"Bruce Sterling - Our Neural Chernobyl" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

And Berenbaum, who showed an early interest in such
subjects as math and engineering (then considered
markedly un-glamorous), did suffer some persecution
from peers and schoolmates. At fifteen he had already
drifted into the gene-hacker subculture, accessing gossip
and learning "the scene" through computer bulletin
boards and all-night beer-and-pizza sessions with other
would-be pros. At twenty-one, Berenbaum was working a
summer internship with the small Raleigh firm of
CoCoGenCo, a producer of specialized biochemicals.
CoCoGenCo, as later congressional investigations proved,
was actually a front for the California "designer drug"
manufacturer and smuggler, Jimmy "Screech" McCarley.
McCarley's agents within CoCoGenCo ran innumerable
late-night "research projects" in conditions of heavy
secrecy. In reality, these "secret projects" were straight
production runs of synthetic cocaine,
beta-phenethylamine, and sundry tailored variants of
endorphin, a natural antipain chemical ten thousand
times more potent than morphine.
One of McCarley's "black hackers," possibly
Berenbaum himself, conceived the sinister notion of
"implanted dope factories." By attaching the
drug-producing genetics directly into the human genome,
it was argued, abusers could be "wet-wired" into
permanent states of intoxication. The agent of fixation
would be the AIDS retrovirus, whose RNA sequence was
a matter of common knowledge and available on dozens
of open scientific databases. The one drawback to the
scheme, of course, was that the abuser would "burn out
like a shitpaper moth in a klieg light," to use Dr. Hotton's
memorable phrase. Chapter 3 is rather technical. Given
Dr. Hotton's light and popular style, it makes splendid
reading. Dr. Hotton attempts to reconstruct Berenbaum's
crude attempts to rectify the situation through gross
manipulation of the AIDS RNA transcriptase. What
Berenbaum sought, of course, was a way to shut-off and
start-up the transcriptase carrier, so that the internal drug
factory could be activated at will. Berenbaum's custom
transcriptase was designed to react to a simple
user-induced triggerтАФprobably D,l,2,5-phospholytic
gluteinase, a fractionated component of "Dr. Brown's
Celery Soda," as Hotton suggests. This harmless beverage
was a favorite quaff of gene-hacker circles.
Finding the genomes for cocaine-production too
complex, Berenbaum (or perhaps a close associate, one
Richard "Sticky" Ravetch) switched to a simpler payload:
the just-discovered genome for mammalian dendritic
growth factor. Dendrites are the treelike branches of brain
cells, familiar to every modern schoolchild, which