (as I have suggested), producing either ethanol or butanol through fermentation and using one or more than one together for separation. The oil cake resulting from oil extraction would be feedstock for a biogas plant. The biodiesel plant is presently being considered as a prototype for a number of such plants, and among the key goals of the project are social and economic development, not merely the production of fuel, and although the project expects a profit, my impression is that things would be operated to produce a balance of outcomes. I quite often hear of projects that sound similar (they often want advice from us). I'm always suspicious of the best crop or the best technology approach (see eg http://journeytoforever.org/fyi_previous4.html#1511Technology and the poor), and 600-ha monocrop plantations don't have a very good record. Why jatropha? Whose choice was it? On what grounds? Because there's a tax rebate for it in India? (There is still, isn't there?) Because it's hyped such a lot? I'm not being too sceptical, those are common reasons. If social and economic development are truly key goals, then the approach has to be bottom-up, not top-down. How are the local people to benefit? Did anybody ask them yet? There are other choices besides jatropha. The hype says the jatropha seedcake makes a great organic fertiliser, but the truth is that a non-poisonous seedcake that can be fed to livestock is generally much more useful - in fact it can make the difference to whether a project is feasible or not. Generating biogas from the cake first might make better numbers, but, again, how would the local community see it? What oil crops do the local farmers use, or know of? Wouldn't using mixed species something like J. Russell Smith's Tree Crops http://journeytoforever.org/farm_library.html#treecrops but with a bias towards oil production (easily done) be better? Such an agroforestry project, with intercropping, livestock grazing and so on, would seem to offer much more than a monocrop plantation could, and be more likely to be adaptible to local conditions, and the local community. Amid all the jatropha hype, this report is interesting, I don't know if you saw it, from GRAIN: Jatropha - the agrofuel of the poor? GRAIN July 2007 http://www.grain.org/seedling/?id=480 That whole July 2007 issue of Seedling is worth a look: http://www.grain.org/seedling/?type=68 So, first question: Although I've reviewed the project overview, which mentions that the biodiesel mixer will be batch loaded, as yet I have no information about the size of the unit. What size would/should it be to produce that much biodiesel annually? You could probably set the upper limit of what would qualify as DIY or homebrew or local coop or Appropriate Technology-level biodiesel production at about 1,000 gallons a day, which is about a tenth of what they're planning. They'll be wanting an industrial processor. If the biodiesel plant is to be a prototype for a number of such plants, they'll also be industrial processors. Second, am I near the mark with suggesting that the project consider producing ethanol (or butanol) rather than purchasing methanol? Certainly it will provide increased challenges to use ethanol, and perhaps even more to use butanol (in either case including adding complexity to the process), but I would think for a plant this large, with good access to land (albeit perhaps marginal land) and given the low labor costs in the area, it may make sense, although one problem may be training personnel. Yes? No? Nobody does it. A few homebrewers use ethanol, and they seem to be the only ones, virtually all or all commercially produced biodiesel is methyl esters, not ethyl esters. The ethanol biodiesel process is not easy, but the main
Re: [Biofuel] Jatropha and ethanol
Hello again David Re this: You could probably set the upper limit of what would qualify as DIY or homebrew or local coop or Appropriate Technology-level biodiesel production at about 1,000 gallons a day, which is about a tenth of what they're planning. They'll be wanting an industrial processor. If the biodiesel plant is to be a prototype for a number of such plants, they'll also be industrial processors. Sorry, I got the numbers wrong, took gallons for litres - it's about a third of the planned production, not a tenth. Best Keith ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Search the combined Biofuel and Biofuels-biz list archives (70,000 messages): http://www.mail-archive.com/biofuel@sustainablelists.org/
Re: [Biofuel] Jatropha and ethanol
. Although sodium soaps are soluble (they dissolve in water), the calcium and magnesium soaps are much less soluble, and so they precipitate (they come out of solution) and they form an important component of scum. Scum, the portion of the slurry which floats on the liquid portion, forms a dense hard mat if left alone, which will eventually completely stop gas production in a biogas generator These insoluble soaps, and various greases and oils, bind the other materials in the scum together and make it more difficult to break up the scum. In a similar way, wet hair, caught on a screen or in a trap in a bathtub drain, gathers oils, greases, and soaps, and begins to stick together in a way that clean wet hair would not. TCBH, p. 63 Even so, the presence of so-called soaps is essentially inevitable. (Although fatty acids, in the presence of Ca++ ions, or Mg++ ions, form insoluble soaps, these acids are nevertheless extremely important in biogas production. Even if we did not want them to be present in the slurry, they would still be formed in the process of disassembling more complex molecules, for the volatile acids passed on from the AF [acid-forming] bacteria to the MF [methane-forming] bacteria are mostly fatty acids. ibid) I know that depending on how one handles this waste stream, it can be burned (at high temp), composted, used in soap-making, used to supplement the oil cake for biogas production, used in Clostridium fermentation to produce ABE, used to dry ethanol (and butanol?), et al. Are there other options? Among those possibilities, which might best serve the mix of goals? It depends whether you're talking of the raw by-product or the separated components. Did you read the Glycerine page at the Journey to Forever website? I did. That was part of the reason why I said depending on how one handles... it..., although my sentence could have been clearer. The project information I have says that they intend to use a suitable packed column, condenser, and receiver... to recover excess amount of Methanol in the system. As yet that means very little to me. I'm not sure, for example, whether they would take only the settled fraction of the trans-esterified result (what's the term of art for this?) and put it through such an extraction process, or whether they would put the whole lot through it, given that a minor portion of the excess methanol is mixed into the biodiesel fraction (if I understand correctly). Likewise, I don't know whether such a process would assist in separating-- or if one would need to separate-- further components of the glycerol-containing fraction, following such a process. The project information says they intend to make soap from the glycerol. One can make biogas from methanol, and it therefore seems possible to me based on what little I know about its contents that the whole unseparated glycerol fraction of the trans-esterified result could likely be put in the digester. However, given the value of methanol relative to biogas, that does not seem like an entirely sensible option. Lastly, the information I have says that Furthermore, the process to manufacture biodiesel... has no waste at all [excepting the oil cake and glycerol]. The process employed has no emissions and absolutely no effluent treatment. I don't see how that can be correct. Can that be the case? Did you add [excepting the oil cake and glycerol]? I did, intending not necessarily to indicate they were waste products, but rather that there were such by-products. The process itself has no emissions, but the power supply used might have emissions. Would that be the biogas plant? There's also the water used for washing, but it can all be accounted for with no addition to the waste stream. I think that's all detailed at the Biodiesel section of the Journey to Forever website. Again I know very little. It sounds as though the organization which is hiring me-- which itself is secondary to the project-- is planning on selling the biogas, or at least some of it. Still, it surprises me that given the use of so many chemicals (such as methanol, which evaporates, given half a chance), that there would be no emissions. In any case, as the bacteria of the world prove every day, one being's waste is another being's meal ticket. d. -- David William House The Complete Biogas Handbook |www.completebiogas.com| Make no search for water. But find thirst, And water from the very ground will burst. (Rumi, a Persian mystic poet, quoted in /Delight of Hearts/, p. 77) -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/attachments/20090102/9b73c3e1/attachment.html ___ Biofuel mailing list Biofuel@sustainablelists.org http://sustainablelists.org/mailman/listinfo/sustainablelorgbiofuel Biofuel at Journey to Forever
