Rob Carlson's path to becoming a biohacker began with a chance encounter on the train in 1996. Carlson, a physics PhD student at the time, was travelling to New York to find a journal article that wasn't available at his home institution, Princeton University in New Jersey. He found himself sitting next to an inquisitive elderly gentlemen. Carlson told him about his thesis research on the effects of physical forces on blood cells, and at the end of the journey, the stranger made him an offer. "You should come work for me," said the man, "I'm Dr Sydney Brenner." The name meant little to Carlson, who says he thought: "Yeah, OK. Whatever, 'Dr Sydney Brenner.'"
It wasn't until Carlson got back to Princeton and asked a friend that he realized that "Dr Sydney Brenner" was a famed biologist with a knack for transforming the field. He took the job.
Within a year, Carlson was working with a motley crew of biologists, physicists and engineers at Brenner's Molecular Sciences Institute (MSI) in Berkeley, California, learning molecular biology techniques as he went along. The institute was a hotbed of creativity, and reminded Carlson of the scruffy hacker ethos that had spurred the personal-computing revolution just 25 years earlier. He began to wonder if the same thing could happen for biotechnology. What if a new industry, even a new culture, could be created by giving everyone access to the high-tech tools that he had at his fingertips? Most equipment was already for sale on websites such as eBay.
Carlson penned essays and articles that fanned the embers of the idea. "The era of garage biology is upon us," he wrote in a 2005 article in the technology magazine Wired. "Want to participate?" The democratization of science, he reasoned, would bring in new talent to build and improve scientific instrumentation, and maybe help to uncover new industrial applications for biotechnology. Eventually, he decided to follow his own advice, setting up a garage lab in 2005. "I made the prediction," he says, "so I figured maybe I should do the experiment."
Carlson is not alone. Would-be 'biohackers' around the world are setting up labs in their garages, closets and kitchens — from professional scientists keeping a side project at home to individuals who have never used a pipette before. They buy used lab equipment online, convert webcams into US$10 microscopes and incubate tubes of genetically engineered Escherichia coli in their armpits. (It's cheaper than shelling out $100 or more on a 37 °C incubator.) Some share protocols and ideas in open forums. Others prefer to keep their labs under wraps, concerned that authorities will take one look at the gear in their garages and label them as bioterrorists.
For now, most members of the do-it-yourself, or DIY, biology community are hobbyists, rigging up cheap equipment and tackling projects that — although not exactly pushing the boundaries of molecular biology — are creative proof of the hacker principle. Meredith Patterson, a computer programmer based in San Francisco, California, whom some call the 'doyenne of DIYbio', made glow-in-the-dark yogurt by engineering the bacteria within to produce a fluorescent protein. Others hope to learn more about themselves: a group called DIYgenomics has banded together to analyse their genomes, and even conduct and participate in small clinical trials. For those who aspire to change the world, improving biofuel development is a popular draw. And several groups are focused on making standard instruments — such as PCR machines, which amplify segments of DNA — cheaper and easier to use outside the confines of a laboratory, ultimately promising to make DIYbio more accessible.
No comments:
Post a Comment