Do-it-yourself biology grows with technology
New breed of scientists using technology to experiment outside usual lab settings
Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 20, 2009
In a kitchen in Saratoga, an electrical engineer is working with pure strains of E. coli purchased over the Internet in hopes of creating a handheld diagnostic tool to detect dangerous bacteria.
Out of a garage in Sacramento, a bioengineer is designing low-cost equipment to allow people to see and construct DNA.
From a studio in San Francisco, an artist is building houses from a medicinal fungus.
Across the Bay Area, and in other high-tech hotbeds, a revolution is under way. Citizen scientists - or biohackers, as they're being called - are taking biology out of academia and closed-door laboratories and bringing it into garages and kitchens, studios and warehouses.
The dream is to make breakthroughs that will ultimately benefit humanity, in fields as diverse as biofuel and cancer research. The risk is putting dangerous materials into the wrong hands, which could lead to the creation of potent new pathogens or the reassembly of lethal old ones such as the 1918 influenza virus.
Members of this informal network of wannabe biologists, entrepreneurs and artists are buying bacteria online, cobbling together discarded equipment, and holding parties to transect DNA and exchange live cultures.
What they are doing is legal, but regulation of home labs is largely nonexistent. Genetic databases are free to the public, and buying synthetic DNA online requires little more than the name of an institution and a home address.
Scientists and policy advisers say this availability of biological materials, coupled with new technology, raises questions reminiscent of another scientific debate stirred in San Francisco decades ago.
"When genetic engineering was invented in San Francisco over 30 years ago, it triggered many discussions as to whether it was safe and how safety should be addressed," said Drew Endy, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford and co-founder of iGEM, the nation's premier undergraduate synthetic biology competition. "They came up with a set of DNA guidelines supported by the federal government."
Endy said hobbyist biologists tinkering with live organisms "need to recognize the rising questions around safety oversight. Are there sustaining safe practices for work being done in garages? Or is there a cogent argument as to why that's not needed?"
Wendy Hall, a senior adviser on biological threats with the Department of Homeland Security, acknowledges: "The trick with biology is to figure out whether it is being used for good or evil."
The federal government is keenly aware, Hall said, of the rise in scientific experimentation by nontraditional communities. She noted that the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity approved regulations this month requiring companies selling DNA to do a better job of screening orders for questionable intent.
"We're in a unique place globally because the biotechnology industry is growing so fast," Hall said. "It's exciting in that there will be new discoveries. But we now have all kinds of folks working in the manipulation of biological systems to produce certain outcomes. We are starting to get calls from companies saying, 'Hey, I got a funny order from this place. Please step in.' "
At-home scientific experimentation is nothing new; in 1901, Audubon (as it was called then) enlisted nonexperts to do bird counts. But a confluence of events - new technologies and the commercial availability of synthetic DNA - has enabled hobbyist biologists like never before.
Beginnings in Boston
The biohacker movement began in an organized way in Boston with a group called DIYbio (for do-it-yourself biology). Started a year and a half ago with two members, the forum now includes dozens of clubs around the globe and about 1,000 members. San Francisco has one of the nation's strongest chapters.
Jason Bobe, the co-founder of DIYbio in Boston, says new technologies are enabling citizen scientists in ways never imagined. He cited a well-publicized story in August of two high school girls in New York using a simplified genetic fingerprinting technique to see whether the sushi dinners they were buying were what they thought they were getting. The tests found that a number of high-end restaurants and grocery stores were selling mislabeled fish.
"This is still very early in the science," said Bobe. "But it's amazing science."
Bobe's own do-it-yourself biology project is creating a test allowing people to go out into their communities and take swabs of microbes on crosswalk buttons.
"You'd be able to get all of the data on the bacteria," Bobe said. "Over time, you could see the bacteria, allergens and viruses that are moving through a city. You could compare the microbial content of the air in San Francisco to that in New York City."
S.F. chapter a year old
The San Francisco chapter was started a year ago by Tito Jankowski, a 23-year-old from Hawaii who studied bioengineering at Brown University and came to California in 2008 with the dream of starting a biotechnology company.
"When I got out of school, there wasn't a way really for me to continue doing synthetic biology," said Jankowski, whose day job is doing computer system testing for the consulting firm Accenture. "I've learned that you can do some powerful things if you get a bunch of smart people together in an area they're a bit naive to."
The San Francisco DIYbio group includes artists, entrepreneurs, computer scientists, a winemaker and biophysicists from across Northern California.
"To the general public, the term hacking is not good," said Jankowski. "But the actual definition of a hacker is someone who takes something apart and puts it back together in a new way, maybe a way that's better."
Jankowski said he notified the FBI of the club's meetings and types of experiments, which have ranged from demonstrating how to extract DNA from saliva to devising cells that would glow with a gene from a jellyfish.
"All of it is a learning experiment," said Jankowski.
Working out of his garage in Sacramento, Jankowski is building equipment for hobbyist biologists, including a gel electrophoresis box, which makes it possible to see DNA and separate pieces by length.
"It's a really useful tool for constructing DNA," Jankowski said. "The original box was made around 1978 and hasn't changed. It costs $2,000. We're making a smarter piece of equipment that costs $200."
Jankowski drives to San Francisco regularly to meet with folks from DIYbio and attend related events. "San Francisco is the place where biology will step from biologists to everyone else. There are a lot of really smart people, from technology types to artists, who will apply what they know to biology."
San Francisco artist Phil Ross, 43, a professor at the University of San Francisco, realized decades ago while working in hospice care that people know little about basic life processes. He started something called the Critter Salon a year ago to use accessible science to explore connections between food, art, science and technology. Monthly events have included a plant cloning exchange and a kimchi contest, held to look at the microbiology behind it.
Ross returned last week from Dusseldorf, Germany, where an art show featured his latest work - a house made from fungus.
"This structure I grew for the show is a tea house made from the reishi mushroom, which has medicinal properties," said Ross. "Part of the house can be broken down and used for tea. You can live in the building and drink the building. Next I'm going to do a full-scale building to house 20 people."
Raymond McCauley, 43, is an electrical engineer and biophysicist who works for a Silicon Valley company that makes DNA sequencers. After hours, he sets up a lab in the kitchen of his Mountain View home, shared by his partner and their two toddlers. He uses cast-off equipment from labs that went out of business and items such as a thermo-cycler pulled from a trash bin and a pure strain of E. coli purchased online.
Garage, not kitchen
"My dream is to create a diagnostic care tool where you could go into a hospital room and swab something and put it through this analyzer and see, 'Oh, here's some MRSA bacteria,' " he said. On occasion, McCauley gets kicked out of the kitchen into the garage.
"My partner works in biotech, but she has raised her eyebrows at my monopolizing kitchen counter space working on E. coli," he said. "But it's very cool being able to get things FedEx'd overnight on ice, having these actual biological materials. Once you get into this community, you start to see possibilities for doing something yourself that you wouldn't have thought you could do."
McCauley said he ordered the E. coli - which he measures but does not manipulate - by listing the name of the startup he has formed under the institution category.
"If you have trouble getting live materials, you can always just go out your front door and scoop up some dirt and get 15 different types of fungus," he noted. "Or you can go to the grocery store and buy some yogurt, as there are live cultures there. And with E. coli, you can get a toilet brush and swipe the inside of your toilet. These things are all around us."
For Drew Endy, the Stanford bioengineering professor, the potential for good vies with the potential for harm. But whatever the case, he says, do-it-yourself biology is not going away.
"On the one hand," Endy noted, "there is a recognized need to ensure that accidents or intentional misapplications do not occur. On the other hand, Darwin may have been the original do-it-yourself biologist, as he didn't originally work for any institution."