Try this at home by Daniel Grushkin

The next big scientific breakthrough may come from a garage, not a lab, with do-it-yourself biologists popping up everywhere. Genetic tinkerer Daniel Grushkin has a message for the curious: go ahead, try this at home. 

In the scientific journals, we’ve been labeled biotech hobbyists, citizen scientists, even biohackers.

Last December, seven of us opened the first community lab, called Genspace. Though it’s a fully functional lab, it has a decidedly hacked-together aesthetic. We built it in a Brooklyn, N.Y., warehouse that was converted into a workspace for architects and designers. At the center of the floor sits a glass cube made of found objects. The walls are created from windows and sliding glass doors saved from demo sites. The lab benches are stainless steel tables salvaged from industrial kitchens. Most of the equipment was donated by a biotech company that downsized during the economic crisis.

We incorporated Genspace as a nonprofit to serve as a shared lab, a nursery for biotech tinkerers. Our members include an entrepreneur with great ideas but a miniscule budget, an artist employing single-celled organisms for an experimental design palette, a molecular biologist with a penchant for mentorship, and folks like me, who want to learn by creating novel organisms.

DIY Bio: Growing Movement takes On Aging

Article by H+ Magazine



A movement is growing quietly, steadily, and with great speed. In basements, attics, garages, and living rooms, amateurs and professionals alike are moving steadily towards disparate though unified goals. They come home from work or school and transform into biologists: do-it-yourself biologists, to be exact.

DIYbiology (“DIYbio”) is a homegrown synthesis of software, hardware, and wetware. In the tradition of homebrew computing and in the spirit of the Make space (best typified by o‘Reilly‘s Make Magazine), these DIYers hack much more than software and electronics. These biohackers build their own laboratory equipment, write their own code (computer and genetic) and design their own biological systems. They engineer tissue, purify proteins, extract nucleic acids and alter the genome itself. Whereas typical laboratory experiments can run from tens-of-thousands to millions of dollars, many DIYers knowledge of these fields is so complete that the best among them design and conduct their own experiments at stunningly low costs. With adequate knowledge and ingenuity, DIYbiologists can build equipment and run experiments on a hobbyist‘s budget. As the movement evolves, cooperatives are also springing up where hobbyists are pooling resources and creating “hacker spaces” and clubs to further reduce costs, share knowledge and boost morale.

The Pearl Gel Box and Creative Commons

Open Hardware for Molecular Biology Experiments

Sure it takes years of training to become a world class biologist, but now you can have fun with their equipment without slaving away in academia. Pearl Biotech is selling an electrophoresis gel box, an instrument used in the separation and characterization of DNA online. Electrophoresis is a safe procedure that is useful to molecular biologists but can be enjoyed by anyone. It’s a standard experiment in high school labs. The Pearl Gel Box is an open hardware device which means that anyone is free to build or adapt it as along as they share their modifications in a similar manner. Pearl Biotech sells a fully assembled version for $200. By providing a cheap entry level tool for genetics Pearl is helping generate interest in the field and supporting the do it yourself community.

Neuroscience Experiments

In the "Experiments" page of Backyard Brains are a series of nine increasingly complex experiments - from listening to action potentials to learning the basics of neuropharmacology and neuroprosthesis.

"Backyard Brains wiki page, [is] an open-source experimental how-to's for teachers and amateurs alike."

The page also lists the materials you will need to perform the experiments.

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.

Introduction

The aim of this blog is to be an account of a journey to understand biology, not for passing a scantron test, but for actually figuring out how nature works.

Yesterday, I first learned about a movement called DIY Bio (Do-It-Yourself Biology) by reading this article. It immediately appealed to me. Gregor Mendel's hobby contributed vastly to our knowledge of genetics, although he knew nothing about what a gene actually was. Santiago Ramon y Cajal was a painter, who turned his attention to the nervous system with the aid of accessible devices and his inventive methods. Charles Darwin sailed the world, and collected specimens before writing down his revolutionary ideas in the Origin of Species. However, I was always jealous of these scientists because they did not need a bachelor's degree, Ph.D., government grant, or corporate lab to contribute in a major way to science. Now, it seemed to me, all or most of these things were required.

With my personal discovery of DIY Bio, I hope I can actually do science here in Miami without having to wait to get an advanced degree. Of course, I am financially extremely limited, and am ignorant of the most powerful methods of study. However, I plan to overcome these obstacles in ways I have already planned.

I will post my progress and some articles on this blog. I welcome any feedback on tips, advice, and interest in the subject, too. All advancement in learning and understanding is a group effort. With this I begin...