DIY Biology

We do a lot of stuff here at the Institute on user-driven innovation. As one of the first nodes on the ARPANet-- the original "users are driving innovation" playground-- and a place that's followed the evolution of online collaboration pretty much since Day 1, it's been interesting to see the concept go mainstream in the last couple years. Now it's clearly spreading from IT and the Web to other areas, including biology. Attila Csordás encouraged bio-DIYers, "do not hesitate:"

[I]n the not so distant future, self-aware citizens may manage their own stem cells, grow them in the garage, and store them in the fridge. It could be a form of autonomous medical self-insurance.

Incredible as it may sound, the basics of molecular biology - what is DNA, how genetic information is coded, how it turns to RNA, which base triplets fits to which amino acids, the building blocks of proteins, that make up your body - can be learnt within 2 hours. Another intensive two weeks in an official lab with an instructor and you can work with them.

Csordás argues that if you can learn the basics of PCR and in vitro cell culture-- both of which are now relatively cheap, well-known technologies-- you can do it. Baris Karadogan (at From Istanbul to Sand Hill Road) draws out some implications:

Welcome to open source science, welcome to do it yourself biology.... With so much information on the Internet and such ready access to scientific data, what Attila wrote about could very well be commonplace in 5-10 years. This is a world where people could be "playing around" with their own biology. I see two big impacts right away.

First, tinkering is the best way to invent things, and this would really push the envelope in scientific and practical discovery. Second, if you think governments are having a hard time figuring out the laws to govern file sharing, let's see how they'll deal with "amateur genetic engineering". This will be a huge issue. Imagine people coming up with "user generated biotechnology".

Update: Attila points me to a recent interview he conducted with biotech startup founder Jim Hardy. "Make no mistake," he argues: "biotech is the next IT."

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