24 May 1996 updated
When I wrote the essay below ("Under the Weather") I did not anticipate that events would so rapidly overtake my sickbed speculation. Information Week of 13 May 1996 (page 12) tells how "IBM Reinvents The Immune System". According to the story, IBM is working on anti-virus software to emulate the living immune system, as predicted here three months ago.
For the last few weeks I've been among the 23 million Americans laid low by the annual flu epidemic. And, by sheer coincidence and the generosity of a recent guest, so has my computer. Specifically, a kind visitor borrowed a floppy for 30 seconds to give me a valuable repository meta-model. In that brief contact she also managed to infect the floppy, and consequently my computer, with the Form virus.
I won't bore you with the messy details of installing Windows 95 from floppies onto a laptop - for the fourth time! - although I must mention that nobody I've talked to has discovered the secret of getting it to look exactly the same twice in a row. No, the real topic today is the emerging prevalence of microbial infection - in computers.
My bedridden repose gave me time to read quite a lot more than the weekly ComputerWorld and PC Magazine. Pawing through my wife's pile of books-in-process, I found a current best-seller, The Coming Plague by Laurie Garrett. This exhaustive and exhausting chronicle of "newly emerging diseases in a world out of balance" squirms with names like Ebola, Lassa, Marburg, and Legionnaires through 750 pages of death and hopelessness.
The theme and refrain of The Coming Plague is twofold: frantic development and free-flowing travel in the bowels of tropical rain forests are disseminating exotic strains of deadly microbes; wanton applications of massive antibiotics for both prevention and cure are accelerating the evolution of those microbes to become highly resistant to modern pharmacology.
An unread Christmas book deep in my night stand seemed much less threatening: The Beak of the Finch by Jonathan Weiner is only 332 pages on the seemingly charming subject of biological research among Darwin's finches on the Galapagos Islands. Yet after 250 pages of spellbinding detective tales and historical rummaging among evolution biologists, Weiner's conclusions are suddenly the same: man's intrusions are capable of radically disrupting and accelerating the process of evolution; the children of such brave new worlds are likely to threaten the stability and habitability of the environmental niche which spawned them
Now, how does this apply to computers and why is it important? By the end of the decade, my little encounter with the Form virus will be quaint. We will be living with viruses embedded in all our code and data, arriving in a constant wash with every document and reference. Just as the ocean has been termed a "virus soup", so will our data become a matrix surrounding a shifting kaleidoscope of virus forms.
Do you know that it is fairly well accepted that the nuclei of all nucleated cells are derived from invading primeval bacteria? And Lynn Margulis, the researcher who pioneered this theory, believes just as firmly that such ciliated cells as the rods of the human retina are the remnants of synergistic spirochetes.
Increasingly, modern biologists regard all complex multi-cell living organisms, including humans, as precariously balanced colonies of specialized creatures in competition for the resources of their local environment - in our case, a human body. We are not infected with bacteria and viruses; we are (in large part) these seemingly alien creatures
Think again, as you already have, about the risks of unlimited downloads from the World Wide Web and BBS listings at the click of a mouse (see, for example, InfoWorld, 19 Feb 1996, page 34); of MS Word macros which fire off when you view a document (Computer World, 19 Feb, 1996, page 45); of Java code hitchhiking on the backs of passive documents; of intelligent "agents" finding their way unnoticed through networks at will. Who will police them? And while it may be hyperbole to claim that "the network is the computer", shortly no computer will exist without being attached to some network, probably the network. Who will keep you safe? McAfee? Norton?
No, I believe the answer is that software will have to become adaptive to competing behaviors from other software in its environment, whether "virus" or not. Software will need to be self-monitoring, self-repairing, even self-distructing, as are living cells today when it is necessary for the good of the larger living unit. Software must rapidly "evolve", or we must evolve it, so that any unit of programming or data can recognize an attack, develop antibodies, replicate itself if necessary to maintain function, and even compromise its capabilities and objectives to coexist with the surrounding "alien" code forms. Am I far fetched?
