Wired On Biohacking

Genome at Home: Biohackers Build Their Own Labs

An engineer in this event, made his own Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) device and gel electrophoresis. He founded a company called CoFactor to try to sell a DIY genomics kit. 

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. “I really need more space. But that’s right by the front door. I don’t want to freak people out.”


He laughs a little awkwardly, and it’s easy to see why he’s worried. With its Pyrex containers on metal racks and other clinical-looking equipment, the bedroom looks perfect for cooking crystal meth. A mass of wires spills out of a wooden box; on top sits a metal plate punched full of holes. A table holds several laptops, test tubes, a box of purple surgical gloves, a rack with pipettes in various sizes, rubber tubes connected to vials, an orange plastic box with a blue light in the bottom, and a centrifuge that looks like an oversize rice cooker. The wooden box is actually a homemade device for doing polymerase chain reactions (PCR), a process that turns small samples of DNA into quantities large enough to analyze. And the orange plastic thing runs gel electrophoresis, a way to sort DNA strands by size. Perfetto, an engineer, built a few of the gadgets himself.


“I’ve been sleeping in here,” says Mackenzie Cowell, Perfetto’s business partner. “And who knows what kinds of chemicals have soaked into this rug!” He flew out to California from Boston a week earlier and has been working with Perfetto on a DIY genomics kit to sell through their new business, CoFactor. The problem is, right now extracting and amplifying DNA at home still takes too many steps. The guys are worried that people won’t enjoy the process if it’s too complicated.