Extreme Futurist Festival. Can Hobbyists and Hackers Transform Biotechnology? For most of us, managing our health means visiting a doctor.
The more serious our concerns, the more specialized a medical expert we seek. Our bodies often feel like foreign and frightening lands, and we are happy to let someone with an MD serve as our tour guide. For most of us, our own DNA never makes it onto our personal reading list. Biohackers are on a mission to change all that. These do-it-yourself biology hobbyists want to bring biotechnology out of institutional labs and into our homes. In Biopunk, journalist Marcus Wohlsen surveys the rising tide of the biohacker movement, which has been made possible by a convergence of better and cheaper technologies. Wohlson discovers that biohackers, like the open-source programmers and software hackers who came before, are united by a profound idealism. Things ReviewedBiopunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of LifeBy Marcus Wohlsen Current, $25.95. Grinding.be. Biohackers and Grinders. 1-Biohacking-101-with-Andrew_Clark. Genome at Home: Biohackers Build Their Own Labs.
This homemade machine from OpenPCR amplifies DNA samples—just like a professional device.Photo: Justin Fantl A tiny spare bedroom is not an ideal space for a high tech biofabrication facility.
To get to the one Josh Perfetto is putting together, visitors must walk all the way to the back of his mostly unfurnished house in Saratoga, California—through the kitchen, past some empty rooms, across a den with a lone couch—then climb a poorly lit staircase and round a corner. The room itself is about 120 square feet and has one big window with a view of an adjacent roof. There’s an 8-foot-wide gap in the middle; the rest of the room is for science.
“I thought about moving the lab to the empty living room downstairs,” Perfetto says. He laughs a little awkwardly, and it’s easy to see why he’s worried. “I’ve been sleeping in here,” says Mackenzie Cowell, Perfetto’s business partner. And the home audience is their target market. But PCR machines are only the beginning. FAQtastic! Codes. DIYbio.org organized a series of congresses in 2011, where we brought together individuals and delegates from regional groups in North America and Europe to collaborate on the development of a DIYbio code that may serve as a framework for helping us achieve a vibrant, productive and safe global community of DIYbio practitioners, regional groups, and community labs.
In May 2011, individuals and delegates from regional groups of amateur biologists from across Europe came together at the London School of Economics BIOS Centre with the goal of generating an aspirational code of ethics for the emerging do-it-yourself biology movement. The congress was composed of participants from five countries, including Denmark, England, France, Germany, and Ireland . Read the draft codes of ethics from Europe (left) and North America (right) A weekend of biohacking at FutureLabCamp. Nidhi Subbaraman, contributor Biologists, architects, artists and engineers gathered in a former bank in Brooklyn this weekend for New York City's first FutureLabCamp "biohackathon" - a hacking camp focused on biological design and gadgetry.
(Image: Mac Cowell/FutureLabCamp) On Friday evening, on the seventh floor of the building - which normally hosts start-up design and architecture firms, a writers' collective and a community biology lab - desks and models were swept aside, tents were put up and sleeping bags rolled out. And after some speedy presentations by fellow hackers and designers, participants got down to work. Teams got together to create biohacking projects using cheap electronics, open-source code and material drawn from large plastic tubs labelled with identifiers like "robot brains". "The point is to get [the project] done and make it work," says Mackenzie Cowell, co-organiser of FutureLabCamp. (Image: Chris Woebken/FutureLabCamp) The PCR is a mainstay of synthetic biology.