Homemade Molecular Biology Labs aim to create Synthetic Life.
(February 16th 2009) Inspired by the enormous success of all those US amateur electronic engineers and computer programmers, whose hobby room tinkering led to the personal computer revolution, groups of biological hobbyists in their home-based laboratories have now decided to generate a new synthetic life revolution, employing modular biological components. Jeremy Garwood reports.
The idea of performing molecular biology experiments in the home environment may seem incredible to life science researchers in their institutional laboratories. However, with a little knowledge of what's required, some enthusiastic amateurs are coming up with ingenious solutions: centrifuges made from power drills and plastic food containers, incubators in styrofoam with heating pads designed for keeping pet reptiles, $40 ultrasonic jewellery cleaners used to transform bacteria, extracting DNA with household materials and separating it in gel boxes held together with duct tape. One amateur in Cambridge, Massachusetts, boasted of having bought a thermocycler for $59 on eBay - she's now all set to generate DNA strands using the polymerase chain reaction. Even specialised chemicals can be ordered from commercial suppliers who are apparently unaware that they are shipping to domestic addresses.
So, what do these amateur molecular biologists actually want to do in their home laboratories? One woman in San Francisco is making green fluorescent bacteria for yoghurt as a cheap test for melamine - she hopes they will light up in the presence of this industrial chemical, recently introduced with lethal effects into Chinese milk products by unscrupulous merchants. Another group wants to modify bacteria in our mouths to eat away at dental plaque and re-calcify our teeth. However, other enthusiasts start less ambitiously by simply turning their bacteria red or making them smell like bananas.
In fact, many of these projects are inspired by the ideas of 'Synthetic Biology', an area of professional research that believes living organisms can be reduced to interchangeable components, which can be re-engineered to produce novel biological properties. In a supervised university environment, there are even competitions to encourage undergraduates to generate synthetic life from modular parts. The best know is the international Genetically Engineered Machine (iGEM) competition run by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which provides student teams with a kit of biological parts. Using these parts and others of their own design, they are encouraged to build biological systems and operate them in living cells. Randy Rettberg, the director of the iGEM competition, says that iGEM is helping to address the questions "Can simple biological systems be built from standard, interchangeable parts and operated in living cells? Or is biology just too complicated to be engineered in this way?"
However, Mackenzie Cowell, one of iGEM's former employees, has decided to break out of what he sees as the constraints of the academic research environment. In 2008, he founded a group called 'DIYbio' (do-it-yourself biology), to bring about a democratisation of science. "DIYbio is a group of people who are interested in doing amateur biotechnology. In a broad sense, we're developing an infrastructure that enables people not in traditional institutions to take advantage of the tools that those institutions typically provide." His local group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has over 20 active members and the DIYbio site (
http://diybio.org/) currently lists another two dozen local groups worldwide.
He hopes that by liberating biology from academic and industrial labs, it will gain the kind of momentum that is seen in computing, "The open source computer programming movement became ubiquitous and computers became a platform that enabled a huge amateur or hobbyist culture of people to push the field further. Many people got organised and started working on projects collaboratively. Why can't we do that in biology?"
Yet, ironically, Cowell already finds himself incarnating a more 'responsible' approach to amateur biology. Many commentators find the prospect of unregulated hordes of do-it-yourself biologists 'doing their thing' in makeshift domestic laboratories more than a little alarming. Even if there were no malicious individuals seeking to actively generate ingeniously lethal combinations of pathogens, the unintentional consequences of such experiments is cause for concern in itself - just think what might be happening to their toxic waste!
In response, Cowell says that DIYbio has now introduced a "self-imposed moratorium on wetwork". They are discouraging synthetic biology experiments until amateur researchers can demonstrate that what they are doing is safe. He has gained the support of George Church, a synthetic biology researcher at Harvard University, who now provides advice and academic oversight for the group. Church himself has previously stated his concerns, writing that synthetic DNA misuse could have more damaging consequences than chemical or nuclear weapons. Furthermore, doubts about the intentions of amateur synthetic biologists are hardly allayed by their use of the term 'biohackers' to describe themselves. This may be an obvious reference to the success of amateur computer programmers but 'hacker' is not perceived by the general public as a purely benign term - will 'biohackers' also have a dark side?
To channel would-be biohackers in the 'right' direction, DIYbio is encouraging responsible learning through collaborations on 'safe' projects. For example, compiling 'BioWeatherMaps' by DNA fingerprinting of the environment or, more specifically, taking DNA samples from the buttons that pedestrians press to activate street crossing lights. Although, for the moment, the actual DNA sequence analysis is performed by commercial labs, the DIYbio members can then perform sequence analysis using DNA databases to identify how many different microbes are present on these buttons and how these microbial populations vary in major cities (or, at least, at their street crossings) across the US.
There's also 'Project SmartLab', which seeks to "build hardware to augment the benchtop science experience", including some ideas that professional lab workers might find useful such as "automatic data logging instruments with painless electronic lab book integration, video streaming with 'instant replay' features for those 'did-I-just-pipette-that-into-the-wrong-tube?' moments and interactive protocol libraries that guide new scientists and the scientifically enthusiastic alike through tricky protocols."
Cowell says the current barrier to entry for doing something interesting in biology is a PhD. He hopes that DIYbio and similar grassroots initiatives will create a new opportunity for enthusiasts to participate at the cutting-edge of applied biology but it remains to be seen just what kind of reprogrammed, reengineered organisms such 'biohackers' are going to produce.
