DIYbio

URL = http://www.diybio.org/

Definition

"DIYbio is an organization for the ever expanding community of citizen scientists and DIY biological engineers that value openness & responsibility. DIYbio aims to be an "Institution for the Amateur" -- an umbrella organization that provides some of the same resources afforded by more traditional institutions like academia and industry, such as access to a community of experts, to technical literature and other resources, to responsible oversight for health and safety, and an interface between the community and the public at large." (http://www.diybio.org/)

Description

From an interview with Mac Cowell, cofounder of DIYbio:

"What exactly is DIYBio?

DIYbio is a group of people who are interested in doing amateur biotechnology. Amateur, meaning doing something that you love for the sake of doing it. 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.

Why did you start DIYbio instead of pursuing a PhD or collaborating with an established lab?

I really fell in love with the general idea that biology can be engineered. But I was disappointed with the huge barrier of entry for average people, or for anyone who wants to get involved but is not already in a PhD program. 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 organized and started working on projects collaboratively. So why can’t we do that with biology? Why does all biology happen in academic or industrial labs? What’s the barrier to entry for doing something interesting in biology? It’s a four- to seven-year PhD program. There must be another opportunity.

What do amateurs bring to the table that trained scientists don’t?

That’s a great question. The number one thing is a “cross-pollination” of expertise. We are trying to develop the tools that enable people, who might be experts in other areas, to do biology as a hobby in their spare time, bringing some of that expertise to the lab. That way, there is a lot of potential for innovation. For instance, one of the projects that we are working on right now is an “augmented reality benchtop.” There has been a lot of work in the last 10 or 20 years on things like multitouch, big-screen tabletops. What if we made a benchtop for a lab that could recognize the stuff on top of it, walk you through a protocol visually, or connect you to a microscope on the surface of that lab bench and show you what it sees? So that you’re not just scribbling in a lab notebook, you’re actually recording at an equal or better granularity what you’re doing. Another example of where advancements in other fields could apply to biology is pipetting. During experiments, you pipette over and over again, hundreds or thousands of times a day. Every once in a while you might zone out and think, “Oh, my God. Did I just pipette that two times in a row? Five times? I don’t even remember.” Why don’t we just install a little wireless data logger into a pipette that keeps track of how much and every time you press a button? Some of the people we’re collaborating with are installing little wireless data loggers into pipettes that keep track of how many times you press the pipette button. And it only costs $40. Why aren’t all pipettes like that?

Is a crowd-sourced approach especially well suited to synthetic biology?

Synthetic biology aims to make biology easier to engineer by adopting basic engineering principles: modular parts, standardization, abstraction, standard units. And as these practices become more developed, the opportunity for people to do biology on their own increases. As the system of weights and measures is realized, the less you have to be a vertical expert, or a specialist. Furthermore, a crowd-sourced network of hobbyists might help measure and characterize the needed toolbox of thousands of biological parts in the first place. Hobbyists don’t have the same set of goals as PhDs. Measuring things is not very sexy, meaning you probably couldn’t write a paper about it. Many synthetic biologists are having trouble getting papers about different measurement standards published because it doesn’t clearly advance the scientific agenda. Maybe it could be construed as scientific progress, but really, it’s about engineering progress. There’s a lag between what needs to happen to make synthetic biology more of a reality in certain ways. There’s a lot of science that had to happen to make synthetic biology possible. But there’s also a lot of grunt work — measuring, trying different combinations, characterizing — that I think a lot of traditional scientists aren’t necessarily going to do. Scientists who are trying to write their thesis or publish a paper in Nature might not have as much compulsion to perform that initial grunt work.

Does amateur science affect the peer-review process?

Right now that function is being provided mostly by the mainstream publishing industry, which is now a couple hundred years old. These publications have become academic currency. If you want to get tenure, you need the pedigree of having been published in prestigious journals. Until we can find alternative ways of crediting good work, we’re going to be stuck with the existing publishing system. The current way to have a scientific conversation is to take six months to two years to publish a paper, and the paper is the end product of research that’s taken six months, maybe many years. All of that data is stored in lab notebooks. And maybe only the best analysis of that data gets published as an auxiliary file on a publisher’s website, even though useful experimental data was generated much earlier. As we develop tools that make it easier for scientists to capture the process of actually doing research, I think that will enable a faster scientific conversation than the current six-month to two-year process. Software platforms that make it easier for scientists to capture, on the fly, what they are doing at a granular level — that’s what the scientific dialogue is all about.

How do you respond to critics who claim that you’re potentially putting dangerous biological materials in the wrong hands? Or, to use the computer-programming analogy, are you aiding the development of viruses in a very literal sense?

All the hazardous sequences are available publicly from GenBank, etc.: Ebola, H5N1, the 1918 plague; they’re all there. DIYbio won’t change that. We’re looking to mostly focus on doing wet lab work in a very public, transparent group setting. So that if anyone — a neighbor, a governmental agent, a journalist — wants to know what is going on, it’s evident what we are working on. Forming that community is the first defense so that the 99.9999 percent of the group who are positive will stop the .0001 percent of the group that’s negative. Today, at the ground floor, I think it’s best if we blaze a path forward in a very public and open way. A small minority may have unleashed computer viruses over the years, but it’s the computer hacking community at large who created many of the solutions that safeguard us from them." (http://seedmagazine.com/content/print/the_biohacking_hobbyist/)

Discussion

"DIYbio versus synthetic biology

The media attention surrounding DIYbio has served to brand the endeavor just as synthetic biology was branded. Both embrace the goals of making biology 'easy to engineer' and ensuring materials and know-how circulate in an 'open source' mode—“biology for the people” as the platitude has it. The association is not surprising or accidental. DIYbio and synthetic biology, after all, share institutional and personal connections. Leading research institutions, such as the National Science Foundation–funded Synthetic Biology Engineering Research Center, of which three of us (P.R., G.B. and A.S.) are a part, have made these two goals central to their strategic plans. Additionally, leading figures in synthetic biology have informally served as impresarios to some in the biohacker movement, notably through their sponsorship and promotion of the International Genetically Engineered Machines (iGEM) competition, which in 2009 has drawn over 100 teams of undergraduate bioengineers from five continents. In the light of the growth of DIYbio and the publicity that it has generated and received, however, the directors of the iGEM competition have banned DIYbio teams from participating in the competition.

The connections and convergences can no doubt be overstated. Self-definitions vary, and not all synthetic biologists would define their field as fostering “mechanisms for amateurs to increase their knowledge and skills,” as a prominent DIYbio website (http://diybio.org/) puts it. Conversely, not all DIY biologists design “new biological parts, devices, and systems,” as synthetic biology has sometimes been defined (http://syntheticbiology.org/). Nevertheless, it's certainly fair to say that accessible, easy-to-engineer biology is becoming the proverbial name of the game. Those synthetic biologists and DIYbio practitioners who object to being grouped together need to speak up in their own name.

The good news is that open access biology, to the extent that it works, may help actualize the long-promised biotechnical future: growth of green industry, production of cheaper drugs, development of new biofuels and the like. The bad news, however, is that making biological engineering easier and available to many more players also makes it less predictable, raising the specter of unknown dangers." (http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/v27/n12/full/nbt1209-1109.html)

More Information

1. Blog at http://blog.diybio.org/
2. profile of the movement, http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/bio/diy-bio-growing-movement-takes-aging