Biohacking

Description

By Rob Carslon [1]:

There are 3 components to biological/biotechnological research: the academics, the corporate researchers, but also an emerging group of biohackers:

"At the moment, there is a community of considerable size which discusses appropriate avenues of research, which integrates findings, and, after a fashion, agrees on descriptions of how the pieces fit together. This community consists primarily of academics who communicate primarily through academic journals. There is currently an entirely different community that resides in the corporate world which publishes only selected results and whose research and commercialization decisions are decidedly solitary. Into this fractured milieu will soon arrive a third group, the garage biology hacker, who is plugged into neither community, and who doesn't give a rip about either.

The biohacker community will emerge as DNA manipulation technology decreases in cost and when the overall technological infrastructure enables instruments to be assembled in the garage. The Molecular Sciences Institute has a parallel DNA synthesizer that can synthesize sufficient DNA to build a human pathogenic virus from scratch in about a week. Assembled, this machine cost ~$100,000 about 18 months ago. We estimate the parts could be purchased for ~$10,000 today. A working DNA synthesizer could be built with relative ease. Synthesizers of this sort produce ~50 mers, and it is likely that methods to assemble these short oligos into chromosomes will be perfected relaltively soon. Hobbyists often spent similar sums on cars, motocycles, computers, and aquariums.

The academic biology community often moves very, very slowly somewhat by design in that the review process for grants can take the better part of a year and recent history shows that the corporate biology community often moves so quickly that no review is possible until word finds its way into the press. The third community, those working in the garage, will neither be restricted in action by a review process nor will their efforts easily be found in the press. The best way to ensure that the academic community begins to move faster, that the corporate community moves with more regard for the world around them, and to ensure that we have some idea of what is going on in garages is to get everybody talking to each other." (http://www.intentionalbiology.org/osb.html)